Cirrus@Austlit

'Georgia Blain began to write The Museum of Words shortly after undergoing surgery for removal of an aggressive, malignant tumour from the language centre in her brain. The tumour was incurable. Blain knew that, at best, she ‘wouldn’t last more than a couple of years’. She died thirteen months later, in December 2016. The Museum of Words, as its subtitle – ‘a memoir of language, writing, and mortality’ – signals, is less about dying than it is about the beauty, complexity and necessity of language. ‘Language’, Blain insists, ‘is at the core of our being. The way in which we express ourselves is inextricably linked to who we are and how others see us.’ Blain expresses herself with a decided absence of sentimentality or self-pity. Her valedictory memoir is a celebration of the lives of four women, their relationships with each other and with language and writing. It is also a love letter to three of those women, to her life partner Andrew Taylor and to her own writing life.' (Introduction)

'Sarah Rice and I first became friends when we were members of the same choir and toured Europe in 2003. Sarah had just completed a PhD in philosophy––on epistemic metaphors and ethics in Nietzsche and Levinas––and I was about to embark on my doctorate. Sarah went on to complete further post-graduate study in Visual Art and to lecture in Art Theory at the ANU. Some years after our choir tour Sarah and I reconnected through poetry. While Fingertip of the Tongue is Sarah’s first full-length collection, Sarah’s poems have been widely published and won a number of prizes.' (Introduction)

'‘I have this very fluid relationship with Bankstown, with the Western Suburbs, I’m part of it but also not part of it too. Even as I was growing up in the Western Suburbs… I think my head was always very much elsewhere. I was a huge reader when I was young, I was a huge letter-writer, I had boxes and boxes of letters of pen-pals from all around the world. So even if I was physically located, living in Georges Hall, in my head I think I was a real citizen of the world from a young age, and I really valued those kinds of interactions with people from other places. Which also happened within the borders of Western Sydney too.' (Abstract)

'I have returned to Cold Light, the third novel in the Edith Trilogy by Frank Moorhouse, time and time again. One of my reasons for going back to it is, as is often the case with writers, self-interest. I am currently writing a novel about Leonard Woolf and Woolf was, like Edith Campbell Berry, an odd fish. A bureaucrat of sorts, committed to public service. A man who could be both cruel and deeply romantic, and, while not as queer as Edith, he certainly surrounded himself with queer acquaintances, living the life of a Bloomsbury man, a man who was in, to quote a phrase oft-used by Edith, in a Bloomsbury Marriage. In the current draft of my novel a fictional character called Bella jots various scenes of a novel she is writing down on 3 x 5 inch cards. It was no surprise to me, really, when researching this lecture, that I discovered Frank Moorhouse carries 3 x 5 inch cards everywhere he goes, in a leather custom made wallet.' (Introduction)