Rachel Robertson
Author, editor & Academic

What bliss it is to sit down in front of a fan in the middle of the day in Perth and read a book purely for pleasure, not for reasons of research or teaching, but just for my own delight!

I started this year with The Devil’s Cave by Martin Walker, the latest Bruno, Chief of Police story set in the Perigord. Of course, I had to drink wine and eat lots of soft cheese and pate at the same time, as food is so much a part of this book!

Now I am half way into The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt, a fascinating memoir that is also about neuroscience, psychology and even philosophy. I’m reading it after reading her essay collection Living, Thinking, Looking, which I also found absorbing. As I read, I keep marking especially intriguing passages. I used to feel a bit guilty about writing in books, but now (if I own the book), I find it liberating to do this. If I go back to re-read a book and see my own marks or comments, I’m often amused to see how the same or different things catch my eye at different times.

The next book on my January reading pile is Theories of Memory: A Reader edited by Rossington and Whitehead, which a dear friend gave me for christmas – what an inspired choice!

And of course, I must recommend The Best Australian Essays 2012 edited by Ramona Koval, not just because one of my essays is there, but also because there are a lot of very good essays in this book, including Gillian Mears’ essay about writing the wonderful novel Foal’s Bread.

Happy New (reading) Year!

I read a lot, probably too much.

I should read less and do more of the practical things of life, like cleaning the house, getting some exercise and weeding the garden. I know I need practise with practical activities because the other day it took me 30 minutes to take the beeping smoke detector off the ceiling to change its battery and then another 30 minutes to fail to get it back up there. Tears and swear words later, my friend arrived and sorted it immediately – the problem was all to do with a little red tab that had to be tucked under the battery. How is it that some people can see that sort of thing straightaway and I can’t?

No amount of great literature is ever going to teach me how to be comfortable up a ladder fiddling around with batteries and buttons and little red things. I know this. I know I can’t rely on my friends to help me out every time either. You only get good at things through practice, so the smoke detector should be a warning to me – get practical.

Yes, I said to myself, but first since I’ve just made a coffee I’ll sit down for a quick read before I tackle the garden weeds. An hour later, I was still engrossed in The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, a novel set in the 80s, partly about a girl who reads too much!

What excuse is there for people like me? I don’t know, except I also came across this sentence by Mary Jane Moffat: “Literature is one of the few resources we have in modern times for living the deep life and not being simply spectators of our own experience.”

This is so true: the more I read, the more I understand myself and others. This is worth something, surely.

This, from Margaret Atwood: “Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.” (From her book Negotiating with the Dead.)

Isn’t this true? When you begin working on an essay or a story or a poem, something is obscured, but you don’t necessarily know what. There can be an emptiness – a void, the sense of something unknown or unspoken, something felt but not fully expressed yet. And you work with it, around it, towards it. You dive down into the darkness, and find – or rather create – a pattern, a way of shedding light.

And if you go down there and come up with nothing, well, you just do it all again the next day, and the next … Diving and writing, writing and diving.