heavy in my mind like a ripe pear

“As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.” - Virginia Woolf

My PhD novel has been growing heavy in my mind for nearly 20 years.

Its shape has shifted, then shifted again. Then again. And then again once more.

I think it’s ready, asking, to be cut now. But if instead it falls from the branch it has clung to for all these years, I hope it lands in a pile of soft dry grass, where it will be safe from the hungry parrots who have been feasting on fruit still on the trees. Where it isn’t left too long to be picked up, still fine to eat, with perhaps only a tiny bruise or two from the fall to be cut away.

Worse case scenario, maybe it will be scooped up with all the other windfalls and be made into a lovely crumble.

I lit my first fire in the house last week. Picked figs, rhubarb, runner beans, iron-rich greens so dark they are almost ink-black. Made yoghurt. Failed at making yoghurt. Wrote and wrote, deleted, despaired, then wrote again.

The pear will be cut, or it will fall.

a mention on Life & Faith podcast!

Having been off it for many years now, I had no idea that Facebook has now been in existence for over 20 years (?!). This anniversary prompted the hosts of Life & Faith podcast to have a very interesting chat about the social media age and the impact it has had on our lives. I was very honoured that they discussed my Guardian article! I was also fascinated by another writer they discussed, Andy Crouch, who made this apt comparison:

“You probably have heard that with icebergs, 80% of their mass is underwater, invisible – you just see the little top of the iceberg. And as it turns out, ocean liners – like, cruise liners – 80% of the structure is above the water. And what social media has done is turn all of us from icebergs into ocean liners, where most of our life is on display. The problem is, in your life, you’re going to hit icebergs. You’re going to hit real challenges, real pain, real loss, real suffering, and the testimony of maritime history is when an ocean liner meets an iceberg, the iceberg wins. You actually want to be an iceberg. You want 80% of your life to be hidden, not to be public, not to be visible. ”

— Andy Crouch

It’s well worth a listen, and not just because I get a mention :)

an uphill finish

I felt like doing a vlog in my office today. I’m trying to be more spontaneous and less self-conscious and perfectionist about what I post on here, so instead of doing my usual thing of leaving it on my phone and never sharing it, I thought I’d be brave instead. Brave is my word for 2024, after all.

Enjoy!

• video transcript

  Hello, and welcome to my office! Here’s my inspiration wall behind me. I just feel like doing a video today just to break my brain out of its creative rut. Do you like my T-shirt? (laughs) Mario Kart is my favourite way to unwind at the moment in between all of this PhD-related overwhelm.

  I just wanted to record, for posterity more than anything, because I just had a very insightful conversation with my wonderful husband who just gets all of the ups and downs of this journey. I am in the final months of my PhD and it's been a long, long couple of years bringing this project to its conclusion and I thought I was just about there with it. I thought, you know, to apply my oft-repeated marathon metaphor because it's the closest experience that I've had in my life that even comes close to what the PhD has been like, so to just milk that metaphor a little bit more, I thought I was going to have a downhill finish to this race. It was certainly looking that way.

  And then a few weeks ago, it was suggested to me that perhaps I needed to change a few things, a few fundamental things, about my thesis. And they are exciting changes that overall will improve the argument and strengthen it and just make the whole thing work a bit better, which is obviously something I'm very keen to do. But it will involve quite a bit more work at almost literally the 11th hour. And so it looks like I'm going to have an uphill finish to this marathon rather than a downhill one.

  And when Tom said that, all of a sudden I could understand why I was feeling so exhausted! Because I have run the intellectual equivalent of 24 miles and I was ready for an easy finish. But instead, the last two miles are going to be uphill all the way.

  And that is life, sometimes. Sometimes we get an uphill finish when we'd rather have a downhill one. But if you've trained, and if you stay strong ,you can get through it.

  So, wish me luck as I proceed…uphill!

tomatoes and third drafts

When I think about the current state of my novel (is it even a novel anymore? That’s a question for another day!), these words of Henry Miller spring to mind:

“I had to grow foul with knowledge, realise the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.”

Meanwhile, it’s now the start of autumn in Tasmania, which means tomatoes are ripe and plentiful. My parents came round today with a crate for me - they drove to a pick-your-own-farm half an hour out of the city where these beauties were a steal at $2 a kilogram.

I washed and chopped several kilograms of them and was reassured that, even though my mind is a constant whirl of what the fuck am I doing with this novel or whatever it’s turned into and how is this ever going to work, if I put tomatoes, onions, garlic, thyme, oregano, basil, wine and stock in a slow cooker, put it on high for four hours and walk away, I will come back and it will have turned into a thick, rich and delicious sauce. There is also now an open bottle of wine.

writer at work

Last year, I was the grateful recipient of a Residential Fellowship at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writer's Centre in Perth, Western Australia. I spent two weeks there last August working on my PhD novel. You can read all about my experience here. You will see I still enjoy using the marathon as a metaphor all these years later. But, I argue, it is most apt. In the months that have elapsed since my return the parallels between the two experiences have amplified. I am definitely at the point in the race where it is, as writer Fiona Kelly McGregor put it in A Novel Idea, “a matter of stamina, of technicalities, and of getting the job done.”

Also, Perth in August is lovely! Balmy warm days, expansive skies and an awesome annual secondhand charity book sale that frankly would be worth flying back for each winter, providing one brought an empty suitcase…which I did not.