The first story from my new book-in-progress has now been published!
The piece is called “What are the attributes of God?” and it appears in the latest issue (issue 11) of The Lifted Brow. It’s great to have the first piece from the book published – and it’s even better to have it featured alongside works by the many other excellent artists in the issue, including Alice Pung, Mandy Ord, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Sarah Howell and more.
You can buy the issue for $10 – or why not subscribe for a whole year?
And if you’d like some bonus discussion about my piece, that’s coming very soon too, courtesy of The Rereaders:
[Update: You can listen to or download this podcast here.]
I’m really proud of the work of that I’ve been producing for my second book. I’m writing far too slowly for my liking but the work itself is really special. I remember the afternoon when I finished the first draft of “What are the attributes of God?”. I’d been really struggling with the ending of the piece, which was certainly stretching me intellectually. When I wrote my exegesis (the theoretical part of my PhD thesis), I incorporated some art theory right towards the end of the very last chapter. That section was one of my favourite parts of my exegesis. In writing “What are the attributes of God?”, I adapted some of the ideas from that section for use in the story. Doing this was very hard and I completed it over the course of, I think, a week or so. When I finally wrote that last sentence in the draft, I remember feeling a bit surreal and shaky (and I was already literally sweating from the exertion I had been putting into the piece that day). I thought: “I think I’ve done it. I’ve finished the draft. Have I? I think I have!”
PS And in some other good news… another piece from my second book was recently accepted by the magazine Meanjin. More about that piece in a later post!
