Issue 4: Emma Yearwood
“At work, a library, a small child crawls under the desk, lifts up my trouser leg and licks me on the shin.”
~ We see through a crack by Emma Yearwood
Your creative non-fiction piece “We see through a crack,” explores ideas of intimacy, fragments and the duality of our online/offline and work/home lives. Can you tell us a bit more about the inspiration behind this piece?
This piece started out with how it feels to ‘peek’ into people’s domestic lives on social media — how these ‘curated’ and often visual fragments of lives intensify a sensation of intimacy with strangers. Thinking about this also made me think about how I increasingly feel this sense of ‘peeking’ or fragmentation in offline contexts too. Working in a customer service role I sometimes get this feeling of scrolling through hundreds of fleeting interactions with strangers. Or the way we ‘curate’ what we share of our lives differently for colleagues compared to, say, family, and I feel each ‘curation’ decision leads to a splitting or doubling sensation, depending on if you are in a bleak or generous mood.
The title quote is from a Cristina Rivera Garza novella The Taiga Syndrome, a kind of noir detective fairytale set mostly in a mysterious northern boreal forest. A young village boy is recounting a strange tale of seeing a series of bloody, fleshy and impossibly tiny people emerge as if born from the meaty vomit of a regular-sized woman. The event is seen through a crack in the wall of a hut, on the edge of a snowy forest. The impossibly tiny people are grotesque and very real. And the scene just reminds me of being reborn over and over, but each time a little more imperfectly.
In The Suburban Review, you mention that the process of writing begins with collecting, and this piece in particular, with its short, luminous fragments, definitely feels like a collection! I’m curious as to how you developed and edited it over time?
I am definitely a collector! Over the last few years I’ve kept a series of notebooks split into sections assigned to various moods or topics, like ‘low light’ or ‘lists’ or ‘wearable tech’ for example, and I jot down quotes or thoughts that seem to fit into certain categories and this process is fun and satisfying. Developing this piece, which coalesced from a section of notes called ‘digital intimacies’, was more like making a collage than writing, or the writing was done in tiny disparate bursts and then stuck together. The process of sticking was one where I tried many arrangements until the fragments seemed like they were in the right spot and their order created what I hope is enough connective tissue to hold the collection together.
You mention the pull of the “eroticism of the everyday.” What draws you to exploring these themes?
I think ultimately I am someone who does not need a lot of stimulation — who finds the texture of everyday life invigorating and deeply interesting. I love to read texts focussed on the domestic and the minute, that see the weirdness, joy and sensuality of the everyday. I’ve been reading a lot of Beverley Farmer’s non-fiction and she spends a lot of time describing shadows on the walls of her house or dappled light under trees or the texture of fruit and it’s so delightful and enticing and eerie. Or in Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond she spends paragraphs describing the subtle textural pleasures of morning meals, and it’s funny and sensuous and utterly captivating. There is a charge to any kind of close observation, and, in a way, this is what I am most interested in — attempting to capture the charge that exists in the space of living quietly and observantly.
You name several fantastic writers in your piece, including Kate Zambreno, Cristina Rivera Garza and Sarah Sentilles. Who is at the top of your reading list at the moment?
I have recently read and am still dwelling on a few great non-fiction books: Amy Liptrot’s The Instant, Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night and the Liminal and Pantera Press non-fiction prize anthology Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory.
Amy Liptrot’s second memoir, ostensibly about a year spent looking for raccoons (and love) in Berlin, is very good on the ultra contemporary pain of the online/offline blur in break-ups and dating — how it’s so easy to tongue the ulcer of break-up hurt by online stalking ex-lovers or going over and over records of earlier digital communication, and how real this prolonged pain is. Alongside this is also the way it can feel like there is a glut of dating opportunities through apps but also some underlying brittleness to connections made so easily.
A Horse at Night is a collection of loosely essayistic reflections on the act of reading — sparse, wise and elusive, they seem imbued with the airy desert and mountain landscapes around LA, which is where Cain is writing from. The brief essays have made me more attuned to the context of reading — how physical locations or different types of aloneness or what you read before and after a text can inform and enhance the act of reading.
Each essay in Against Disappearance is brilliant and surprising in its own way. It’s exciting to read a showcase of Australian writers experimenting with form and content so unexpectedly. Brandon K. Liew’s playful essay on how his family have run the restaurant Shakahari (a stalwart in the Melbourne vegetarian scene) for decades and Lur Alghurabi’s essay arguing against the trend of writing ‘resilience’ in refugee stories were real standouts.
Emma Yearwood lives on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land in the inner west of Melbourne. Her essays have been published in The Suburban Review, Island and Antic. She works as a librarian and lives with an elderly greyhound named Mumma.