Shelf Reflection: Sam van Zweden

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 Sam van Zweden, whose debut book Eating With my Mouth Open, a personal and cultural exploration of food, memory, and hunger (and the winner of the 2019 KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award) is out now from NewSouth Publishing. Join us for a free in-person event at Bargoonga Nganjin, North Fitzroy Library on Wednesday 17 February!

What are you currently reading?

I’ve recently started reading the anthology Fire Flood Plague. It’s edited by Sophie Cunningham, and it’s a collection that looks at the incredible time between late 2019 and late 2020, and the social, ecological and public health challenges we met in that time. I came to it because I trust Sophie’s ability to make sense of really difficult things, and I know that she’s curated the best voices to reflect on things that are still terribly raw, even continuing. I’m five essays in, and it’s delivering.

What kind of reader are you?

I’m a slow reader, and a grazer: I often have multiple books on the go, but usually only one in any given genre. At the moment I am reading Fire, Flood, Plague, but I also have on the go Tishani Doshi’s Girls are Coming out of the Woods, and the essay ‘covers’ collection After Montaigne.

I also always keep a writing craft book on the go in the background, which I can dip into in the morning on the days I’m writing. At the moment, this is Robin Hemley’s A Field Guide for Immersion Writing. It’s nice to keep some kind of critical practice input happening—even if it’s peripheral and small, it feeds into the work.

The books I’ve reread in full are very few (they include the Narnia books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, Wide Sargasso Sea, Eat Up!). I dip back into books often though—revisiting a chapter or an essay. Drawing on a lot of literature in my own work, revisiting is essential and rewarded, but often the deep dives are into specific bits.

Drawing on a lot of literature in my own work, revisiting is essential and rewarded, but often the deep dives are into specific bits.

In the last few months I’ve also been using Pocket and P2K—two apps that, together, pull long essays and articles off the internet, strip them of advertising and distractions, and send them to my Kindle once a week so I have my own curated longreads on the weekends. It’s lovely.

When reading hard copy, I use index cards as bookmarks and take notes along the way—reflections, quotes. The box of old index cards serves as a nice record of my reading, learning and thinking.

What does your book collection look like?

Enormous and encompassing. Towering. Shamefully unread. Aspirational.

I have one big shelf in the lounge room full of fiction (A-Z), and two shelves in my study with non-fiction and journals. The non-fiction organisation is a bit eclectic… Craft books, collections, biography/essay/general A-Z by author (occasionally biography subject), then self-help, food and body books, plays/poetry, and journals. There’s an unorganised stack of fiction in the lounge, a ‘really really TBR’ pile next to my reading chair, and a ‘c’mon, TBR’ stack next to my bed.

The books I own are a collection of those I have read and can’t bear to part with, and those I own but haven’t read—it’s probably a 50/50 split. If I finish a book and I enjoyed it but know I won’t return to it, then I’ll rehome it, either at a Little Library or to a friend who I think will enjoy it too.

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

Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost arrived in my life at just the right time. It’s full of beautiful, meandering prose and it’s just so measured and thoughtful. Writing on distance, location, and loss, Solnit pivots around the idea that sometimes things are lost or fall apart and that’s the most fruitful thing that can happen. Writing when you don’t already know the answer—particularly when it’s a book-length project—is an incredibly vulnerable place to be. Solnit held my hand through it and kept me ploughing ahead.

Writing when you don’t already know the answer—particularly when it’s a book-length project—is an incredibly vulnerable place to be.

Eating with my Mouth Open is, in part, about sense memory and why food memories are so compelling. This involved a lot of ‘mapping’—trying to recreate the movement of memory on the page, and bringing a great deal of curiosity to what’s connected and how. There were a lot of disconnected or strangely shaped parts. I took inspiration from Solnit’s willingness to map both thought processes and sprawling influences in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and I think that shows up in my book’s structure.

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

A few of the books I recommend a lot:

• Reality Hunger by David Shields
• All the Beginnings by Quinn Eades
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
• City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham
• The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

I often revisit Ruby Tandoh’s Eat Up! when I’m in need of some reminding that food is magical and comforting and complicated and tricky and that’s all okay. So while it’s not really a book you can live in, it’s a book I kind of am living in.

Eating With My Mouth Open is available from your local independent bookseller.