Writing on the walls

In 2012, I published a piece in The Emerging Writer – a book commissioned by the Emerging Writers Festival – called ‘Writing on the Walls, the writer as community builder’. It was my first English language publication. 

I was a recent migrant then, and I had found shortcut to festival panels, thanks to boyfriend connections, French wit, and a recently published romantic comedy. Back in France, I wanted  to be known as a ‘writer’. Maintaining that role in Australia meant embracing a new language. So, inspired by Conrad, Nabokov, and millions of aspiring migrants around the world, I gave up my sophisticated mother tongue for Global English. 

It took years for English to remotely match where my French had been. In the meantime, I explored other creative avenues. One of those was a mixed media exhibition, presented as part of the 2011 Midsumma Festival. I interviewed five couples who, like me, had gone through the process of a same-sex partner visa. I wrote up two versions of their story: one closely matching their words, one the formal tone of the statutory declarations they submitted with their application. Both texts featured on either side of a large photograph showing the couple at breakfast, and hung on the walls of Alliance Francaise.  

Sophie Calle was a direct source of formal inspiration: like her, I combined photographs and writing to document an aspect of the world, and made it public on the walls of an exhibition space. Any subsequent book or digital format was derivative. But there was more to it, as I articulated in ‘Writing on the Walls’. It was my first proper attempt at editing. I organised the words of other people, and through this, I revealed a shared experience in its various manifestations. Something I later associated to the work of Annie Ernaux, Svetlana Alexievich or – in Australia – Helen Garner. This was not about producing a clever plot to be sold in book form, then adapted for TV. Nor was it journalism, grabbing onto the debates of the day to sell advertising space. It was an investigation into the times, binding personal and collective.

Last year, a piece of mine was featured in Meanjin, upon invitation from its editor Esther Anatolitis, whom I met the same Emerging Writers Festival. The piece is a long string of philosophical aphorisms exploring virtue ethics and the Metacrisis, inspired by the French moralists and the early Romantic school, and gathered under the title Who should die, and what should we do with the bodies. For the magazine launch party, six of those were printed on large posters, and glued to the side walls of Readings in Carlton, where generations of Melbourne Uni students found home and community. Once again, I was writing on the walls. 

And now, I’m on to my second piece in Meanjin, coming out next week.