It’s winter and night comes early. But, as consolation, at this time of year the angle of the sun is such that sunlight comes in through my window for most of the day, striping over me as I sit at my desk, in the scene you see above. Teddy snoozing by the window, desk messy. Above the window are the object models from Calendar that S made for my reading at Outlet, a selection of talismans. There are a few actual objects I wrote about in Calendar visible here too: a green rotary dial telephone, a sheet of gold foil printed with a drawing of a rat, and other things too hidden to make out.

In Calendar news, a new review has just come out in Overland, by Courtney Powell: The Past in the Object: Vanessa Berry’s Calendar in which Powell connects Calendar to my zine-making practice, considers some of its recurring images: ‘rivers, eggs, apples, the colour green’, and considers the book as an object in and of itself:

It is a unique object in and of itself as much as it is about objects. Berry has constructed a feast of the personal for readers to devour, demonstrating that consumptive habits don’t need to be defined by algorithmic microtrends or unending accumulation. Memory and experience imbue the things we surround ourselves with far greater value.

It’s such a thoughtful review and I loved some of Powell’s own object stories that they share, about a tree branch (Calendar object 236), secateurs (45), a wayward packet of silica gel (82). The object stories people have told me after reading Calendar have been one of the best things about it being out in the world.

Also coming up soon, this time on Substack, will be an interview with me about Calendar by , on his Davey Dreamnation newsletter. We had a good long chat between Sydney (me) and the Netherlands (David) about how and why I wrote the book, and some of the ideas that went into its making.

I have a few wintertime Calendar-related events, a reading in June and two workshops in July. The reading is for the winter solstice, at Rogue Gallery on Saturday, 20th June, for the closing of Maria Pia Mosquera’s exhibition Juju, and I’ll be reading some of the objects from Calendar that relate to the paintings in the show (four-leaf clovers! apples! keys! and some of the spooky objects more generally - the planchette!)

In July I’ll be in Naarm/Melbourne for two workshops with The Paperback Bookshop.

The first is the ‘Day of Slow’ on July 18th, with Olivia Meehan (author of Slow Looking) and Anna MacDonald (author of A Jealous Tide) - see A Day of Slow: Listening, Writing and Looking with Objects for the schedule. We’ll be sharing approaches for looking at, living with, and thinking through objects, and will start at Coates Community Arts on Collins Street, before moving over to the NGV.

Then on July 19th I’ll be leading the Topography of Chance workshop at Paperback Books’ new event space. It’s an afternoon workshop exploring ideas of noticing and working with material from everyday life, and harnessing the powers of chance and serendipity in your writing. The name is borrowed from one of my favourite chance-based artworks, Daniel Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (of which, more below).

Both will be convivial events with cups of tea and a cosy winter writing mood. I’m looking forward to wearing one of the big old heavy vintage coats that lie in wait in my wardrobe for just such a Naarm winter trip and stretching out into a weekend of object writing.

Object of the Month (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

8. Airline Blanket

For most of my objects of the month in this newsletter I choose an object that’s from the same month in which I’m writing, but this time I chose the airline blanket, prompted by Courtney Powell’s review. They reflect on how some objects in the book leave their personal significance to me open for the reader to imagine. For the airline blanket, “It’s never clear who took the blanket from the plane, or why, how Berry acquired it and when this occurred, or how long ago it was.”

This made me realise that some of those questions are a mystery for me, too: S bought the blanket from an op shop, maybe 20 years ago? We like the idea of the airline blanket having a new, earthbound life, going on picnics, relieved of its midair duties. On long flights I have always been grateful for airline blankets, though they’ve become noticeably thinner and less appealing over the years I’ve been travelling: cheaper to make, and less desirable to steal. The Korean Airlines blanket is a sturdy synthetic fabric with a plaid pattern, and is still our picnic rug of choice.

Searching for airline blanket information, I hoped to come across a blog that has a comprehensive catalogue of airline blanket patterns over the years, but alas, no such thing exists as far as I can find. I’m sure there are aviation enthusiasts who collect them, but they’re elusive objects to track down. They exist mostly in the no-space and no-time of long haul flights, but sometimes, one escapes.

Object Project: An Anecdoted Topography of Chance by Daniel Spoerri (with Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams and Dieter Roth)

I knew Daniel Soperri first for his ‘snare pictures’ - for which he would affix the plates, cups, cutlery and detritus left over after a meal to the tabletop, which he’d then hang on the wall like a painting. But it wasn’t until I was poking around in my friend Sarina’s excellent book collection that I found his book that works off the same principle: An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, first published in 1962.

The book is a collection of 80 objects, all of which originated from a kitchen table arrangement in 1961, which are listed and described by Spoerri, and then the descriptions annotated by Spoerri and friends, through multiple editions. The first edition was 54 pages long, the final, published in 1995 and pictured above among a selection of our own table objects, is 271 pages, with multiple introductions and appendices. You can take a look at the 1966 version on Monoskop.

It’s equally a conceptual art project, artist’s book, extended conversation, and eccentric encyclopedia, as one by one it presents the objects from the table - pale-green egg cup, burnt match, jar of celery salt, white shirt button, and so on - which correlate to a map printed on the inside cover. The initial description of the object is interrupted by notes which branch out alphabetically. A few items have no notes or only one or two, some have many (alarm clock, for example, goes all the way to ‘o’), and within these the notes are often annotated with further notes. In this way it suggests every object could branch out indefinitely, that every object has the potential to stretch out into complex webs of associations. There’s something, too of the spirit of rambling conversation to it, which was how the project started in the first place.

*

The final piece of news I have for now is that I’ve been working on a new I am a Camera, number 26, which I am planning to have finished in time for the Other Worlds zine fair. The fair is on July 11th this year, at Peter Forsyth auditorium, beside the Broadway Shopping Centre.

See you there, or maybe at one of the workshops. Enjoy the advance towards the solstice, whether your days are long or short at this time of the year.

Vanessa.

p.s. I’ve recently been looking through photos from 2006 and to round out my winter newsletter with a third Significant Black Cat, here I am with Mickie and the Canon PowerShot A400.

