This is an illustrated poem I wrote after seeing my friend Issy play Ophelia at Ormond College. (She was a very good Ophelia!)
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Best Books of 2023
I always collect my reading stats for the year, so here’s a look at what I loved most and a breakdown of the kinds of books I gravitated towards.
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THE FUTURE IS HERE (and it’s bad): a comic
This is a comic I made in Express Media’s Toolkits program about AI becoming so intelligent that is becomes just as annoying and inclined to procrastinate as humans.
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Midnight mist and lambs
I decided a while ago that I wouldn’t get any word tattoos, only images. There’s one phrase that tempts me though, one I have tacked up above my desk.
DEMONS HATE FRESH AIR
Linn Ullmann, relaying something her father Ingmar Bergman told her. I found it via Austin Kleon’s book, Keep GoingThe idea is that movement and the outside and walking in particular get rid of the demons in your head. ‘Go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air.’
A lot of writers and artists took long walks and I’ve often found them incredibly helpful as ways to get out of my head, and to find sparks of ideas.
Here are two excellent things that I’ve seen on walks recently.
Midnight fog on my way home I walked home at midnight the other night after a concert. It was so foggy that all the streetlights left streamers of light through the gumtrees. It was beautiful and calming and I know I’m going to use it in a story or drawing soon.
The second came on a very bad day when I was feeling miserable. My best friend and I went on a walk to talk everything through and saw lambs in a paddock near the creek.
Seeing something small and new wobble around on their fluffy little legs was a delight, but it also made me feel much better. I felt wobbly too, but I’d be okay.
All this to say: take a walk. Make a plan that travels.
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My Favourite Queer Books
This is an ongoing list of queer books I’ve read, loved, and recommend. Think of it as a hub, which I’ll update as I add more books.
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From My Notebook to Yours: 5 things worth sharing
Here are 5 things I’ve been interested in over the last month or so that I think are worth a perusal
1. I’ve been compiling a reading list of new, reframed art history books. I’m loving THE WHOLE PICTURE by Alice Procter, which tracks the different kinds of museum collections and their relationships to colonialism. It’s been fascinating, especially the final sections, which investigate attempts to protest and change the ways museums operate. Alice’s website is also a great resource.
2. I’ve been a little stuck with art-making and have turned to drawing fancy cats. I have some more here. And here. And some in pyjamas here. I think it might be the best art un-blocker.
3. While I don’t agree with everything they stand for, I enjoyed reading ‘The Founding, Manifesto and Rules of the Other Muswell Hill Stuckists’ (2009), a manifesto of an artist group opposed to conceptual art. I love some conceptual art, but their manifesto is such a delight to read that it almost convinced me.
4. I’ve started reading (and become slightly obsessed with) Bram Stoker’s Dracula after seeing Nosferatu at the Malthouse Theatre. The season is sadly over now, but I hope it returns because it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen and an amazing reframing of a classic. My Dracula obsession led me to watch this version from 1992 which may be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, despite having a cast that should have been amazing.
5. My friend gave me Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson for my birthday and I can feel it curing my reading slump. It feels like Carry On by Rainbow Rowell meets Good Omens by Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman i.e. the perfect book for me. One day, I’ll write my own witchy vampire story, and I hope it can be half has good as Dawson’s. HMRC is also such an interesting take on some of the transphobia happening in the UK and USA now (and, increasingly, Australia) so I also recommend watching Contrapoint’s new video as a non-fiction companion to the novel
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My top books of 2022
I read quite a bit and I talk about books a lot, so I thought I’d collate my favourite books of the year, for your perusal. I’ve linked to a better blurb for each title, so you can see what the actual plot entails, but for the most part, I’m just going to detail my highlights of each book and the reasons I loved it. It’s like going book shopping or to the library with me. I hold up a book, saying, ‘You have to read this, it has a GIANT CAT in it!’ and hope you understand my enthusiasm.
Vita and Virginia
I started the year off with the love letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. It was fascinating to see how their lives intertwined and their relationship unfolded through turbulent times. I then devoured a biography of Vita – which is rare for me, as someone who almost never reads biographies. There’s something about these women, their work, and their lives, that fascinates me and I know that 2023 will be a continuation of this reading for me.
