Paying Attention: Fiona Murphy talks with El Gibbs, Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law

Paying Attention: Fiona Murphy, El Gibbs, Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law, SWF 2022

On the last day of the Sydney Writers’ Festival 2022 I went to an afternoon session called ‘Paying Attention’. It was curated by Deaf poet and essayist Fiona Murphy, author of the acclaimed 2021 memoir The Shape of Sound.

I was there because I’m interested in the idea and practice of paying attention – and I love the writing of two of the panellists, Fiona Murphy and Fiona Wright. Beyond that I had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be a riveting, illuminating, funny and very moving conclusion to my SWF 2022.

Murphy had invited four writers with disability and chronic illness – El Gibbs (live via video), Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law – to flip the script and speak of their conditions as superpowers, as expertise they should be charging money for.

She opened by noting that we’re living in an attention economy, but it’s unevenly distributed: people with disability and chronic illness are exposed to things they have to attend even if they don’t want to.

The Undying: A meditation on modern illness by Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer’s The Undying is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I read it so slowly: it took me from early April until the end of June. Boyer is a poet and her prose is dense and resonant as poetry. It’s so loaded with … meaning? Undoing of meaning?

That this book is impossible to race through is one of its great virtues. In this and many other ways, it’s a perfect text for pandemic 2020: it forces you to slow down, to be deeply attentive and considerate, and, in particular, it brings home to you the fierce reality of a body in pain – and of the life-saving and life-destroying powers of the modern medical and pharmaceutical industries, their ruthless, violent, cost-minimising service to late capitalism in this age of digital media, data and screens.

new book, booksJane Gleeson-WhiteSeptember 17, 2020illness, cancer, The Undying, Anne Boyer, poetry, poet, nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize, pain, writing, women's writing

A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth

How different this year looks from the one I sketched onto the calendar on the wall above my desk in January. I was supposed to be giving a keynote in Oslo in March and speaking at a sustainability conference at Yale the following week, as well as speaking at various local writers’ festivals about the new edition of Six Capitals. Needless to say, all conferences and festivals have been postponed indefinitely.

The best thing about the cancelled Oslo-Yale trip was that in preparing for Oslo I read my first Norwegian novel in at least a decade: Vigdis Hjorth’s A House in Norway (2014).

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