Walking home one hot, humid afternoon, tired out from the day, you come across a brick that someone has carefully painted a face onto. It is a small enough thing, but it cheers you. Anything that lifts your spirits, even briefly, is welcome. You get home and the cat appears from where he’s been curled up sleeping all day to greet you. You put your bags down, take off your shoes, think about posting the photo of the brick to Instagram, but then decide to keep it just for you.

*

It’s a weekend morning, sunlight is twinkling in the bright green leaves of the oak tree outside, and the cat is snoozing behind me, planning his takeover of my office chair the moment I move. Muriel Spark had this to observe about cats and writing, in A Far Cry From Kensington:

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially on some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle under the desk lamp. The light from a lamp … gives the cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquillity of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impeded your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, and very mysterious.

True, I say, although my own concentration is more due to the fact I don’t dare to get up from my position at the desk. If I do I will lose my seat to the serene, tranquil one who immediately affects an attitude of deep sleep the moment he takes up the coveted position.

I’m a fan of writer’s cat stories and enjoy a literary cat memoir (my favourite is May Sarton’s The Fur Person). Same with portraits of writers and their cats. So, when photographer Nash Ferguson came to visit me at home last year, I was thrilled to have her take my own.

*

There have been some good Calendar related happenings lately. Kirsten Krauth wrote a lovely review in Australian Book Review (paywalled), observing that “Berry has many passions or, some would say, obsessions”. This is true! She writes:

With Berry’s flair for lyricism, the object-to-a-page often reads like a prose poem, a modern ode to the recycled, the forgotten, the passed over, an antidote to the radical decluttering of Marie Kondo. Calendar is a special book that changes the way you view the world and the objects that surround you; it is to be dipped into and savoured – once a day – to honour the way it was written.

I am also the first featured artist in the new newsletter series Close Reading, in which a guest writer shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and “one other thing”: the newsletter is well worth signing up to. The previous newsletter by Close Reading’s Heath Killen, In Wild Air, was a weekly inbox highlight when it ran 2016-2018.

February/March also saw S having an exhibition at Numbers Sydney, a new gallery in Potts Point. His exhibition, Apparitions, was of optical illusion artworks and you can read my interview with him about it here.

Object of the Month (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

81. Pencil Tin

    

I’ve kept this tin of 72 Derwent coloured pencils since I was given them as a child. Then, they made me feel as if I had the power to make anything I wanted to, and I enjoyed the descriptive names of the colours etched into the pencil in gold: Rose Madder Lake, Kingfisher Blue, Burnt Carmine. The shortest of the pencils in my tin, the ones which must have seen the most use, are black, white, and Jade Green. Some of the Derwent colours are so distinct that they have become reference points for me: Emerald Green the colour of grass in a cartoon, and Magenta, a colour exactly on the edge of red and blue.

In the story I wrote for Calendar, I remember drawing the cartoon head in the corner of the tin, and then being disappointed that I’d ruined the tin with my clumsy personalisation of it. It is a familiar feeling: I still encounter it when I make an attempt to customise something that doesn’t quite live up to my ambitions. If I wanted to sell the tin on Ebay it would no doubt bring the price down from the $1000 such sets usually sell for. (!)

Object Project: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (trans. Sophie Hughes)

A tribute to Georges Perec’s Things: a story of the sixties (trans. David Bellos), this short novel follows the original by tracking the lives of a young couple who are caught up in the zeitgeist, but struggle to keep up with it its changes. In Perec’s novel this is 60s consumerism, and in Perfection it is the late-capitalist gig economy.

Perfection begins with a description of the couple’s apartment, as each room appears in the photographs on Airbnb. This section, ‘Present’, forms an introduction and the next section, ‘Imperfect’, announces both the tense the novel is written in (the same as Perec’s), and shows the reality outside of the photographs: ‘Reality didn’t always live up to the pictures’.

In Things, the couple live in a small apartment with a mariner’s chart on the wall in the living room and displays of knick-knacks “agates and stone eggs, snuffboxes, candy-boxes, jade ashtrays…” They find charm in untidyness. In Perfection untidyness is what breaks the illusion:

And then there were the things. Things absolutely everywhere: the chargers, the receipts, the bicycle pump, and the endless stream of forms and reminds that constituted German bureaucracy; the herpes cream, the tissues - fresh packs, used or scraps that had been through the wash - the wool felt innersoles, the sunglasses case, the odd glove they still hoped to match with its pair, the tangled earphones.

Both novels are critical of the ways of life they describe, which is bound up in the pleasure of richly describing them, articulating their details. In Perfection this life, despite the digital existence the couple lead, it is littered with objects, which take on added significance through being acceptable, or not, to their lifestyle. It’s a precise, thoughtful novel, a portrait of a place, time and way of life, and a reminder that no matter how digitally oriented we are, we are still physical beings in a physical world.

*

I’ve been working on my project about Sydney bookshops, and have published Part 2 of my survey of them now. On to making the map!

In object news, although I have vowed to resist any more typewriters, I came across a Facit T2 typewriter with a wide carriage, which makes it possible to type on larger paper sizes than the usual A4. I had to! What will I make with it? Maybe something for Other Worlds zine fair (happening on July 11th, this year).

Go well into your autumn or spring,

Vanessa.

At my desk I keep a number of calendars and cards which I consult to set the day’s mood. In my Good Fortune Birthday Book, it says of a person born today that “this birthday is associated with divided interests”. My cat tarot cards bring up The Hermit - picturing a ginger cat sitting on top of a pile of books (‘the secrets of the feline mind are well hidden’). From my We are all astonishingly wise cards, by the artist Katy B Plummer, I reveal ‘Messages transmitted, received’, which seems to be a good omen for writing this message to you.

The Good Fortune Birthday Book has a mean streak, despite or perhaps because of being compiled from ‘ancient astrological lore’. For example:

This birth date may go with want of staying power. Learn to watch for small signs of headway and you will discover that, like the proverbial earthworm, you keep ‘inching along’ to better things.

This strikes me as a certificate of participation kind of fortune. Mine tells me my birthday ‘favours poesy’, which is close enough to the truth, I guess.

Calendar!

Thank you to all those who have written to me over the summer to tell me you are reading Calendar and enjoying it. It is very interesting that everyone seems to be reading Calendar slightly differently, although there are 5 main ways:

1. Straight through

2. Day by day

3. Day by day starting from Jan 1st 2026

4. Dipping in/ a page or more at random

5. One story at night before bed

I love to hear your responses and reading methods!

