Delia Falconer Delia Falconer i(A26842 works by) (a.k.a. Delia C. Falconer)
Born: Established: 1966 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 'Something Almost as Old-fashioned as Resptct' : A History of the UTS Writers Anthology Delia Falconer , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: 40 : Forty Years of the UTS Writers' Anthology 2021; (p. xiv-xvii)
1 7 y separately published work icon Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , Cammeray : Simon and Schuster Australia , 2021 22597313 2021 selected work essay

'The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed.

'In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.

'Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?

'Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.' (Publication summary)

1 Living in the Time of Coronavirus Delia Falconer , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Fire Flood Plague : Australian Writers Respond to 2020 2020;
1 Signs and Wonders of a New Age Delia Falconer , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Living with the Anthropocene 2020;
1 Compassion, a Timely Feeling … Diana G. Barnes , Delia Falconer , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Emotions : History, Culture, Society , vol. 4 no. 1 2020; (p. 91–108)

'The concept of compassion, defined as suffering with, has a long history often entangled in that of the cognate term pity. It has proven to be a changeable concept that is not only responsive to but integral to historical change itself. This is because it is a sociable emotion, but, in the sense that it expresses a desire to alleviate the suffering of another, the emotion also expresses the desire to effect change. For this reason it is a particularly timely lens through which to consider the emotional effect of climate change upon local communities, and the new emotional regime taking shape in the Anthropocene – and the dawning of the Pyrocene – beginning with Armidale, New South Wales through the drought and fire of Australia’s Black Summer of 2019–20, but extending beyond.' (Publication abstract)

1 As Time Becomes Kaleidoscopic, I Find It Unbearable to Think Too Far into My Children's Future Delia Falconer , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 13 September 2020;

'‘Stop the world’ the musical hero said whenever things went wrong. I’ve been feeling this way for a few years now.'

1 The Uses and Enchantments of the Writer’s Notebook Delia Falconer , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , April vol. 24 no. 1 2020;
'This paper examines the writer’s notebook to ask: why does it persist as such an effective generative tool? Drawing primarily on the work of Michael Taussig and Roland Barthes, while focusing on the ways in which writers have themselves described their experience of using journals, it examines the notebook as a remarkably polyvalent and talismanic text. In its first part it explores the difference, often strongly marked by writers, between the journal and diary, arguing that it is exactly the notebook’s ‘album’-like quality of fragmentation and interchangeability, which bothered Barthes, that creates its value for writers. In its second half, it examines the different discursive or formal strands typically found within the notebook: its ‘extractive realist’ (Gibson 2009) techniques for briefly recording the ‘real’ in ways that transform it for creative use; its curation of quotes, which descends from the Renaissance commonplace book, as a means of professional self-fashioning; and its appeal as a physical object representing an enchanted promise of creativity. It concludes that the notebook’s longevity and energy derive from the constant juxtaposition of these often contradictory elements, which create the ongoing quality of ‘something else’ that writers so often remark upon.' (Publication abstract)
1 Signs and Wonders Delia Falconer , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , March 2019;

'I’m walking to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair in Sydney’s Domain at high tide, scanning the small bay in Woolloomooloo, as I always do, for fish or stingrays. There’s nothing to see in the flat green water nudging the sandstone cliffs of the tiny beach, or below the sea wall; I can’t even spot the usual mullet nosing around the  floating walkways at the marina. A few years ago, I might have assumed the variation in numbers was seasonal, hoping for better luck next time. But since 2016, when the figures started to come through that we have lost around 60 per cent of the world’s wildlife over the last half-century—not only exotic animals but common creatures like giraffes, sparrows, and even insects—it’s hard not to see today’s emptiness as a sign of catastrophic absence.' (Introduction)

1 'The Life to Come' by Michelle de Kretser Delia Falconer , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Monthly , October no. 149 2018; (p. 62)
1 1 The Opposite of Glamour Delia Falconer , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , July 2017;

'Recently, I found myself longing to reread John Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez. I first read it when I was a teenager studying one of his novels at school; anxious for me to succeed, my parents purchased other Steinbeck books in the cheap Pan editions featuring naïve illustrations constrained by circular borders, as if seen through a telescope. The book is the author’s account, a decade after the event, of his travels in 1940 with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who would become the model for ‘Doc’ in Cannery Row.  Under the pretext of a loosely conceived scientific expedition, the men hire and equip a small purse seiner, a fishing boat, and set out from Monterey, in northern California, for the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California), between the Baja California Peninsula and Mexico.  Over six weeks, they pull creatures from the low coastal waters, to collect specimens for Rickett’s marine biological business, but also for the sheer pleasure of gathering them in their plenitude and seeing how these small animals propel themselves and behave...' (Introduction)

1 Out of the Woods Delia Falconer , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 3 June 2017; (p. 16)
Also discusses The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature's Great Connectors By David George Haskell.
1 A Stark Picture of Women's Stifled Lives Delia Falconer , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 22-23 October 2016; (p. 24) The Saturday Age , 22-23 October 2016; (p. 18)

— Review of The Good People Hannah Kent , 2016 single work novel
1 When a Writer Keeps Watch on the Beat of His Heartland Delia Falconer , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 24-25 October 2015; (p. 29) The Saturday Age , 24-25 October 2015; (p. 29)

— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir Tim Winton , 2015 single work autobiography
1 'This Stuff Tastes of Window' : Reading as a Writer Delia Falconer , 2015 single work essay
— Appears in: The Simple Act of Reading 2015; (p. 193-199)
1 An Aria to the Art Delia Falconer , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 3-4 October 2015; (p. 36) The Saturday Age , 3-4 October 2015; (p. 30)

— Review of My Salute to Five Bells : John Olsen's Opera House Journal 1973 single work
1 Introduction Delia Falconer , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Seven Poor Men of Sydney 2015; The Best Australian Essays 2015 2015;
1 Robert Dessaix's New Memoir Delia Falconer , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 367 2014; (p. 21)

— Review of What Days Are For Robert Dessaix , 2014 single work autobiography
1 Journey through Mythology Delia Falconer , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 13-14 December 2014; (p. 22)

— Review of Navigatio Patrick Holland , 2014 single work novel
1 Dark Activities Delia Falconer , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 364 2014; (p. 9-10)

— Review of The Snow Kimono Mark Henshaw , 2014 single work novel
1 Doomed Ship a Vessel of Hope for Neglected Kids Delia Falconer , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 23-24 August 2014; (p. 18-19)

— Review of When the Night Comes Favel Parrett , 2014 single work novel
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