I highly recommend reading their letters and Alison Bechdel’s introduction to them, especially if you’re interested in queer history (and Virginia’s comments about Vita’s legs).Sci-fi
This year has been a great sci-fi year for me. I started off with Mars Awakens by HM Waugh, an amazing middle-grade adventure set on Mars and filled with eery intrigue, daring adventures, friendships across political divides, and some of the cleverest aliens I’ve ever seen. You can read my previous review (read: gushing, glowing praise) of it here.
In terms of YA sci-fi, I fell in love with Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman’s writing. After devouring (and, at the end of the year, rereading in audio form) their Illuminae series, I loved their Aurora Cycle too. Illuminae is so clever, so funny, and if you’re after a long, engaging audiobook, I highly recommend getting the whole series out from your library (my library uses BorrowBox, which is excellent). The Aurora Cycle would also be great for fans of Guardians of the Galaxy who wanted to read some fun, high-stakes hijinks.
For something a little different, All That’s Left in the World by Erik J Brown was a delightful, exciting, and heartwarming look at a post-apocalyptic teenage life, including a beautiful queer first love and some great twists and turns. It’s a book I feel I’ve been looking for for a long time and I’m so glad to finally have found something like it. It’s definitely one I’ll be rereading for years to come.
And a warmer, quieter one: the Monk and Robot duology by Becky Chambers. A reflective, poetic exploration of how to live a slower, kinder life and a philosophical look at what humans need and want. It would also be great for anyone who wants to read a solar-punk Ghibli-style book, with amazing eco villages and tea ceremonies. (Plus, they’re really short.)
Young Adult
I read about 25 YA books this year, so those that made it to this list are truly the best of the best.
First of all, three I read in quick succession. Unneccessary Drama by Nina Kenwood (whose lovely launch I attended): a hilarious rom com set in a Melbourne share house, with a sprinkling of enemies-to-lovers. It’s a grin-like-a-weirdo, laugh-out-loud-on-the-train kind of book.
Then, maybe my favourite book of 2022: Dancing Barefoot by Alice Boyle. You can read my full review here, but if you need a funny, honest, big queer hug of a book, this is one you need to read right away. (I also met Alice at Nina Kenwood’s launch and she was lovely.)
Where You Left Us by Rhiannon Wilde (my other review here) is the perfect gothic Australian summer holiday read, full of mystery, complex sibling relationships, and hesitant, honest love.
I also finally read Looking for Alibrandi by Melinda Marchetta – and then immediately watched the movie and happened to finish it just before the amazing play opened at the Malthouse. I fell in love with Marchetta’s writing and hope that some of my own can follow in her footsteps and create characters and settings as vivid and true as hers.
I’m hoping to start 2023 with Malinda Lo’s new book, the companion to Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which was one of my favourites of this year. If you need a quiet, gorgeous book about hesitant, faltering relationships, summoning courage, and a tour through the sapphic scene in 1950s San Franscico’s Chinatown – which everyone needs, let’s be honest – then this one is for you.
Creativity
I also read all of Austin Kleon’s books this year, which I’ve mentioned repeatedly on here before (so I won’t bore you again). If you need a little pick-me-up as we head into the new year, I especially recommend Keep Going and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. Gilbert’s audiobook is one big creative pep talk.
I hope your 2022 has been full of excellent books and that next year brings you unexpected gems, as well as the space to settle in and read them. See you on the other end!
A little illustration of a phrase I’ve repeated through 2022 -
Ends of worlds
Most of my story ideas start with the end of the world. Or the end of a world. The end of a friendship, the end of certainty, the end of the version of reality you once relied on.
Mostly I write contemporary YA fiction, although I’ve been toying with an idea that leans a little more sci-fi. In researching that idea, and in living through multiple crises, I’ve realised just how much of my thinking surrounds crisis and how we deal with it.
It may not surprise you – and definitely shouldn’t surprise people who know me – that I am a catastrophiser. I’m not as bad as I used to be (partly because my mental health in general is better), but I still feel drawn to the worst-case scenario. In many ways, I find it comforting. Like many naturally anxious people feel we are, I like to feel I am always prepared for the worst.
It sounds smug, but the public health orders and general end-of-the-world feeling that came with the first lockdown here in Melbourne did not come as a surprise to me. That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult – it absolutely was – but I knew the beats of the story. I knew not to let myself think, like some people around me did in March 2020, that this might be over in a couple of weeks. I have long been interested in disease pandemics and I had been following COVID since December 2019, when it seemed to be a weird blip in China. I only heard about it because I had a Google alert set up for bubonic plague and was pinged about articles that linked this new disease in China to the Black Death.