In December I visited Eastside FM for an interview on their Arts Wednesday show: if you’d like to listen to my conversation with presenter (and brilliant author in her own right) Bronwyn Rennex, you can listen here (scroll down to the December 10th show).

Around that same time, the photographer Nash Ferguson took an amazing timeless portrait of me and Teddy!

On Instagram I’ve been doing some occasional readings from Calendar (sometimes also featuring Teddy) if you’d like to listen to me reading and talking about some of my favourite Calendar objects.

What’s coming up?

I’m going to be interviewed on 3RRR’s Literati Glitterati on Wednesday 28th January. The show’s on from 12-1pm and I’ll be talking about and reading from Calendar.

I’ll be in Melbourne for the Festival of the Photocopier soon after: I’ll have a stall on the first day of the two: Saturday 7th February, 12-5pm, at the Meat Market, North Melbourne. I’ll have some copies of Calendar and my calendar stamp so if you’d like a signed copy, or a zine, or to say hello and have a chat, do come by.

For fans of ‘S’, he’s having an exhibition soon, opening February 14th, at Numbers Gallery in Kings Cross.

Object of the Month (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

24. Flipbook

The gifs of the 19th century: I love flipbooks and the little worlds they hold. The ‘Premier Danseuse’ is doing something I never in my life have been able to do, that being a cartwheel, the effect enhanced by her fluffy layers of petticoats, which bloom like a fluffy carnation as she turns upside down.

We have quite a few flipbooks and I enjoy how random they are in what they feature: a man being chased by a bull (an advertisement for Bovril), a cartoon cat that comes up to lick the page, Elvis’s face zooming in to show it’s made of barcodes, a cartoon bird on wheels delivering a book, a black cat and a white cat tumbling together, arranging hair in a French twist, a hummingbird hovering, and a worm that tunnels through the pages.

Object Project: the summer reading edition.

Summer is reading season for me, so this time I thought I’d feature a number of the object-related books I have been reading.

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck is a slim book of essays on disappearance, memory, and forgetting. She writes about the disappearance of East Germany, about her family, and about everyday objects. The book itself is small and slight with a tendency to disappear between others, which is an added disappearing aspect. The essays are on things like ‘cheese and socks’, ‘stoves and coal’, ‘empty space’, ‘men’, ‘splitterbrotchen’ (a type of bread that has disappeared apart from at two bakeries in Berlin), but it’s impossible to know from the names of the essays alone the strange but recognisable places they will reach.

Day Book by Gill Houghton is published by Ma Biblioteque, Sharon Kivland’s publishing imprint. The beautiful books they publish are difficult to track down in Australia, so Gill and I traded our books: the day book that is Calendar, for Day Book, a collection of short daily texts, 112 days in all, guided by women artists who have taken the day as their subject. Each day has a short, thoughtful, diaristic meditation on an aspect of time, artistic labour, motherhood, and artists and writers such as Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, and Bernadette Mayer.

Iris in Her Garden by Barbara Hanrahan. After reading Barbara Hanrahan’s recently-republished novels Annie Magdelene and Sea Green, I have been in search of more. Iris and Her Garden is a collection of autofictional short stories based on her childhood: Iris is her grandmother. As with all of Hanrahan’s fiction it is grounded in the physical world: eiderdowns, rock cakes, bracelets, a dress-up box, pastel party streamers, a sandcastle, talcum powder: I envisage all of these objects like they are being carved in one of Hanrahan’s prints. I also recently read ’s wonderful article about Hanrahan’s long out-of-print diaries.

In In Defence of Leisure Akshi Singh reflects on writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s approach to self-knowledge, creativity, and attention in her books such as A Life of One’s Own. It’s the least object-focused of the books in my pile, but it is about the conditions that lead you to notice objects. Milner brings insight to processes of being attentive and receptive to the everyday and understanding states of daydream or flow. Singh writes, for example, about Milner’s defintion of reverie:

Reverie is the word that Milner uses to describe a state of mind and body in which inside and outside are not clearly differentiated - it is a state of suspension, when boundaries between the self and others, the self and world, between dream and waking are not watchfully policed. She considered such as state as ‘necessary for all creative work, whether the work is within the psyche or in the outer world’.

Bread of Angels is ’s latest memoir, in which she relates the story of her childhood as a foundation for her career and family life, tracing her early understandings about life into the present day. Bread of Angels is melancholy and lyrical in its reflections on identity and creative purpose. It examines her writer’s sensibility as it developed from her childhood: the conditions, personality traits and habits of mind that make for a writer’s way of being in the world. The ‘bread of angels’ of the title is ‘what the writer craves’, moments from her life that are clear and distilled.

Serendipity: the afterlife of the object by Carol Mavor is the most directly object-focused of my collection, and came to me via the excellent Anna of Paperback Bookshop. Examining serendipity, happenstance and coincidence through art, literature, and Mavor’s own life, it centres around powerful rediscovered or rescued creative works, such as Anne Frank’s diary, and Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, each chapter an exhibit of serendipitous connections. The chapter on Dickinson’s envelopes, for example, connects with the tokens left with children at London’s Foundling Hospital, and artworks by Marcel Duchamp and Mary Cassat.

A new zine: Hidden Frequency

February brings an important anniversary for me - 30 years since I made my first zine, in February 1996. This marks the beginning of my life as a writer, and the format that has been a constant throughout my writing life. To celebrate I have made a zine in my Disposable Camera series, Hidden Frequency, with 30 thoughts on 30 years of making zines - about aspects of the zinemaking life: letters, longarm staplers, reading zines, late-night photocopying, picnics and zine cats. You can buy or trade for a copy of it at Festival of the Photocopier; it’s also on Etsy.

I’ve also been working on a project about Sydney bookshops from 1980 to the present: the first part of this you can read on my Mirror Sydney blog.

I’ll write again soon with further Calendar news,

Vanessa.

November was a month of Calendar events. The first was the Sydney launch, held upstairs at Gleebooks on a Sunday afternoon. Kate Lilley and Melissa Hardie launched the book with wonderful speeches, and I read some of the stories as a slideshow of all the illustrations cycled through behind us. I made sure to wear my lucky squirrel, on the collar of my ‘parenthesis dress’ (there’s no time like launching a book about objects to think carefully about what talismans to wear).

