Cirrus@Austlit

'She knew how to cut a dramatic figure. One of my defining memories of Fay Zwicky is seeing her at the Perth Writers Festival in 1989, sitting alone and wearing large, dark sunglasses. She was like an actor—or perhaps an actor comically playing a spy—trying to be incognito, but simply drawing attention to herself. It is possible, of course, that she was genuinely trying to avoid attention from the festival audience. As she says in Jenny Digby’s A Woman’s Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets (1995), ‘I recently asked another poet how she coped with conferences and writers’ festivals and she said that she could block off. I can’t do that. I actually take on the marks of everybody. That’s why life is so damn difficult. Things impinge very, very acutely as if you have one skin too few’ (99–100).' (Introduction)