This House Burns Blue

by Gabby Vachon

My mother wears so much blue, it’s fucking ridiculous.

Her whole house is decorated in blue, so much so that she has a room called “the red room” because it lacks the hegemony of blue of its neighboring kitchen and laundry room.

People—like her sisters, her personal trainer, and the cashiers at the local grocery store—often remark upon the blue, even poke fun at it. But their criticism never bothers her.

She just smiles her famous tight smile and lets out a light suburban-mom laugh.

I don’t know for sure why she’s so attached to the color blue, but I have a few theories:

1. Blue may remind her of her childhood, as her parents were ardent Quebec separatists. If you don’t know much about Quebec politics, here’s a very basic overview of the Sovereignty movement, or at least my version of it, keeping in mind I am a pure-bread French Canadian who grew up in Montreal: French Canadian people made up most of Quebec, a large Canadian province; English people made up most of the rest of Canada. The Quebec provincial government was pissed at Canada’s federal government for a multitude of reasons (some rational, some lunatic) and decided to make the Quebec people vote twice, in 1980 and 1995, about separating the province of Quebec from Canada, making Quebec its own country. The vote failed both times, but the periods between 1970 and 1995 were wrought with aggressive discourse, xenophobia, and even terrorism.

My mom was born into a house with a big blue Fleur de Lys flag (the official Quebec flag) planted on its lawn. She had been cradled in this flag; it was her first toy, her first friend, her first truth. My grandparents made phone calls for the Separation party, hosted events, and were even investigated in relation to terrorist acts on federal representatives. The big blue flag, separated into four corners, represented a people she could call her own, through childhood all the way through young adulthood. She was proud Separatist.

Then she moved to Toronto to study. She met my dad, an anti-Separatist to the core of his being. She learned English. She got a good job. She read more than what was available in her childhood home and French Catholic convent high school. And slowly but surely, she changed her mind.

This house that was once unified by Separatism had fragmented. She fought brutal political wars with her parents and siblings, with whom she remained, despite the political divide, very close. These fights hinged on identity, on the very idea of belonging, on the very notion that the family had come from the same blue roots and beliefs, yet couldn’t agree to the same nation state.

The Canadian political climate calmed after 1995, the year I was born, and my parents moved back to Quebec. They settled in a nice English neighborhood. They raised a nice bilingual family. They held nice Christmases with my mother’s family, tiptoeing around the glass shards of a once unified familial political belief.

I know she would deny it if confronted, but there is still a fragmentation inside my mother’s heart. There were nights of endless fights that don’t escape nightmares even for fifty-year-old women with blue yoga mats and blue Mercedes SUVs.

A river runs through my mother’s heart when politicians mention a third referendum, and that river, though thin and filled with old rotten sticks and stones, runs blue.

2. Blue may remind her of my teenage years. When I was sixteen-years-old, I was admitted to a children’s psychiatric hospital. I was bulimic, depressed, a nervous wreck, and saw myself at the edge of something. I wasn’t sure what that something was, but it felt violent. It’s as much as you’d expect from any sixteen- year-old, really, but I was empty, and lonely, and suicidal, so the hospital, after I’d called an emergency hotline and met with their team a few times, decided I should be admitted for a week’s worth of treatment. They called my mother into a small blue room filled with many chairs. She sat in the one furthest from me, closest to the doctor. The psychiatrist then explained how my mother, because I was a minor, would have to go downstairs, sign me over to the hospital’s custody, and pack a few of my things from home, like homework, pajamas, and toothbrush.

My mother paused for a short time, though it seemed like forever, until she said: “What if I don’t sign her over? What happens then?” I couldn’t believe her reaction at first, but with thought, I could. My mother came from a generation that found disgrace in therapy, shame in weakness, and secrecy in suicide. There was no “sixteen-year-old girl who lives in a nice house with a nice family who goes to a nice school with her nice friends and gets nice grades” who was also suicidal. Whatever the problem, it wasn’t something a little bit of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps couldn’t fix. She believed that these doctors, with their sharp teeth and parent-shaming, would seek to destroy her blue-blood beliefs.