A few evenings later, I was in conversation with Mireille Juchau at Haberfield Library, talking about some of the books and writers who influenced me (Clarice Lispector, Georges Perec, Sei Shonagon, Jenny Offill, Sophie Calle, Derek Jarman, and so on) and the process of writing Calendar from day to day over a year.

Haberfield library is tucked around the corner from the pasticcerias on Ramsay St. This part of Haberfield is a lucky place for me. In winter, when I unknowingly dropped my gloves on a street just around the corner from the library, after realising I returned three days to search for them. I found them, looking a bit worse for wear, on separate sides of the street, and reunited them with each other and me. If I had been still writing Calendar, I noted at the time, they would be the object of the day. There is a different kind of glove story in Calendar, the object with the longest name, no. 124. ‘Exact Copy of the Gloves Worn during the French Period of the Directoire, 1796–1799’.

My final book launch event was a reading at one of my favourite shops - Outlet Newtown, perhaps the world’s only retro lifestyle adventure store. For a week, there was a Calendar themed window display, with sculptures S made of some of readers’ favourite objects from the book - Perkin’s Paste, 4711 cologne, the rotary dial phone, a giant pair of (good) scissors.

For the reading, I used the window as a stage and read out the stories associated with the objects around me, and some crowd favourites including no. 120. Hand Towel (“To help with the insomnia which has been rattling my head every night and putting me out of step with the days, S has an idea. He takes the towel from the top of the washing basket, a hand towel with a print of pink roses, and balls it up into a bundled shape which he then secures with a thick rubber band. ‘This is an extra brain,’ he says. ‘It’s going to do all the worrying for you, while you sleep.’”) and, as an encore, no. 183. The 1986 Smash Hits RSVP Directory, with its plaintive ads for pen pals from teenage music fans across the country.

The window display is retired now but the Perkins Paste and the green phone live on in the store: look for them if you visit. Outlet are also stocking Calendar so that’s another place you can pick up a copy if you’re out on a King St. wander.

In November I also taught a couple of object-writing workshops, one in Lake Macquarie at Toronto Library, and another at Writing NSW. The workshops had a focus on memoir and how objects can inform writing your life stories. It’s always interesting (and surprising) to see what the participants bring along to write with: the object I brought along with me to talk about writing was an Avon pomander (no. 9 in Calendar - although I brought along the boot, rather than the glove - another glove! - that I featured in the story).

Of course while I was in Toronto, I whipped around to look at all the op shops. I restricted myself to looking rather than buying but did enjoy coming across this coffee table decoupaged with concert tickets for 1990s gigs and sports events.

Objects continue to surprise me every day - maybe after writing Calendar I’ll low key have an object of the day forevermore.

It has been so lovely to see many of you at the events for Calendar - I’ve finished events for this year, but copies of the book are around in many bookstores and you can order it from Upswell, as well as check out their wonderful 2026 list, which has just been announced. I’ve also been loving hearing from you about reading Calendar and how you’ve chosen to do it: some go straight through, others dip in, others read one a day.

It is the gift season (as my visit to Ashfield Mall this morning starkly confirmed) and if you’d like to gift a copy of Calendar with a personal inscription and stamp, be in touch, we can work it out!

I’ll have another edition of this newsletter before the end of the year - a summer reading edition with some recommended object books for over the holidays, and some book-related objects from Calendar to ponder, and maybe something about a new project I’m starting. Go well into the end of the year all.

Vanessa.

After all my years of working on the book it is a little surreal to see it around, knowing the stories that are so close to me are being read by others. It’s a familiar feeling, but there’s always magic in it. Some reviews have come in, most recently on the ABC’s ‘Best Books out in October’, where Declan Fry writes: “Calendar is a Pillow Book for the 21st century: reflective, observant, piquant.” The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon was one of my touchstones (and also the focus of object no. 140, incense stick) so this was extremely welcome praise!

A slew of events are coming up for Calendar, first up the Paperback Salon with Sharon Kivland, in which we will discuss our calendar-inspired books. It’s on Tuesday 28th October, AEDT, online so you can join from anywhere you happen to be. Then on Sunday Nov. 2nd is the launch at Gleebooks in Sydney, with Kate Lilley and Melissa Hardie. Events continue on after this - I’ll include a full list at the end of this post.

Object of the Month

319. Jacarandas

The jacarandas are in flower, and so as I travel around the city I move my eye between the patches of purple interspersed among the buildings and the trees. At the university where I work, which is known for its jacarandas, there are queues of people lined up to take photos with them, and I side step their photo shoots as I walk to my office.

The jacaranda is so much associated with Sydney, but like so many urban garden trees they are not native, instead brought here from Brazil in the 19th century. They have been celebrated ever since, and in Calendar I decided I would assemble a story from some of the descriptions of jacarandas from a century ago. There are a few objects in Calendar I write this way, assembling from older sources, such as the the ouija board, and the bow-tie. This is a way of showing the object through time, and being playful in a book that is also a game of sorts, of selecting the day’s object.

Reading articles from the 1920s and 30s about jacaranda season, I enjoyed their descriptive excess: ‘Tree of elusive tint, known variously as: a graceful and living cone of floral grandeur, a lovely mauve-covered cloud, as joyous a thing as ever carried a headful of buds and blossoms’. I knew that some readers would imagine this to be my description, but perhaps would question my rapturous tone. Consulting the Notes section in Calendar reveals the truth, or perhaps readers will just think me overcome by the beauty of jacaranda season.

Object Project

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

When I first encountered this book, in the discount bookstore Basement Books (much-missed highlight of the tunnel leading into Central Station) I thought it was an actual auction catalogue. Indeed, much effort had been put into making it look as if it was one, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that was one reason it had found its way to Basement Books. For it is, indeed, a novel.

The interior looks like an auction catalogue too, with photographs of an entire life’s-worth of objects. Trivial things like t-shirts, handwritten notes, jars of homemade jam, sunglasses, shoes, a rock collection, teatowels, mix CDs, and many love notes, for the novel is a love story between two fictional characters: Lenore Doolan and Hal Morris.

