Cirrus@Austlit

'When Tinder was invented, I was working at a small design company, run by a friend. I was working on websites, and usability, and talking big to clients about hero images and easy interfaces, and so I pretended I was downloading the app for research purposes. Tinder was different then, when it was still new, still determining exactly what it was and what it might yet be. It was sweeter, maybe, less prone to abrupt endings and ghostings; I think of it as being like those very early films that still look and sound like stage shows, before directors and camera operators figured out what their new medium could do - in those early days, it still resembled actual, amiable, human dating, before it fully came into its own. (Sometimes I think this is why I still stick around.) ' (Introduction)

"Our bodies and homes are our shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those who feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? In The World Was Whole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spaces of our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into the wider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up our lives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming the engagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters and interactions can illuminate our lives. 

"Many of the essays are set in the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midst of rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, the mega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essays are poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour. Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, and the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the world and our place within it." (Publisher's website)

'The poems in Domestic Interior draw together varieties of suburban experience and imagination, charting places that are vibrant, plangent and comical. Award-winning poet and essayist Fiona Wright shows her acute concern for spaces general and particular, showing the small details that build our everyday worlds via story, memory and experience. In her poems these details hold their thrall through the moments of charged emotional extremity we encounter across our lives, whether through dream or desire, illness or struggle. Wright traverses family and its rituals, the spaces of love and friendship, the sites of everyday experience: houses, roadways, clinics, shopping centres. These works are mostly set in Sydney, in the inner suburbs where Wright now lives and in the south-western suburbs where she grew up. Domestic Interior captures these sites as the locations of love as well as sadness, of adversity as well as succour and strength.'  (Publication summary)