AustLit

'As a writer, I find it increasingly difficult to be able to separate myself from my work; as a poet, even more. My anxiety runs through my poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and a lot of the time it even drives it. Roland Barthes writes about ‘the death of the author’ — the idea that once a piece of writing is written, it becomes its own thing, separate from the writer and the writer’s biography. It exists as art, in a kind of art-vacuum. It’s something I wish I could do sometimes — not let my anxiety affect my writing as though they are welded together. But it’s certainly something I’ve gotten better at since editing for Voiceworks; editing others’ work and my own allows me an objective space from which I can read pieces, and think about how I can make it better.' 

 (Introduction)