In the many photographs included among the items Sheila Heti poses as Lenore, and the artist Paul Sahre, as Hal. The notes are transcribed in all their cutesy-ness: ‘Missing you very much, your Buttertart’ Objects are forensically presented and described, and given a monetary value: ‘A plastic shark belonging to Morris. Snout has been chewed off. 2 x 11 in. $5-$10.’ Or, ‘A pair of colour photographs. One photo of Doolan waiting outside Morris’s apartment, at 11A Sherman Street, Brooklyn. The other of Morris waiting outside Doolan’s West Village apartment at 84 Grove Street. 4 x 6 in. $20-40’

The novel meticulously details the couple’s relationship from start to finish - from the invitation to the Halloween party at which they met, to Doolan’s four leaf clover collection which is the final object in the catalogue.

I thought - a novel can be this? It was exciting to encounter it by chance, to realise that you could write a book with things in this way.

Shapton had been inspired by an auction of Truman Capote’s personal items, from which she bought ‘three of his raincoats and some scarves’. In a NY Times interview she went on to describe how ‘it was in reading that catalog that it struck me that it was like reading a kind of autobiography’. Celebrity auctions continue to be fascinating: in Calendar I write about sunglasses from the Joan Didion auction, and most recently I followed the Shelley Duvall estate sale. There’s the fascination that comes with celebrity, of course, but this always also comes along with the recognition of how mundane the household objects for sale essentially are.

All the Calendar Events

October 28th, 6pm AEDT, online: Paperback Salon

November 2nd, 3pm, Gleebooks, Glebe, Sydney: Launch

November 4th, 11am Toronto Library (Lake Macquarie): Memoir with Objects workshop.

November 6th, 6pm, Haberfield Library: Speaker Series: Calendar with Vanessa Berry in conversation with Mireille Juchau.

November 8th: Workshop, Finding Inspiration Through Objects for Memoir and Fiction at Writing NSW.

November 14th, 10-4pm: ‘Writing With’ symposium on life writing and objects

November 22nd: Outlet, King St, Newtown, reading, more details to come!

Some Objects from October

As much as I try to resist temptation at the op shop, sometimes some items I cannot resist, like these angry little tiger figurines, and this mobile phone wrapping paper, c. 2000.

See you at a Calendar event soon, or next month here at the newsletter, with some stories from them.

Vanessa.

Calendar!

Aqua green, minty bright, all the little picture of things which are so familiar to me and are transformed in the book. It felt substantial, long at 400 pages, but also compressed, a year in my hand, all the stories that stretch out from the objects and from my life. It was humbling to hold a copy of it, to think of all the work that went into it and all the people who encouraged me and especially to my wonderful publisher Terri-ann White at Upswell, and Anna MacDonald, who wrote the lovely endorsement.

Calendar takes its place among Upswell’s list of inventive narrative nonfiction and I’m proud for it to have a home here. It makes a good companion to other object-focused books Upswell have published, including Gemma Nisbet’s book of object essays The Things We Live With, and The Prime Minister’s Potato and other essays by Anne-Marie Condé, and fragmentary, visual-textual essays such as Vessel by Dani Netherclift and Life with Birds by Bronwyn Rennex, which Upswell also specialises in.

Calendar’s publication day is Wednesday October 1st. That’s the day around which your preorders should arrive and when you can go in search of it in shops (please buy from independent bookstores if you can - or from Upswell directly). On publication day I’ll be celebrating with Teddy (who is a little jealous of the parts about his predecessor, Soxy) and maybe a frog cake (if I can find one in Sydney - they’re the right colour).

All the Events…

Launches

October 28th, 6pm AEDT: Online Launch - With Paperback Bookshop: A conversation with Vanessa Berry of Calendar and Sharon Kivland of Almanach about writing with the French Republican calendar, writing in real-time, and life as a writer-artist. Book in to receive the link here.

November 2nd, 3pm: Sydney Launch - Gleebooks, Glebe. Calendar will be launched by Kate Lilley and Melissa Hardie, with readings from the book and a show and tell. More details and booking link here.

In Conversation

October 7th, 6pm: Craft and Conversation at the State Library of NSW. I’ll be discussing Calendar with Openbook editor Phillipa McGuinness, and artists Mylyn Nguyen and Louise Whelan will also be speaking about their work on the night. Bookings here.

Workshops

Tuesday November 4th: Memoir with Objects workshop at Toronto Library (Lake Macquarie)

Saturday November 8th: Finding Inspiration Through Objects for Memoir and Fiction at Writing NSW.

Readings

Wednesday 1st October: I’ll be reading at the launch of HEAT magazine at Sean and Dolly’s - I’ll be reading from my piece on Bernadette Mayer in HEAT but it’s Calendar’s publication day, we can have a celebratory lemonade (or absinthe - along with the frog cakes, it’s the right colour) together.

Saturday 22nd November: Outlet, King St, Newtown - I’ll be reading at my favourite retro adventure lifestyle store! More details about this to come but for now, save the date.

Symposium

Friday 14th November, online. On the academic side of things, I’m running a symposium with Gemma Nisbet on life writing and objects that you’re welcome to join in on if you write or teach with objects: more details about that here.

Flowers

It’s also azalea season, and I’ve been enjoying these bursts of colour in the older-style gardens around the suburbs.

Object of the Month

Cicada Pendant Watch

If I’m ever in Melbourne on a Sunday, I like to go to Camberwell Markets which takes over the carpark behind the shopping strip on Sunday mornings. I would have first gone to Camberwell Markets some time in the 1990s, led there by my Melbourne friends who were in the know, and ever since then have found it a reliable source of treasures.

During my Calendar year, it so happened I was in Melbourne on a Sunday, and so of course I had to go to the markets. There was nothing I was looking for in particular (there rarely is - chance rules). This time my theme became little things that would all fit into an cardboard box that had once held ‘Essay’ brand notepaper. Afterwards, I lined them up on the table of the place I was staying at, a 1960s apartment on a street lined with white cherry blossom trees, lovely but for the fatal flaw of an incessant drift of cigarette smoke from the apartment below.