I saw my mother not as angry, but as scared. Scared of the small blue room that separated us, mother and daughter, blood and flesh, alive and, well, less alive. There were too many chairs. I could see it her in her eyes, that she thought there were too many chairs. There were too many chairs for too many therapists and counselors and psychiatrists with their Pfizer checks and pernicious hands. She didn’t want to believe this team of strangers could do a better job repairing me than she could, the one who had birthed me in a room not unlike this one.

The doctor answered her, looking at me directly: “Well, we are keeping her, whether you sign her off or not. We will take custody, but it is up to you how peacefully it is done.” And that was that. I stayed a week. My mother came during visiting hours and brought me awkward hugs and bowls of fruit.

That wasn’t my last time in a mental hospital, not by a long shot, and my mom has gotten better at handling the devastation each time. But I know in retrospect that it was in that moment when my mother understood she couldn’t contain my sanity in a clean Tupperware container. There was always going to be too much blue inside my heart for her to warm with her burnt banana bread or long heat-curled eyelashes. I was born a red-blooded girl, but numbed to a pale blue shade as I grew older; and though my mother wears her blue proudly, she also knows the color to be bigger than what any mother can fix.

3. Blue may remind her of the eyes of those she loves.

We are truly the whitest family on the block. We have light blond hair and alabaster skin, and, yes, blue eyes (except my dad, but we really have a hard time believing he’s actually physically related to us).

All my cousins have eyes like sapphire engagement rings, so bright and faceted you could neglect the possibility of divorce with one hefty check at Kay jewelers.

My aunts have eyes like Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough packaging, warm and sweet and definitely in danger of sugar rush and/or salmonella, depending on their mood.

My brother has eyes like an airy blue sky, free of trouble.

My grandparents have eyes like the Caribbean Sea, clear and distinct and free of pollution.

I have eyes like an angry lake, dark and moody.

And my mother, my mother has eyes so vibrant blue you can see the embrace of her safety.

You can’t slip on the blue carpeting in my house.

You can’t spill juice on the blue tablecloth.

You can’t hurt your back sleeping on the expensive blue mattress in the guest room.

You can try to escape it, certainly, but my mother possesses blue so potent you can see yourself in its reflection. You see yourself, and your family, and the cracks in your skins, and your smile lines, and your stress wrinkles, and your veins.

Those blue veins that unite us all: separatist, mentally ill.

Those bulging lines in our arms that trace our heritage from France to this home in the suburbs where my mother paints the walls in our honor.

For our sake, she wears her blue parka when it’s cold and her blue Speedo one- piece when it’s hot.

For our sake, she is monochromatic.

And maybe also for her sake.

After all, a dark blue Mercedes SUV is so much easier to clean.

Gabby Vachon is a writer and artist from Montreal, Canada. She has been published or has work forthcoming in Tiny Tim, Ink in Thirds, and The Corvus Review, among other publications. She is an editor for Soliloquies Anthology. Her favorite food is the skin around her cuticles, and she is happily and forever married to her true love Justin. Follow her on twitter @gabbyvwrites.

Irretrievable Breakdown

by Anya Liftig

Yellow piss snow was piled outside the window. Slushy puddles of ice pellets welled up on the corner. We had both given up the idea that there was anything romantic or charming about the layers of snow we trudged through. The weather was something to be endured, just another difficulty we put up with to live in this city, the greatest city in the world.

Inside, the radiator was turned up to broil, shriveling my nasal passages despite finding a formidable foe in the humidifier. Most mornings I woke up on a pillow splotched with flecks of red. My side of the bed was inches from the back window and when it got cold, I could feel the wind blow through the cracks around the frame. I tried any and all methods to seal it up—industrial plastic, caulking, construction foam, duct tape. I stuffed plastic grocery bags in the gaps between the panes, wadded up a years’ worth of white and red Target bags into the holes. I fought the cold with thin layers of Saran Wrap stretched taut over the dirty glass.

At least it was better than the last place I lived where, when it rained outside, it rained inside. There I had rigged up a grey plastic tarp over the bed, hoisted with a complex system of pulleys made of rope from the dollar store. Living in this city always meant taking matters into my own hands as far as repairs were concerned. When things went wrong, I fixed the offending article myself or I learned to live with it. This was the same method I used on the leaky pipes under the sink. I removed what looked like the guilty piece and trekked back through the snow to the hardware store. I used three rolls of duct tape to secure its pathetically incongruous fixture. I wrapped the whole thing in cut up towels and then wrapped those in another roll of duct tape. A fool-proof barrier. I could always fix things myself, even if they still looked more broken by the time I finished with them.  

