Emerging Writers Series: Susie Anderson
“My hope is that people take that notion of being grounded where you are and thinking about stories or voices you can hear and what might be hidden. Connecting to the softer edges of a place, thinking humanely about things that might overwhelm you.”
the body country (2023) is the debut collection of poetry from proud Wergaia and Wemba Wemba woman, Susie Anderson. It’s an evocative and personal account of Anderson’s connection to place, memory and Country, while also offering insights about love, loss, and grief that many will find a strong connection with.
This was truly a standout collection in my personal reading this year, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to catch up with Susie about her work, writing life, influences and the beautiful outcomes that arise when we sit with our creative work for a time.
I like to start with a general introduction to help new readers get a sense of your background and craft; can you tell us a little about yourself and your writing journey?
I’ve always found myself in books. Growing up in a regional place, and on a farm for the first nine years of my life, adults were always trying to get me to go outside and play, but I was happy escaping into different worlds through reading. I always loved writing letters to any and everybody I could, from the age of about eight years old. As I grew up and we got the internet, I gravitated towards emails and blogs. Somehow I found Livejournal, where I met friends who liked the same music as me, and we traded CDs and poetry via email and snail mail.
Through my schooling, I had a lot of wonderful English teachers who encouraged my writing all the way through primary school into high school. There was something about music that I loved, and after I watched the movie Almost Famous, I was desperate to write for Rolling Stone and be like Triple J presenter Myf Warhurst. So I went to study media in Melbourne and did only a few electives in Literature and philosophy.
Outside of uni, I discovered zines and self-publishing, which spoke to the personal, confessional nature I really liked in letter writing, and I also found the literary magazine Voiceworks, who publish writers under 25. I attended the National Young Writers Festival with some work colleagues and attended a workshop where one of the Voiceworks Editorial Committee encouraged me to explore the idea of nonfiction poetry. I eventually went on to join the Voiceworks Ed Comm, and that’s where I found a supportive real-world community of writers. I was still involved in blogging and had a lot of friends online who were writing around the ‘alt lit’ scene of 2011-12 too.
But I think it was when I moved to Sydney and started working in the visual art sector in 2014, meeting First Nations artists who expanded my mind about what a writing practice could be, that I started to see ways I could write about the fullness of who I am - my cultural identity - alongside the sad girl poetry I had been writing up to that time.
the body country is an absolutely stunning read, I adored it. There’s a real sense of tenderness that holds us as readers through some of the core themes of grief and loss. I’d love to know more about your process of bringing the collection together and deciding which poems to include.
I’ll be honest. I was jealous of people I saw around me getting published. I felt like I had been writing and making zines for a while, and it was my turn. The envy was enough for me to try to pull together almost everything I’d written into a collection. I hoped that a structure would just happen and something would unite them. But this was naive of me and it wasn’t working.
There were some pieces I had written after Lydia Davis, whose prose poetry is a major influence on me, about losing my wallet on a bus or being anxious in the workplace, and they had this wry sense of humour that I was really proud of, but they didn’t have the heart or groundedness and didn’t gel. I unsuccessfully submitted twice to the black&write! fellowship, got disheartened, and I decided to let it go.
In 2019 I had a writing residency with Overland Magazine, and during that time, I was commissioned to write an essay for a Faber Academy event. I’d been writing about the experience of disconnection and how we have to take our belonging with us, and this became a lyrical essay that I titled the body country. A year or so later, I was approached by the black&write! organisers to resubmit my earlier manuscript, and when I reviewed the material, I thought maybe the essay could work as a thread to hold everything together.
Once I began playing with the essay as a connective tissue, it became more obvious which poems fit and which didn’t. I could see that the overwhelming thread was about emotional and physical landscapes. Tenderness is a lovely word to describe it. Everything had this emotional connection to place, whether through a memory of loved ones or a cultural connection through an Aboriginal story or language word. Once that skeleton was there as a structure, it was easier to make decisions because I had this overall world I was building.
I’m happy I had the delayed process of getting the poems published. As a collection, it wasn’t ready and it wasn’t resolved until the essay came through to unite it thematically. It also gave me time and maturity to soften my ego and enjoy the process of crafting the collection in and of itself.
Connection to Country and land are vital themes in this collection. I truly felt it when you wrote, “physical presence on Country becomes care for the self becomes interior romantic love” (I gave myself goosebumps just rereading that poem!). Would you mind expanding on this and your thoughts behind the changing forms of self and love through Country?
I’m so happy that resonates with you! It’s great that you feel something in your body because it’s an invitation for non-Aboriginal people to try to appreciate how we have an innate connection to place.
I think we can all feel it, particularly in Australia, where there is so much natural beauty. I’m in some ways likening it to romantic connections with others or the way everybody (should!) cultivate self-love and self-care.
I think or hope most First Nations people will understand what I mean kind of intuitively because our well-being is so tied to Country and how it nurtures us, how we nurture it. It's such a cyclical thing.
