Shelf Reflection: Evelyn Araluen

Shelf Reflection is a monthly series where we explore the bookshelves and reading habits of our featured First Book Club authors.

This month’s reflection is from Evelyn Araluen, whose debut poetry and prose collection Dropbear (UQP) confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Join us tonight, 24 March, for a free online event in partnership with Yarra Libraries!

What are you currently reading?

I’m really enjoying sitting down with pakana writer Adam Thompson’s debut short story collection Born Into This. Adam and I were co-Wheeler Centre Next Chapter fellows and I really enjoyed reading his stories and seeing his process develop, so it’s so gorgeous to finally hold his book in my hands. For a writer I know to be so strongly in dialogue with different styles and interpretations of the form, his short stories have a really distinct voice. It’s beautiful to read such intimate and familiar representations of lutruwita—a place too often rendered as haunting and gothic in the history of Australian literature. There stories cover themes of family, activism, intimacy and identity. I know it’s going to be one of those books that is read really widely for years to come. Can’t wait to see what Adam gets up to next.

What kind of reader are you?

In a lot of ways I’m still in recovery from what my PhD did to my reading practice, so I’m learning how to give myself the involved space of literary enjoyment without feeling like I need to prepare an analysis or have something to say about a text. I’ve always been an inconsistent reader though. I have a habit of picking something up, managing the first fifty pages and then leaving a book in the wrong city or in the back of my car for the next three months. For longer novels and non-fiction I’m trying to force myself to get through the first hundred pages in one day, because that way I know I’ll be too involved to stop. For poetry, I tend to devour things whole—especially after the experience of putting my own book together I’m really interested in how collections operate as a whole.

I’m learning how to give myself the involved space of literary enjoyment without feeling like I need to prepare an analysis.

I’ve basically been in a process of constant nesting over the last few years, going from my childhood home to the four different places I’ve lived by myself or with my partner over the last three years. Even though I don’t think I’ve ever really completely unpacked, in every home I try to find a nice place to read and to write, and I like to keep those separate. What I’ve realised though is that the aestheticised idea of a charming little reading nook with crochet cushions and cups of tea is an inefficient use of space. The nice chair fills up with washing that needs to be folded and put away, the dog steals the pillow, it’s easy to forget where you put down your cuppa. I remember when I received Ellen Van Neerven’s extraordinary second poetry collection Throat last year, which I read in a frantic daze sitting at my dinner table.

What does your book collection look like?

Again, I really don’t think I’ve unpacked yet, and I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I have. At our last place we ran out of shelves so we stacked an old wooden wardrobe with books, and it was just a random surprise when you stuck your hand in to pull out something to read. The house we just moved into has a lot more space, so most of the books can be put out on shelves in the study as if we’re normal people. They do tend to feel a bit more academic in that space—like these are the books we should be writing things about, as opposed to enjoying. I’m hoping to find some weird furniture to display a few pretty books and things that I know I’m likely just to read for enjoyment in the living room now that I’m an adult who lives somewhere with more than just one room. My treasured books are still at home with mum and dad—the stuff I read as a kid, the tattered copy of my favourite novel I got signed at a writers festival, all of that stuff. I don’t trust myself to be responsible for them now.

Australian national identity is such a peculiar and often camp thing, and to read a guidebook written from a period of naive hope was a very unsettling but productive thing.

What’s one book you found critical to the writing of your own book?

Dropbear deals quite explicitly with my reflections on the childhood classics my parents read me growing up, but actually I spent a lot of time with this old book on Australian national identity Aussie-Osities, by a Melbourne artist Vane Lindesay, that was published during the bicentenary celebrations. It’s a collection of kitsch and Australiana that guided me in my research process for the book—pointing me in the direction of now almost-forgotten tropes and icons which I was able to interview my parents about, or discuss with other older people for insights. Australian national identity is such a peculiar and often camp thing, and to read a guidebook written from a period of naive hope and aspiration for a unified national identity was a very unsettling but productive thing. It’s just one of many books I pulled out of my dad’s shed when Dropbear was still in its infancy, but definitely the book I spent the most time with when writing.

What book/s are you constantly recommending other people read?

Everyone who ever talks to me about literature knows that I’m Michael Ondaatje’s biggest fan, so I’ll always recommend his novels and poetry, my favourites including Anil’s Ghost, Coming Through Slaughter, and Divisadero. One book I’m surprised I’ve recommended so many times is Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, which I still have such mixed and complicated feelings about. While it’s not my preferred style of prose, I really was impressed by the way in which he negotiated settler-colonial space and Aboriginal presence from a white voice. I don’t see that done well very often. And of course, I am always encouraging people to read some of the beautiful Blak voices out there—lots of people buy books by Aboriginal writers without ever reading them, which I think is a real shame. We have such a wealth of stories to tell, and they’ve never been more accessible.

On second thoughts, I think the world would be a better place if we all read more Frantz Fanon—so maybe Wretched of the Earth or Black Skin, White Masks?

Lots of people buy books by Aboriginal writers without ever reading them, which I think is a real shame. We have such a wealth of stories to tell, and they’ve never been more accessible.

If you had to pick one book to live in for the rest of your life, which would it be?

Oh god. What a stressful question. I just don’t think life works that way, does it? I want a life of happiness and comfort and justice, but that just doesn’t make for good reading. My favourite characters are often pretty miserable. I did love the intimate, not-at-all-utopian-but-celebrating-whatever-we-can-get-back space of the final scenes of Tony Birch’s The White Girl, or the dream of successful land restitution in books like Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby and Tara June Winch’s The Yield, but even then it always comes at such loss. I could enjoy something with really low stakes, like a Jane Austen novel in which the worst that befalls any character is a bad cold and the prospect of actually having to work for an income instead of exploiting the feudal working class, but they’re all super white. Maybe something safe like Possum Magic. Can’t go wrong there.

Any upcoming projects, causes or events you’d like to mention?

I’ll be at a couple of writers festivals this year across the country, which you’ll be able to find out about through my Twitter and Instagram. Completely unrelated to me though, you should check out the cool work of the Refugee Art Project, which we recently ran a piece on in Overland. In fact, check out all the things we do at Overland Literary Journal!

Dropbear is available from your local independent bookseller.