The apartment was once just his apartment, until he asked me to move in seven years ago. Then it became “our” apartment—all 375 glorious square feet of cozy, adorable basement studio of it. It was supposed to be a temporary nest on our way to a larger and hopefully, jointly owned place. A year packed in there together, tops. It would be an adventure, not unlike living on a sailboat. Every item had to nest neatly into every other item. There was no room for storing anything. At the grocery store, I bought only the smallest amounts—one roll of toilet paper at a time, one tiny bottle of dish soap, just enough for the dishes we washed in the Lilliputian sink. I decorated using miniature figurines—bits of my childhood Barbie collection. In the medicine cabinet, I displayed my tiny collection of thimble-sized porcelain houses. I stationed a few Smurf figurines on the faucet, not far from where Gumby contorted himself around the hand soap. I exploited the fact that our front door was made out of cheap steel alloy and turned it into a magnetic board with magnets made by cutting up misogynist ads in old issues of Ladies Home Journal. My sticker soaked love notes hung there, like a toddler’s artwork decorating a refrigerator. Using my sister’s abandoned pull-up bar, I made curtains out of fabric I brought back from Thailand. This was intended to create an illusion of privacy.

This apartment was in a brownstone, the most beautiful brownstone on the most beautiful street in the most beautiful neighborhood in Brooklyn, which, in case you didn’t know, and how could you not know, is just about one of the most beautiful and important places in the whole world. Inevitably, we were surrounded by inordinately beautiful people wearing crisp, tailored clothes, strolling beautiful children with perfect, cherry red pouts; children who thought artisanal thoughts while buried under layers of the softest goose down; children who knew the taste of capers before they knew the taste of failure.

Each week, on the eve of trash day, scavengers would rifle through the neighborhood garbage nabbing a slightly scuffed Eames lounger here, a crooked Knoll bookcase there. In fact, it turned out that there was a whole black market economy funded by our trash. Leave something out on the street and the next day, it would be on Craigslist, spruced up with a slap of paint and new knobs. There also appeared to be a neighborhood syndicate solely devoted to rummaging for cans and plastic bottles that could be returned for deposit. The tiny, wiry Chinese women were the most aggressive. They would shove you out of the way in front of your own can. And why not? Here were thousands of people who were so rich that they literally threw money out in the trash. It would have been criminal not to capitalize on the distinctly American combination of waste and laziness. It was not unlike living under a swarm of quietly hovering buzzards patiently waiting to softly peck out your eyes.  

But even this oddball ecosystem was strangely beautiful and if there was ever any question about its merits, it was ugly in only the most beautiful, most significant way: five dollar cups of licorice-noted pour-over coffee, ice cream made from the milk of cows rocked to sleep every night with Ukrainian folk songs, letter-pressed note cards embossed with the ink of blueberries picked by workers paid a living wage, pimento loaf imported from the most ass-backwards county in Alabama. Everything was sourced, curated and sustainable, each moment a precious opportunity to be more authentic.

We lived below some of these beautiful people; only they were some of the most detestable people anywhere. People who treated us like poorly paid help, people who had omitted the words “thank” and “you” from their vocabulary in favor of Neolithic cave man grunts. People who thought we were serfs and they the lords of the manor. They assumed that because we lived beneath them in their illegal in-law suite, we were untouchables. Our sleep was not as special as their sleep, our migraines paled in comparison to theirs, their mail was far more important than ours. Everything that went wrong in the house was our fault.

Once, the lord of the manor let himself in unannounced with designs on fixing the front window. Since he usually let himself in uninvited to turn down the thermostat, his new chore intrigued me. He removed his hammer from his tool kit and promptly managed to put a 3ft long crack in the glass. It was winter and the wind whistled through. He promised to come back and fix the damage within the week. But three months passed and I decided, once again, to take matters into my own hands. If we couldn’t get him to fix the window, we could at least shame him into submission. I taped bright red duct tape along the crack and covered the whole thing with newspaper, pointedly not The New York Times or even the Daily News but rather, USA Today, a copy of which I could only obtain by sneaking into the Quality Inn in Gowanus. Anyone passing by would think that yes, the neighborhood was regressing, unbeautiful, that basically illiterate people lived in our building.  Even our pot dealer who delivered to us every Friday night pronounced it ghetto. It wasn’t long before the lady ordered her lord to fix the eyesore.