You do a brilliant job of blending universal and personal experiences throughout the collection, which is challenging to do. What are some of the things you hope readers walk away with after reading?
I’m so glad to hear that! As I neared the end of the editing process, it began to dawn on me just how personal this collection is, and I did wonder if some of it would be too inaccessible, but that gives me hope people can find different entry points, whether it’s through the references to the natural world, to art or the rogue AFL poem.
It’s really important for me to write about the Wimmera and the Grampians. The collection centres around my experiences of places spanning between Horsham and Glenisla (where my family farm is) and further north up to Dimboola, where our ancestral Country is. I wanted to offer a different voice for these places instead of the ‘regional noir’ that you get in crime novels set in these areas.
The piece ‘counter narrative’ kind of sums up what I mean, In that city, people think that regional areas beyond a 2-hour drive from a major city have this unbridled, uncouth, untameable nature to them, which, if you ask me, stems from colonial days. I’m not saying that these places are without their challenges; it’s just that I wanted to turn the volume up on the voice of other stories that exist.
I guess my hope is that people take that notion of being grounded where you are and thinking about stories or voices you can hear and what might be hidden. Connecting to the softer edges of a place, thinking humanely about things that might overwhelm you.
This collection won you the black&write! Fellowship and I read in your acknowledgments that you submitted your manuscript three times before it reached this point. I think that is admirable and honest, as it can often feel like manuscripts are picked up on the first go. Could you share what winning the fellowship meant to you and your overall experiences of getting to publication?
I think the first time I submitted to the Fellowship, I was a bit naive and over-confident, and being unsuccessful was quite a blow. I put that down to being an emerging writer, feeling like the centre of the universe in that way we do when we are younger.
As I’ve shared, I had just thrown together the pieces without too much deep thought. The second time I submitted, I think my ego was still in the driver’s seat, and though I had worked on the collection, it still (in hindsight, I can see!) wasn’t ready. It didn’t have a centre yet and needed a couple of years of breathing room.
Being successful after that third time really did feel like “ahh, finally,” but I did feel satisfied that I had created, for myself, a collection that was resolved.
Who have been some of the biggest influences on your writing - tell us a bit about who’s on your bookshelves that we should be reading?
I actually read less and less poetry these days. But my influences are quite clear, I think. Maggie Nelson - I had this idea that I was going to write the Australian version of Bluets for a while. Lydia Davis - Can’t and Won’t is a major influence on me. Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees inspired some of the punctuation-free prose poems in my collection.
I’m massively influenced by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, as well as Jean Rhys, Anais Nin, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and Roland Barthes.
Other poets I read and love are Wendy Xu, Franny Choi, Layli Long Soldier, Tommy Pico, and Frank O’Hara. In terms of Australian writing, I would say Ali Cobby Eckermann, Tony Birch, Kirli Saunders, Alison Whittaker, Tara June Winch, and Josephine Rowe.
In terms of what you have to read? You have to read Hyacinth by Will Cox, What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.
And watch out for the poetry of Maya Hodge.
What does creativity mean to you, and do you have any particular creative philosophies that lead your work as a poet?
It’s one of those things interwoven into my DNA. I don’t know how to live without doing some form of creative expression.
As a teenager, I played oboe and piano and sang in choirs, so music is really important to me, even though now it’s just noodling around on the piano.
I also like sewing my own clothing. And I really love cooking. I just think I have this drive to express myself or to make things. I don't know why and sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth the struggle, but I know I can’t stop. And I feel better when I am making.
And lastly, what’s next for you? Are you working on anything you can tell us about, and where might readers be able to find more of your work or experience your poetry in person?
Next for me is a minor appearance in south-west Victoria at the Port Fairy Literary Weekend and hopefully an event at St Kilda Library before the end of the year. I
have a new poem coming up in the next issue of Meanjin magazine. And hopefully will be doing the rounds at the writers festivals next year!
Susie Anderson writes from the nexus of compassion and resistance. Her poetry and nonfiction are widely published online and in print, such as in Archer Magazine, Artist Profile, Artlink, un Magazine, Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia and in many poetry anthologies. In 2018, she was runner-up in the Overland Poetry Prize and awarded the Emerging Writers Fellowship at State Library Victoria; in 2019, she was awarded a Writers Victoria Neilma Sidney grant and was a recipient of the Overland Writers Residency. In 2020, she edited the online journal, Tell Me Like You Mean It Volume 4 for Australian Poetry Journal and Cordite Poetry Review.
Her professional practice is as a digital producer in the arts and creative industries, ranging from Sydney, London, and Melbourne. Leveraging her position within institutions, she attempts to bring about change by uncovering and amplifying stories from her own and other communities. Descended from the Wergaia and Wemba Wemba peoples of Western Victoria, she currently lives on Boon Wurrung land in Melbourne.
Website: https://www.susan.fyi/
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com
