Caitlin McGregor
Caitlin McGregor is an essayist based in regional Victoria. Her work has appeared in a range of magazines and literary journals, including Going Down Swinging, Overland, The Big Issue, Kill Your Darlings and Voiceworks. In 2018 she was a judge for the John Marsden & Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers, and has worked as an editor, submission reader and creative writing tutor. In 2019, she received the inaugural Kat Muscat Highly Commended Award, and was a writer-in-residence at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Caitlin is currently working on an essay collection that explores and interrogates ideas about ‘care’.
Liz Byrski’s introduction to Women of a Certain Rage is, among other things, a homage to second-wave feminism and a lament that feminism, ‘originally a radical countercultural movement’, has been ‘distorted into a tool of neoliberalism’. While there is no doubt that strains of feminism have been co-opted by neoliberalism to debilitating effect, this narrative – that feminism has become ... (read more)
Catherine Cho’s Inferno is the first ‘motherhood memoir’ I have read since reading Maria Tumarkin’s essay ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ in Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018). The topic of motherhood has been ‘overly melded’ to memoiristic writing, Tumarkin argues; it feels ‘too much like a foregone conclusion’.
This tendency to squeeze stories about motherhood into a pre-exis ... (read more)
The writerly ‘I’ is notoriously fraught and political in non-fiction writing. What are the implications of writing from a biased and limited perspective (as all of us inevitably do)? How to get around – or work within – the constraints of the personal? These questions are ethical ones but also ones of craft. Many memoirists and essayists have grappled explicitly with them on the page.
In ... (read more)