Their precociously blockheaded offspring only played with items they could kick or torture. They pegged us first with snowballs and later with rocks when we came or went. They nailed live insects to the back door and lit them on fire. They threw curveballs at cats, howling with laughter when the poor creatures absorbed the thunk. These blockheads squealed with giddy delight when they pissed in the drain outside our bedroom window—the scent of boy stink lingering for weeks. They giggled while they took their blockheaded shits in the backyard. One day in the spring the beautiful but horrible blockheaded mom went out to plant her tulips only to find herself excavating tiny boy turds. A few days later, she demanded her husband cover the whole yard with Astroturf.

Technically, we had no claim on any of the backyard. I knew this wasn’t written in the lease because we had no lease, more of a gentleman’s agreement that we could live there and pay money. I looked enviously at the blockheads as they tossed basketballs, aiming not for the hoop but for the more important parts of each other’s heads. All that lovely space out there, all it off limits. Occasionally, when I thought the horrid people had gone out to a BBQ with their rotten friends, or when I knew they were on vacation making some other place miserable, I would sneak out and lie on the fake grass. I’d stare up into the sky and pretend that I was tripping on mushrooms, watching the leaves morph and swirl like soft serve ice cream into one another. I’d roll up and down the breadth of the yard until I made myself nauseous. I’d look up into trees and imagine what it might be like to live in the curve of a question mark.

Once, in the middle of the winter, when there was almost a foot and a half of snow outside, I left myself out the back gate. It was midnight and I was barefoot, shivering in a t-shirt and panties. I walked to the far back of the lawn, where the plastic met the flagstone, and stood still, waiting for him to come rescue me. The snow burned my feet with cold. I looked up into the night sky and tried to imagine I was flying away from that place, sailing through the air on a plane to somewhere farther than far. After ten minutes, I couldn’t take the pain anymore and I slipped back through the gate and fell into bed. I lay my freezing feet on top of his. Nothing. Finally, I said straight out, “I just went out in the snow in my bare feet and underwear and I looked up at the sky and tried to imagine that I could fly away from here and you didn’t even notice I was gone, you didn’t even try to find me even though I left the door open so you would know where I was. So you couldn’t help but come and rescue me from the cold.”

“Are you crazy?” he asked through a haze of sleep.

As if I would know.

This was just one instance in a season of similar celebrations. Another night, unable to sleep again, and done with my insomniac exercises—naming every word starting with the letter S, listing every female author I knew, every store in Herald Square—I got up and slipped through the curtain that we both desperately needed to be a wall. I walked to the kitchenette, opened the utensil drawer where each spoon was nestled carefully inside each other, and pulled out one of the old steak knives that my mom had given us. It had a worn wooden handle with several gouges—evidence of long, dutiful battle with my mother’s pork chops. I crawled back into bed and began to softly scrape my forearms with the blade, first on the left side and then on the right. My inner arms were white canvases when I put the blade on my skin. I hung on the threshold of puncture for a while, sawing silently, waiting for him to wake.

Anya Liftig is a writer and performer. Her work has been featured at TATE Modern, MOMA, CPR, Highways Performance Space, Lapsody4 Finland, Fado Toronto, Performance Art Institute-San Francisco, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, The Kitchen at the Independent Art Fair, Performer Stammtisch Berlin, OVADA, Joyce Soho and many other venues. In “The Anxiety of Influence” she dressed exactly like Marina Abramovic and sat across from her all day during “The Artist is Present” exhibition. Her work has been published and written about in The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, Next Magazine, Now and Then, Stay Thirsty, New York Magazine, Gothamist, Jezebel, Hyperallergic, Bad at Sports, The Other Journal, and many others. She is a graduate of Yale University and Georgia State University and has received grant and residency support from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Atlantic Center for the Arts, The New Museum, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Flux Projects, University of Antioquia and Casa Tres Patios-Medellin, Colombia. Visit her at: www.anyaliftig.com.

Listening to the Wind

by Catherine Mauk

In November, my sister’s husband, a lifelong diabetic, went into heart failure. Doctors successfully inserted heart stents, small mesh tubes, to open his coronary arteries. During the procedure he had a mild heart attack. In December, surgeons attempted to insert more stents to enable blood flow to another part of his heart, but the procedure failed. Open heart surgery was proposed as a future option. 