As I describe in Calendar - an aluminium acorn with a sewing kit inside it, a slide photograph of a city crowd in Martin Place in 1962, a bottle opener in the shape of a leg in a high-heeled shoe advertising Arnos paper fasteners, a telephone timer, a fountain pen, a plastic sliding numbers game, a miniature German dictionary, and a ‘gold cicada pendant, smooth as a droplet, with wings that part to reveal the watch face underneath’. Even better was the fact the cicada watch was the brand ‘Genius’, but I was not so much a genius in the moment as I put it down, someone else snatched it up, and then - well, you’ll have to read about what happened in Calendar.

Object Project

When I was in Adelaide earlier this year I came across headquarters of Pink Shorts Press in Adelaide Arcade. They are a new publisher who have among their list republished two novels by writer and artist Barbara Hanrahan, including Annie Magdalene. The book relates a woman’s entire life story from childhood to old age. With its robust, pragmatic tone it reminded me of Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood, Youth Dependency, and also of Janet Frame’s autobiographies. In all of these the narrator is a quietly observant character, distinct in their forthrightness to be no one but themselves. The novel also has a vivid and detailed object life, preserving the lively and strange identities that objects can take on during childhood.

Mum had her photo taken in a dark blue suit, a long string of pearls and a blouse that had rows and rows of lace. She hung it in an oval frame on the sitting-room wall over the fireplace, between two painting of a pair of swans, each swimming towards her. On the mantelpiece was a brass jardiniere embossed with grapes and usually filled with flowers. Mum didn’t like white flowers, so when white lilies were all she had, she painted pink stripes on them with lipstick.

The robust weirdness of the everyday: I love it.

Think of Calendar on October 1st - do something green!

Vanessa.

Once it’s out in the world I too will be out doing a few events to celebrate publication.

The first you can join from anywhere in the world: an online Paperback Bookshop Salon event on October 28th at 6pm (AEST), featuring me and Sharon Kivland in conversation. It’s free, but please book here to receive the link.

Then, the book launch! It’s at Gleebooks, Glebe, on Sunday November 2nd and will be launched by the wonderful Kate Lilley and Melissa Hardie. Please RSVP here to secure a spot.

After this there are a couple of events still being planned for later in November: an in-conversation at Inner West Libraries and a reading in Newtown. I’ll give you the details of these in a future newsletter.

I’m also doing some object writing workshops: a memoir workshop at Toronto Library (Lake Macquarie) on Tuesday November 4th; and a workshop on Finding Inspiration Through Objects for Memoir and Fiction at Writing NSW on Saturday November 8th.

A few other Calendar-adjacent events: I’ll be reading at the launch of the new HEAT journal on Oct. 1st at Sean and Dolly’s, Woolloomooloo along with Max Easton, Miro Bilbrough, Chris Andrews and Ivor Indyk.

And on 7th October I’ll be appearing as part of Craft and Conversations at the State Library of NSW, along with Mylyn Nguyen and Louise Whelan.

See you out there, dear readers.

This month started with the Other Worlds zine fair, on another rainy day. For most of the busy fair I stayed at my table and wasn’t able to go browsing, but I did pick up new zines by some of my favourites. These are personal zines, like the compilation of ‘Bridges’ zine by Emma D, a handful of new zines by Tiny Paper Hearts, and the new issue of AOMM, as well as illustration/art zines by Estee and Maja, and I also had a quick browse of Glom Press and Sticky who had tables nearby. Back at mine it was lovely to chat to so many people who came by to say hello and have a flip through issues of I am a Camera.

In Calendar news, it’s suddenly much closer to publication day (October 1st). If you’d like to preorder a copy, you can at Upswell Publishing, or you can order or buy it through your local independent bookstore. There will be some events in October/November to celebrate its publication, which I’ll announce in full in my September newsletter.

Object of the Month: (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

Rainbow

While most of the objects in Calendar are have a stable form, some are more elusive or ephemeral. There are many rainbow-patterned objects, of course, but rainbows themselves? Impossible to grasp, something that you can only see from afar, and which come into existence through our perception of them.

The day I wrote about the rainbow I was at Bundanon, on the writing residency I showed some photos from in last month’s newsletter. While I was there I made a chart of my progress on Calendar so far, by dividing up two big pieces of cartridge paper into squares and writing into each the object of that day. In this way, I could track how it was progressing, and the kind of objects I had written about.

From the newsagency in Nowra I had bought a packet of coloured sticky dots, and went about colour coding some of the categories of objects - op shop, childhood, natural world, functional, decorative - as a way of mapping out the range of objects that had called my attention. It was satisfying to use a sheet of coloured sticky dots for this purpose - the only purpose I have ever put them to. They are an item I associate with Miranda July, for the scene in her film Me and You and Everyone We Know in which her character touches the three pink dots on the dashboard of her car to give herself courage.

But back to rainbows and how I came to write about one. Bundanon was the home of painter Arthur Boyd, who bequeathed it to the government as an artist residency. When I was there the new art museum building had just opened and the exhibition of Boyd’s paintings included ‘The Magic Fish’. The painting is based on the fairytale in which a man catches a magic fish that grants him wishes, until he is too greedy in his demands.

In the painting a man struggles with a fish at the shoreline, both figures greenish and slippery. The man’s foot clamps down the fish’s tail and he puts all his force into holding it down. As he does, rainbow extends from the fish’s mouth, calm and beautiful despite the fish being held with such force. I looked at this painting for a long time.

Object Project

The concept for Calendar - an object for each day, with some connection to that day - was inspired by the French Republican calendar. This calendar was used in France for twelve years at the turn of the 18th century, and was intended to revolutionise timekeeping, along with with the political revolution that began in 1789.

It was a calendar devoid of religious and political associations. The twelve, 30-day months followed the seasons, with names like Brumaire (fog), Nivôse (snow), and Thermidor (heat). The year began in autumn. Weeks had 10 days, and there were 5 (or 6, in a leap year) holiday days at the end of the year to balance out the calendar. And every day had an object associated with it, something from rural life. It is this aspect that inspired Calendar. The objects that made up that calendar were things like loam, chervil, oats, pitchforks and violets. My objects were things like polaroid photos, salt and pepper shakers, a stress ball, a thimble, a message in a bottle. My calendar reflected the object saturation of my 21st century life, showing the constant, but often quiet and unnoticed, presence of them as memory and time keepers.

