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Brenda Walker
Brenda Walker is Emerita Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her book Reading by Moonlight is a study of reading during illness.
Alex Miller’s most recent book, A Kind of Confession, begins with notebook entries from his pre-publication period – long years in which his deep trust in his identity as a writer appears to have been unshaken. In 1971, he notes: ‘I’ve been committed to writing since I was 21, 13 years. Quite a stretch, considering I’ve yet to publish.’ He was in his fifties before his first novel emer ... (read more)
In Marion May Campbell’s poem ‘in the storeroom,’ which appears in Roland Leach’s anthology Cuttlefish, she writes that ‘poems are letters that go astray’ – a whimsical yet fitting definition of the kind of poetry that appears in this collection. In these digital times, there is something ceremonial about a letter: a personal communication which must be opened and held; possibly shar ... (read more)
In an exuberant essay anticipating the publication of Eleven Letters to You, the critic and editor Helen Elliott describes the deep pleasure of working on the book: ‘The satisfaction of writing this book, of making it as good as I can has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. A necessary joy, the deepest new, an entirely selfish pleasure. A small and ravishing bomb inside me’ (The Monthly, M ... (read more)
A third of the way through Jock Serong’s sixth novel, The Settlement, a woman asks her new husband a pointed question about Wybalenna, the desolate Tasmanian community in which she finds herself, a community of duplicitous, expedient, and brutally deranged white men and the First Nations Tasmanians they seek to subjugate. ‘How will it end? His wife had asked him when she first arrived. Will th ... (read more)
The Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dangerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together t ... (read more)
The point of return in this highly moveable associative novel is the London Underground, not as an instance of efficiency or even the most modest and individual progression, but rather as a static enclosure where creatures and people are delayed, starved, balked, pained by the straps or handles of their baggage and, most overwhelmingly, alone.
... (read more)
A father sits on a couch that is set between the beds of his young sons, who must be eased into sleep with a story. The scene is illuminated by a lamp in the shape of the globe, which is as it should be, for he shows them his world through the simple patterns of these stories: his cherishing of the natural world; his insight into happy reversals of fortune; his humour. The father’s stories are s ... (read more)
In 2011, Bernadette Brennan convened a symposium on ‘Narrative and Healing’ at the University of Sydney, an opportunity for specialists in medicine and bereavement to meet writers with comparable interests. Helen Garner, for example, spoke about Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The day included an audiovisual piece about death as a kind of homecoming, with reference to the prodigal son, and exquisi ... (read more)
The biographer Hazel Rowley enjoyed the fact that her green card – permitting her to work in America – classified her as an ‘Alien of exceptional ability’. This is close to perfect: her own biography in a few words. If not exactly an alien, she was usefully and often shrewdly awry in a variety of situations: in the academic world of the 1990s, in tense Parisian literary circles, and in the ... (read more)