It is now January. In Alaska, where my sister and her husband live, snow piles in the driveway and drifts down the back slope to the river. Their house sits in the cold shadow of short days. Despite the seven stents that keep arteries open in my brother-in-law’s legs, circulation to his lower legs is constricted, his legs cramp, and he cries out in pain in the night. He has returned to work, but his concentration lapses and he struggles with his memory. My sister and her husband worry about the loss of his job, the loss of his health insurance, the loss of the life they know. They worry about losses they cannot bring themselves to name out loud. Each of them is seeing a separate therapist for depression. The unspoken resentments and disappointments of 37 years have become a bellicose rumbling. They have stopped eating meat, poultry, fish, dairy, nuts, avocados, and all other fats in a war on cholesterol. They have lost weight. They are starved of joy. Each night they fortify themselves with martinis - Vitamin M.

I ring repeatedly from Australia where the inferno of summer slows time. My sister has stopped answering her phone. “Call me,” I say to the voicemail, curbing the concern in my voice.

The preceding August, my sister and her husband left their twenty-year-old daughter in Spain to attend university. The night they flew back to Alaska, their daughter’s roommate was drugged and raped and dumped on a sidewalk in Barcelona. At the same time, though not related to the incident with her roommate, my niece began vomiting black blood. My sister held this news inside for weeks. She held inside the unpleasantness of her trip to Spain: the press of people, the foul smells, her husband’s failing health, her torn rotator cuff, gastro poisoning from contaminated olives, the death of a man with a mouth full of rotten teeth whom she attempted to resuscitate at a bus stop in Madrid.

When she finally wrote to me in late September, it was not about Spain but of autumn: “nearly clear blue sky with a sprinkling of cloud puffs, golden leaves of birch mixed with the dark green spruce, a dusting of snow on the peaks. Have thoughts today of driving out Turnagain Arm to catch a glimpse of the migrating snow geese.” She wrote of the outback where we had gone when she visited me in Australia the previous September ̶ the year before Spain ̶ of the dingo we saw at dusk, of her longing to return.

The day we saw the dingo had had a difficult start. My sister and I had a clash of tempers. We were all edges as I ground the gears of our 4WD and headed out of Alice Springs towards the MacDonnell Ranges, the stony rises and chasms that are the remnants of ancient mountains once as high as the Himalayas. The vexation between us evaporated as we entered a desert that had become a rowdy botanic garden after unusually heavy winter and spring rains. Meadows of yellow cassia, salt spoon daisies, and desert fuchsia spread across the floor of red earth. We couldn’t stand the distance. We clambered out of the car and walked into the desert where the blur from the windows contoured into the particular. Dormant Ruby Dock, which had looked like fading autumn leaves from the car, turned into pink pouches veined in ruby that hung in clusters from soft green stems. Spinifex sported copper tips that rattled in the breeze.  Budgerigars pecked noisily at a feast table of Spinifex seeds in the camouflage of grasses. Suddenly, hundreds of budgies rose from the clearing and streaked the sky with lime, shifting direction en masse, first one way, then another, and another, as if pushed and pulled by currents, before diving back into cover. When I turned to look at my sister, she stood in a band of sunlight, her hair a shimmer of platinum, her mouth open, her arms raised as if to catch the moment with her whole body.

Many times we stopped the car and spilled into the bush to fill our senses with the desert. Our ears captured the songs of rufous whistler, mistletoe bird, and zebra finches marking their territory as they flitted from branch to branch. At Trephina Gorge, clouds of grasshoppers swarmed around us on the trail. We climbed from the cliff down to the river, rolled up our pants legs, took off our boots and socks and waded into the milky red water. The coolness swirled around our ankles and calves as we scrubbed our feet along the coarse sand and moved deeper into the gorge where blazing walls of rock closed us in on two sides.

We were like a pair of ballroom dancers practiced in our routine, taking cues from one another through the tiniest of motions – a nod, a turn of the head, a change in gaze, a press on the arm, a hand to the heart - to stop, to listen, to regard. Words were rarely necessary between us.