While I was writing Calendar in 2022 writer, artist, and publisher Sharon Kivland was working on Almanach, a response to the French Republican calendar, following this calendar throughout her year. Kivland lives in Brittany, and the seasons and objects of the French Republican calendar are close to her everyday life. They form a structure for the account of her year, which extends into other systems of time-measurement: lives of the saints, the daily news, the seasonal cycles of plants and the garden, and processes of writing, of following life in real time.

‘This is a book of little times,’ Kivland writes in the introduction, but it is nothing but expansive, with a breadth of historical and literary references filtered through the framework of the days and her experiences. Almanach is illustrated by Kivland’s beautiful watercolour paintings of women representing the months: with a lamb for Brumaire, with a swan for Thermidor. The book is structured in months, and within them a cascade of days, pushing forward as they branch out into time in all directions.

I’m such a fan of Sharon and so it’s exciting to announce that she and I will be appearing together for the October Paperback Bookshop Salon on Tuesday October 28th (6pm AEDT) - it’s online as Sharon will be in France and I’ll be in Sydney. We’ll be chatting about our books, about calendars, time and memory, and everything a day can hold and extend to. If you’d like to join, RSVP to Paperback to receive a Zoom link: paperbackbooks.events@gmail.com

Coming up

As well as my conversation with Sharon, there’s a number of events coming up in October and November related to or adjacent to Calendar.

I’m appearing as part of Craft and Conversation at the State Library of NSW on Tuesday 7th of October, talking to Openbook editor Pip McGuiness about zinemaking and Calendar: tickets available at the link.

Belinda Castles has released a wonderful new book out in September, Walking Sydney, and she and I will be hosting a walk in Newtown, followed by a conversation at Better Read Than Dead. It will be on Saturday, 18th October, and you can buy tickets here.

My Writing NSW workshop, Finding Inspiration Through Objects for Memoir and Fiction, is on Saturday November 8th, a day-long workshop in which I’ll share some useful and inspiring methods and techniques for writing with objects.

I’ll have details of the launch for Calendar and a few other related events next time. Enjoy the unfolding springtime, southern hemisphere readers, with the wildflowers and freesias.

Until next month,

Vanessa.

I am a Camera has always been a lightning rod for my life at the time of writing it. Though it has changed since the start - the first issues were a mix of diary entries and fiction, then the rest have been autobiographical stories of different kinds - the zine has consistently been made up of a sequence of stories drawn from sometime in the year before. This, my longest consistent public writing practice, led me towards writing Calendar, which has the same lightning rod effect, channeling the energy of every day through an object from it.

Perhaps, to stretch the photography metaphor, I am a Camera is a snapshot and Calendar is an album. There are a number of camera objects in Calendar - a found photo, a polaroid photo, a Box Brownie camera, a paper photo envelope, a frilly plastic photo frame. I’m attracted to them as objects to write with, for their links to memory, and how writing might share something of the ‘taking’ or ‘capturing’ of a photograph.

If you’d like a copy of I am a Camera #25, I will be debuting them at Other Worlds Zine Fair (Marrickville Town Hall, Saturday August 2nd, 10am-3pm), or you can also buy a copy here. If you’re at Other Worlds, do come and say hello: I’ll be at table 8a, at the end of the hall near the stage, next to the wonderful Keg de Souza.

Object of the Month: (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

Mohair Cardigan

Every winter I am drawn to a different cardigan to wear at home while I’m writing: a cardigan fluffy, sturdy, or otherwise unlike what I would wear out ‘in the world’. In my Calendar year, it was an olive brown mohair cardigan patterned with multicoloured daisies. There are practical reasons for this garment choice: the house is draughty and cold. There are also psychic ones: wearing something soft and enveloping helps me to take on a softness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write.

I have been searching through photos to find an agreeable one of me wearing the mohair cardigan. Mostly only the edge of sleeve of it appears in a photograph of something else but here is one is from my writing residency at Bundanon in 2022, the year I wrote Calendar. That time is recorded in the objects I wrote about while I was there, some of which you can see on the desk in front of me: the kaleidoscope, the paperweight, a box of matches.

Two weeks later, the desk objects had multiplied, post-it notes were stuck around the window, the candle had burned down further, I had watched the wombats and the kangaroos in the field even morning and evening, and the cardigan had kept me warm all through the writing days.

Object Project

Tonight, as I write this, I can hear an owl, a boobook, singing out with its two-note call. I’ve been rereading Tony Birch’s essay ‘Things of stone and wood and wool’, which was published in the Griffith Review in 2020. It’s about the comfort of objects, their role in grief, and their comfort and capacity to bring strength and solace in hard times. The first object Birch writes about is a stone, which he chose as a memento of a friend’s father.

The stone now sits on my writing desk. I often hold it in my hand when I’m thinking about the words I want to write (as I’m doing now). I have thought with the stone about life and death and my love for my friend, who misses her father so deeply. The stone has affected my thoughts on climate justice, which is a key area of my academic and community research. What I have come to understand about the stone is that it is stronger than me – and you.

I love that the stone is such an important writing talisman, present with Birch in the essay as he writes it, so we share in his respect for it, and can almost feel it, ‘egg-shaped, ivory-coloured’, and how it is ‘full and heavy’ in his hand when he holds it.

The essay follows Birch’s relationships to objects throughout his life, growing up in poverty in inner city Melbourne, where people foraged for objects to use or sell.

I later came to cherish the narrative power of objects through my grandmother, Alma, who introduced me to op-shop fever, an ailment I continue to live with sixty years later.

Birch writes about the objects that attract him in op shops, particularly woollen jumpers, which as a child shopping at the Salvos with his grandmother, he sought out for warmth and comfort: ‘when I put a thick woollen jumper over my head as a small child, my body felt protected, both emotionally and physically’. Now, he writes, he has a cupboard full of such jumpers, which bring this same consolation.

It’s a beautiful essay, extending out from the grief of losing loved ones to consider the capacity of the physical world and the things to hand around us to bring us comfort. The essay itself is a comfort, as Birch brings attention and respect to the humble physicality of a stone, a jumper, or a knitted beanie, reminding us of the significance of such everyday things, and how they care for us.

Elsewhere This Month

I will be at Other Worlds Zine Fair on August 2nd, with a new I am a Camera and various Calendar-related bits and pieces (postcards & stickers).

