Category: Life Writing

Admin, Life Writing

A Special Edition of Wayward Kin Read Deborah Levy’s Living Memoir

LJ Maher

It’s been a hot while my loves, and I know we are all zoomed out, but I also know that some of us are craving a little of that human connection outside of the humans/fur humans with whom we are locked down. Therefore, on Wednesday 1 September, 8, September and 15 September I will open the Zoom room for a 2 hour long love-fest on Deborah Levy’s living memoir series. Bring wine, bring tea, bring your adoration for those books you get something new from every time you read it. Bring your evangelical enthusiasm (“No, babes, you don’t understand. YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK.” – no judgement, we’ve all said some iteration of this sentence). This isn’t a “lit class” discussion, it’s wine, reflection, musing, philosophy, therapy, sharing. It’s vulnerability and respect. It’s real estate.

15 September 20:00 AEST: Real Estate

Available at Neighbourhood Books, Brunswick Books, Paperback Bookshop, Hill of Content

Enter the Zoom here from 8pm on 8 September.

Life Writing

Reflection: Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit

LJ Maher

Rebecca Solnit is, for me, an essayist who I can read with ease. I agree with most of her takes, I find her turn of phrase clear, but not patronising, and I enjoy the way she weaves her knowledge and experience as an historian into her observations about life in what has been fairly complex, turbulent, and angry times. I enjoy the essay as a genre of writing, but I can no longer drag together the energy to be righteously indignant every time I read something. I think this is why I love Solnit. She offers relief. She offers hope. I know she can be pop-feministy, but there are also times when I want to listen to pop music, or watch reality TV and I think these things can teach readers, in their own small, quiet, softly, softly ways.

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Fiction, Life Writing

Sounds of Silence: Audiobooks and the Reader

LJ Maher

I’ve been listening to audiobooks. I’ve had friends and colleagues tell me that this is a thing that I should be doing for ages. This makes sense, I’m busy, I’m overcommitted, I commute and I do a lot of walking. Audiobooks should be a way of maximising productivity and pleasure in one hit. In some ways, they have been. I enjoy being read to, there’s something delightful and childish about it. I find it comforting.

I also find it hard to concentrate, and I often have to go back and repeat entire chapters. I realise that as I’ve been cleaning, walking, staring out of the train window, whatever, I’ve lost half a story. In one ear, out the other.

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Life Writing

Reflection: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

LJ Maher

I’ve been reading a lot of florid fiction of late. There was Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot last week, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and Beverley Farmer’s Alone. These books have allowed me to sit with some fairly deep and conflicting emotions that I’ve had to process over the last twelve months, feelings related to my position as a Dedicated Spinster, feelings related to the likelihood that I won’t be a mother (old, single, precarious employment/no mat leave) and the reality that even if I do, my father, who is very unwell, won’t ever meet any of my children (beyond the furbaby, Dr Felix). This is, like, a lot. And I often find that the clean, fresh, pared back language that is favoured in contemporary writing doesn’t do justice to the messiness of these deep, but reasonable, feelings. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept  was a glorious means of understanding the fury, focus and frailty that arises when we see the future we had imagined thwarted.

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Life Writing

Reflection: Running Upon the Wires by Kate Tempest

LJ Maher

I have been fascinated by Kate Tempest since the first time I saw her. I think it was on some Australian morning show. I remember being surprised that they had a poet on (I don’t watch daytime television for the most part) And there was this Raphealite cherub in jeans and an oversized shirt, And instead of pearls and jubilations she spoke gritty prescience. She was some Cassandra, some some soothsayer, some unforgiving truth speaker. I was a ready made acolyte.

I devoured her written work, Let The Eat Chaos, The Brand New Ancients, Hold Your Own, The Bricks that Built the Houses, and Everything Speaks in Its Own Way. I listened to them where I could find them. I even made the Wayward Girls read them (we did Brand New Ancients just last month). Then this month, Running Upon the Wires was released. I ordered copies (both the book and the CD) from the UK (for reasons I don’t have to justify to you).

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