selected writing work

criticism + essays + profiles + two edited books

criticism

Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers | 2024

It is summer and I’m in search of a good swimming story. In Miranda July’s ‘The Swim Team’, the narrator gives swimming lessons in a town without a pool. Her students place their faces in bowls of water on the floor of her apartment: ‘we were four people lying on the kitchen floor, kicking it loudly as if angry, as if furious, as if disappointed and frustrated and not afraid to show it’. A good pool appears in David Foster Wallace’s ‘Forever Overhead’, a boy standing paralysed on the diving board, on the cusp of his thirteenth birthday. The pool, ‘blue as energy’, affords Wallace some rare simplicity, and it is here that he delivers one of his best lines: ‘So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? The lie is that it’s one or the other’. Read more >

 

Andre Dao’s Anam | 2023

In the winter of 1986, Toni Morrison was invited to speak at The New York Public Library. “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,” she noted. “Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

Reading André Dao’s Anam feels like stepping into this water, which gently pulls us into a deepening flow of memory. Early on, the narrator imagines a “machine for perfect remembrance”, which summons ghosts to tell a complete story of their lives. Anam is replete with such ghosts, but the remembrances it is filled with are imperfect and incomplete – necessarily so, for it is a monument to Dao’s grandfather, who survived ten years as a political detainee in Chí Hòa prison in Vietnam. As Anam’s narrator asks: “What should we keep uppermost in our minds when translating the suffering of others?” Read more >

 
 

Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother | 2022

Ocean Vuong’s work is replete with entrances, openings, doors. In his first poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), stars are “Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through.” In his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), the protagonist is always stepping or pushing or running through doors – “ajar, revealing the glow of a clamshell night”.

It’s possible to map Vuong’s oeuvre through loss: to say that Night Sky merely collects a trace of his father, that On Earth loops through the loss of his first love, Trevor, or that his newest collection, Time Is a Mother (2022), circles around the death of his mother. But to lose something, one first must hold it. In Time Is a Mother, Vuong makes space for this holding; grief does not close the door. The collection begins: “Not an answer but / an entrance the shape of / an animal. Like me.” The entrance widens. We step through. Read more >

essays

where the light falls
commissioned for State Library Victoria’s
Mirror exhibition (2023)


If a photograph is a mirror, it is a mirror falling towards fracture; the blur of the fall happens just beyond the frame. Every photograph carries a trace of this fall — this beyond — the inevitable splintering of time and space. In recording what is seen, a photo also carries that which is not. Sometimes you don’t notice the blur. Sometimes, the photo, fixed, fixes you: your gaze returned and returning. Read more >

profiles +
interviews

Hua Hsu
The Critic as Artist (2022)

Hua Hsu approaches criticism with a refreshing tenderness. Refusing the hatchet, The New Yorker critic prefers a more careful mode. He explains his approach: “There was a moment when I realised that I could not come up with disruptive theories for how the world should be … My ability is more one where I can connect different conversations, or connect different worlds.” And so he does, connecting Paul Beatty with Kendrick Lamar with W. E. B. Du Bois; elsewhere, he swerves between George Michael’s death and Maggie Lee’s film Mommy and the International Community Radio Taipei. Drawing such constellations, he makes clear that he, too, is simply another node. 

“I’m always trying to bring a kind of humility into the work where I’m like, I don’t actually know the answers. Hopefully you can take something out of this and see beyond me.”  Read more >

edited books

Against Disappearance
Essays on Memory
Pantera Press (2022)

Introduction
In so-called Australia, we seem to be citizens of an after. The enforced disappearance of cultures is often framed as natural or unavoidable, the way of things, when it is in fact the opposite: hegemonic power is as much about the stories it actively erases as those it tells. It suits the colony to mythologise a terra nullius, to declare Indigenous cultures non-existent and to work to make them so, rewriting cultures that have always been here into nothing. If nothing was here, then nothing could be murdered – or so the logic loops, bloodied hands wiped clean. It still suits the colony to continue this violence, overt or clandestine, always transforming, ever present. Read more >

Collisions
Fictions of the Future
Pantera Press (2020)

Introduction
James Baldwin writes, in Notes of a Native Son, ‘I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.’ I feel similarly about literature written in so-called Australia. There is great love in seeing something for what it is, and what it could be. Among many things, a book contains the capacity to comfort, to soothe, to test, to stretch. Books offer up new worlds; they propose visions o the future. A book holds real and lasting potential; once read, a good book does not leave you. If you are already holding this in your hands, you probably, in some way, would agree. I love the Australian writing community, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise it perpetually. Read more >