Months before, I had stood in the pressed-together crowd of a school strike for climate with 100,000 other young bodies. In that crowd, among all the noise and inspiration, the anxious part of my brain asked, ‘How long would it take for the plague to spread if one person here was infected?’
The strangest thing about COVID for me has been having those worries and anxious thoughts confirmed and affirmed as rational risk assessment. It’s something I’m finding difficult, as we move from a ubiquitous crisis of COVID to many others, just as urgent and scary (and with COVID still in the mix, of course). It is difficult to rein in my anxieties when they’re confirmed like this. It’s difficult to tell yourself you’re overreacting or that your worries are the stuff of sci-fi when they keep unfolding right before your eyes.
One of my friends, when I told them about the plague worry I’d had at that school strike, went wide-eyed and said that I had predicted the pandemic. I told them I hadn’t done that; there are just some disasters that are historical inevitabilities. There are some challenges we’ve been warned about but choose to ignore. Half my state was underwater last week and no one was overly surprised, but there was still so little discussion of how these floods linked to our climate crisis. It was scary and frustrating, watching it all play out.
Maybe this is what I’m trying to say, when I write and talk about ends of worlds: we all need to think about crises more. We need to prepare for them and we need to treat them as real and present threats. Because, dear reader, they are coming.
Or maybe I need to read fewer dystopias…
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An unexpected poem about sport, on Grand Final day
‘It’s a lot of money to spend just to leave at halftime,’
I think as the losing fans board the train.
But maybe they’re onto something:
There are so few sorrows in this world you can run from
before their heaviest blows land on your shoulders.
Why not duck out of this one before the final siren? -
Accidentally radical
It started with a plot problem. I needed my protagonist to run into another character at her school and for them both to be somewhere they wouldn’t normally be. I landed on the school sickbay as the setting and decided that my protagonist, Maggie, had arrived there because of period pain and dizziness (mostly because I didn’t want her to get a serious injury or feel nauseous).
All I had intended in writing the scene was for two characters to collide. I was glad I had incidentally included the experience of period pain on the page because I had never read a story where periods are treated as a normal and natural occurrence. I had never read a story where periods appeared as something other than a coming-of-age experience or the first steps into “womanhood”. I had never, I realised, read a description of periods that wasn’t about a character’s very first period.
At school, it infuriated me that boys could make as many jokes as they liked about the size of their dicks – even in the context of a classroom, and even when they knew they were making others uncomfortable – but I was judged for openly carrying a pad to the bathroom or mentioning that I was having a painful day of cramps and dizziness. I hate that my period pain was questioned and doubted.
So I wrote the scene and moved on. I didn’t think much more about it.
But when I shared this excerpt in my Young Adult Fiction class, the response took me by complete surprise. Some of my classmates said it was refreshing, almost a relief, to read such honest descriptions and discussion of periods on the page, especially in YA. Others hadn’t realised until we discussed it in workshopping that many people who menstruate experience incredibly painful cramps like mine and my protagonist’s. There were stories from some of the non-menstruators in the room about how little they knew about menstruation, and how they had had to ask friends and girlfriends to explain periods to them. There were anecdotes about non-menstruators who had received the same sex ed as me holding completely nonsensical ideas about what a period was and how it worked. There were stories about menstruators who were never shown how to use a pad and they had to figure it out for themselves.
As I draft, I keep coming back to that wonderful Joan Didion quote: ‘I don’t know what I think until I write it down.’ I didn’t know until I wrote that scene that this was an area where I have something to say. That this is something I can advocate for.
I’ve changed my whole book to focus more on menstruation. I’m putting this experience back into the narrative. I’m writing it to make it real again, to put it out into the open where we can talk about it freely and without shame or embarrassment. I hope that someday, reading this story will help someone continue these conversations. I’ve made it the radical act of this story to make discussing menstruation so normal that radical action is no longer needed.
Because no writer should be scared to explore something that happens to them every single month.
Writing about periods has reminded me that I had to explain Libra Oddspots to a male friend once and he thought they were incredible. This image is from a blog that compiles Oddspots which you can find here. I also enjoy this American’s blog explaining them – I didn’t realise they were only an Australian thing
Lydia Schofield 