We came across a young woman, also wading in the river. She had a Glossy Black Cockatoo feather banded in scarlet stuck in her hair. “How beautiful!” I said as we pushed through the water past one another. She stopped, reached up to the feather, pulled it from her thick brown plait, and handed it to me without a word. Smiling, she turned and continued, her long skirt dragging through the water. As much as I wanted the feather, I offered it to my sister. Feathers, shells, rocks, and pieces of wood are often our most treasured gifts from one another.

We left Trephina Gorge driving away from the receding sun to N’dhala Gorge, where we hoped to hike to ancient rock carvings. But we had dallied. We had stopped to inspect a frill-neck lizard sitting on the road absorbing heat. By the time we reached the turnoff to N’dhala Gorge, the sun was too low in the sky for us to attempt driving over sandy river beds and into unknown bush.

At dusk, the dingo appeared from out of nowhere. He saw us at the same time we saw him. He ran parallel to our car until we stopped in the middle of the empty road. Then, he veered in front of us. He could have been a stray dog with his curled tail and ginger coat, shiny and neatly matted, but for the fire in the eyes. He fixed us in his gaze with an unnerving penetration as he moved in front of the car and continued to watch us as he crossed the road.  When he reached the edge of the road he gave us a final look, then broke into a run and disappeared into the bush.

We sat in in the stillness with all the windows down, breathing in the coolness and slight moisture that infused the evening air. Surrounded by the vast outback, it felt as if we and the dingo were alone in the desert, that it belonged to the three of us, that the three of us belonged nowhere else. It was as if my sister and I too had crossed that road with our smouldering wildness and released ourselves into the bush.

We drove on in silence. A full moon was on the rise with Venus watching on. As neither of us was in a hurry to leave the bush, we pulled off the road to drink a beer and watch the clouds streak across the moon. Black descended around us like a lace curtain backlit by moon silver.

“Sometimes, a day like this is the only thing that makes sense to me,” my sister said.

A week later, we were on the south coast of New South Wales. In contrast to the desert, grey watery skies and cold air draped over our days. The sea churned. The wind blew. On a day when the weather confined us to the house, my sister disappeared into her room for hours. “Join me,” I said each time she reappeared in the living room where I was curled up on the couch reading. She paced for a few minutes, then again retreated to her bedroom. I worried about what churned inside her.

“I love the sound of the wind,” she said to me at dinner. “In my room I could lie on my bed and hear it like a song, drift with it. I kept coming back into the living room, but it wasn’t the same, and all I wanted to do was go back to my room so I could float on the wind.”

The weather cleared the next day. We hiked down the headland and onto the beach to walk to Mossy Point. My sister fell behind. I waited for her to catch up several times. At one point when she joined me she said, “Do you know there are over 400 different species of seaweed?” and leaned down to scoop up a handful of leathery jade strands dotted with green pearls of seaweed fruit. For an hour we picked through the seaweed that had washed up on shore the length of the beach. We identified nine different types. There was the jumble of grapelike balls tethered by green rope and the seaweed that looked like boughs from a pine tree. Some was rust coloured, some a dirty brown purple, other olive. One bunch looked like the charred remains of a fire. Another, like green petticoats.

I think often of those weeks with my sister. About how we let our spirit selves run with the dingo with the fire in his eyes to howl and wail into the soft curtain of night. I imagine my sister drifting on wind currents or riding the tide wrapped in seaweed, protected from the pain for which she has no words. I think of how we are with one another in nature in a way we are with no other. Of our comfortable silence.  But now, with time and distance between us, I worry about her silence. I once read that the dingo mates for life. When it loses its mate, the dingo may mourn itself to death. This is what I fear for my sister, that her grief will consume her.

A short email arrives in late February. “The wind is blowing,” my sister writes, “and my tree out front is covered with cedar waxwings eating the beautiful red berries. They come thru every winter and strip the trees.  I love listening to the wind and seeing the trees bend under its power.”

Cathy Mauk left the US 23 years ago for the love of a man and has been living in Australia ever since. She came to writing late, but is making up for lost time. She has been published in PAN: Philosophy, Activism and Nature, an Australian journal.  She was long listed for the 2013 Calibre Prize, Australia’s premier essay prize. In 2012, she was accepted to Breadloaf in Sicily. She is currently revising a completed memoir Out of Place, which deals with place and identity, and is developing a collection of essays about our emotional, cultural, and moral relationships with place.