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Colette’s use of present-tense first-person narration in The Vagabond builds a rapport with the reader – there is a sense of authenticity as if Renée Néré is confiding in you directly. By positioning the reader as a dear confidant, Colette transports the reader to Renée’s ground floor flat and skips the ‘honeymoon’ phase in which the reader is usually still being introduced to the protagonist and sheltered from their dirty laundry, cigarette butts and the wet truffle black nosing of their little dog. At the same time, the reader is always conscious they are being strung along – this intimacy is a narrative device – an intentional structure intended to emphasise the blossoming of Renée’s innermost voice as her creative side thrives in the wake of her failed marriage: “So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days." The poetry of Renée’s language flourishes as the narrative creates distance between her and her past as a married woman, and the predicament of her lover’s desire for marriage. Rather than seeking self-fulfilment or completion in heterosexual or monogamous love (as many women of the time did) Renée’s intellectual life is at its most beguiling when she is alone, or among kindred artistic spirits in a non-romantic context: "I have no equals, I have only my fellow wayfarers." Through Renée Colette paints a vibrant version of womanhood, where one “wants nothing from love, in short, but love” without the constraints of gender and social norms or the expectation that another will make one whole. Instead, the pith and marrow of Renée’s self, for better or for worse, is embedded in her voice. However, writing is just one-way Renée tries to express herself. The essence of The Vagabond lies not in whether she succeeds, or whether Renée herself satisfies the reader’s salacious desire to substantiate the character’s substantial identity with Colette, but rather in the process of her gradually remembering how to use her voice: "To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower."
-A T Ballard
https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-vagabond-colette/book/9780374528041.html

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Wacky things happen, but they magically speak to unmistakably female lived realities in terms of moments, feelings and through symbolism/premonition.

July's writing constructs a space where certain ways of knowing are privileged in a way that I've never seen done in a novel; you may find these nuggets of truth unexpectedly difficult to recognise but they are even more satisfying (& powerful) offered so.

Every once in a while you read a book that blows open your expectations of the form. So refreshing after a hiatus from fiction, to be reminded of fresh ways of meaning-making possible in the novel form.

first published:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1743072331

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The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous

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The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous

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One of my favourite essays ever, knocks my socks off.  Read for a stirring, dazzling, and poetic command for women to write in order to reclaim their bodies, voices, and narratives!

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I recently finished this 1968 lesbian pulp fiction novel. The blurb, title and tagline all led me to believe it would be about a fantasy world where only lesbians live. In reality, it was about a slutty bisexual who sleeps her way through Manhattan. Not mad at all. It was really fantastic.

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https://twitter.com/aredwingedbeast

This line sums it up: "Carson gives the impression — on the page, at readings — of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient, for whom our modern earthly categories are too artificial and simplistic to contain anything like the real truth she is determined to communicate." (from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html)

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My body is a global catastrophe monitoring station by Hannah Jenkins

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My body is a global catastrophe monitoring station by Hannah Jenkins

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One of my favourite stories of the year. Incredibly evocative, conceptual speculative fiction which touches the nerves of your spinal column and threatens to shiver it, lift it up and, just like in the story, disembody you.

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My body is a global catastrophe monitoring station*

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Reading between the lines, it was pretty clear they were looking for people dumb or desperate enough to walk out west into the unprotected zone and measure the damage. Can you imagine? Just sending people out there to see how nature will destroy the human body?

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This short story was very spooky. Definite trigger warning. And, unlike me, try not to read it just before you go to sleep!

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I nod my head.

The woman says nothing but slurps the last of her hot milk and sets the cup on the floor. I look into the fire for a long time, listening to the storm until I cannot hear the crying child anymore.

A fluttering starts in my chest and I want to ask her to please stay here today but before I can make the words come, Silas is out the door and the door is shut behind her. Kait turns back to the old woman who I realise has been watching me.

I don't hear the woman's reply over the rush of panic in my ears, but I see her horrid mouth moving and I cannot look any more.

And that is when I hear Silas's cries.

Kait sniffles from her seat.

Kait holds her hand over her mouth.

Next to me I feel Silas give way and slump beside Kait .

And w hen it stops, I feel an open space unfold inside me and I can breathe all the way into it.

Emma Maguire is a writer and researcher working on Bindal and Wulgurukaba land in Townsville, and Kuarna land in Adelaide. She researches young women's digital autobiography by day, and by night she writes weird stories about intimacy, female relationships, and creepy landscapes. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have been published in Kill Your Darlings, The Conversation, Scum Mag, and more. You can find out more about Emma on her website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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I nod my head. The woman says nothing but slurps the last of her hot milk and sets the cup on the floor. I look into the fire for a long time, listening to the storm until I cannot hear the crying child anymore.

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I recently finished reading Ellena Savage’s collection of essays, Blueberries. I loved the essay ‘Notes to Unlived Time’. She so aptly describes the act of writing memories and notes: "They are the insisted-upon valour of making the (always-broken) promise that they’ll be returned to, retrieved, revised.” As someone with around thirty volumes of journals, this struck a real chord!

(This post originally in a Readings blog post - check it out for reccos from the rest of the EWF team!! <https://www.readings.com.au/news/book-recommendations-from-the-ewf-programming-team> )

- Pip Grylls