Events for Calendar are starting to come together in October and November and I’ll have more news of these soon. One that has just been announced is a workshop I’m teaching at Writing NSW on writing with objects: Finding Inspiration Through Objects for Memoir and Fiction.

If you’d like to pre-order Calendar, visit Upswell upswellpublishing.com/product/calendar

I was interviewed on the radio last night, talking about zines and what they have meant to me over my almost 30 years of making them, and the connections between my zine making and Calendar. When the presenter asked me what kinds of objects I had written about in the book, I found myself quickly checking the postcard of the cover, as whenever people ask me this, I can only ever call to mind the weirdest ones. I should have said the zine-related objects, to keep on theme: a typewriter, a photocopier (‘Something is wrong in the sticky heart of the photocopier’ is one of the lines from the book that is imprinted on my memory), and a long-arm stapler, which is almost all you need.

Other than marking and writing I’ve been reading Rock Flight by Hasib Hourani, Under the Bed by Stephanie Radok, and A Body of Water by Beverley Farmer (again - I’m presenting on it at a conference soon), thinking about the power of personal writing, in all the ways that it extends. I am drawn to writing that draws in the details of the writing moment, the energy of it. Reading it can feel like going close up to a painting to see the brushstrokes, being inside the making of it as well as seeing the result.

Object of the Month: (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

Hot Water Bottle

My favourite part of working as a museum guide was taking people on tours, and my favourite part of the tour was the guessing game we would play with the hot water bottles. They were 19th century ceramic hot water bottles, sturdy earthenware flasks, and required some imagination to connect with what we know of as a hot water bottle today. I would pick up one of these ceramic flasks and ask the group to guess what it was. Often, someone would venture that it was some kind of bedpan. ‘It’s a hot water bottle,’ I would say, ‘which people called the hot pig, because of its piggy expression.’ Here I would draw attention to the end of the flask, where the stopper formed a kind of snout that, once you have the idea of it in mind, resembles a pig.

Although I have an ordinary rubber hot water bottle, I have a fondness for them as you might for something creaturely, and they are a cold-weather fixture for me. A cosy winter object, but reading about them and their history, as with so many objects in our everyday lives, is to read how their development is entwined with exploitation: in this case, with the colonial rubber industry. The tea I drink, the sugar in this biscuit, the shirt I wear, are all legacies of this history.

Hot water bottles as we know them haven’t changed much over the last century, although I find articles from the early twentieth century introducing hot water bottles in the shape of dolls, and also stories of hot water bottles being filled with whiskey as a trick to get around Prohibition laws. My own is housed in a cover with a life-size, photoerealistic image of a black cat on it, and it is in daily use at this time of the year: I sit at my desk with it on my lap like it is indeed a cat.

Object Project

In the radio interview I talked a little about discovering zines in the 1990s, and the American zines that were some of the first I came across, like Murder Can Be Fun, Ben is Dead, Mystery Date, and Rollerderby. Of all of them, Thrift Score by Al Hoff was a particular favourite. A zine about thrifting was close to my heart even then. Thrift Score recorded stories of thrifted objects and thrift store experiences. It was so popular that, in the late 90s, a Thrift Score book was published. The blurb on the back ran:

Forget about tightwadding! Finally a book about spending too much money on too cool stuff in thrift stores! This book is about the GLORY OF THRIFTING- the METHOD, the MADNESS, and the SCORE!

Even the language seemed part of a secret world. Tightwadding? (Looking that up now and I’m given results for ‘tight wedding. People Also Ask: What is a tight wedding dress called? Are tights appropriate for a wedding?’)

It’s an inimitable, funny book, and wise about the joys of thrifting. Much of it I took to heart then, and much of it still resonates.

As our culture changes, bits and pieces of forgotten fads, fashions, and ways of life can now be retrieved from the secondhand realm….Museums may preserve the ‘important’ stuff, but it’s the thrifts that hold the secrets of past everyday lives. Every object in the thrift store has already ‘lived’ somewhere before.

Opening it at any page and there’s something funny or useful: I enjoyed re-reading the tips for trying on clothes when there’s no changeroom (loose skirts are convenient here), and descriptions of ‘literals’ - a 70s houseware trend to ‘label the obvious’ by emblazoning an object with its name. ‘While most people only had one or two literals in their home, I really like the idea of a room stocked only with them.’

Elsewhere This Month

I wrote an article about zines for the Winter edition of Openbook, as part of their ‘Making’ themed issue. It’s an overview of the current zine scene and some of its literary connections. I’ll be talking more about zine culture at a library event in October, which I’ll post details of in a future Calendrical.

The other thing that’s happening in October, is the big news, the very reason for this newsletter - that’s when Calendar will be published. If you’d like to pre-order it, you can do so here upswellpublishing.com/product/calendar

Openbook also featured some of the illustrations in the magazine, so it is starting to quietly make its way out into the world.

Elsewhere in the Past

Digging around in my papers recently, I unearthed this article about op shopping from 2008, which pictures me in my sharehouse room of the time. I still have most of the things in the photo, and at least one is featured in Calendar (which one? Hint: background item).

I will leave you with this puzzle: until next month,

Vanessa.

Inside, a stretch of pavement, grey and stained, and my shadow, holding up the camera. Outside the frame, the street in SoHo, New York, last October, on the day I experimented with the method Bernadette Mayer devised in Memory. Every day for the month of July 1971 she took a roll of film, 36 photographs. She combined the photographs with an accompanying text that recounted her experiences on each day, based on her journals and writing triggered by her viewing the photos.

In an interview from 2017, Mayer said, about Memory: ‘After I did it, years went by, and I thought, it’s odd that nobody else has done it.” And so I decided to try, to spend a day tracing Bernadette Mayer’s life in New York, using the method that she had devised.

Later, viewing the photos, I found them to be a surprising, discontinous record of moments from that day, alchemised onto the film. The photographs and my writing from that day make up my essay, ‘Enduring Present’, now published in the new issue of HEAT magazine.

Object of the Month: (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

Memory Game

In this game, the object is to collect matching pairs of images. You first place the cards face down, and then, when it’s your turn, you flip two over to see if they make a match. If they do, you take them, if not, you turn them back over, trying to remember the positions of each card, for your next turn.

The games brand Ravensburger hold the rights for calling the game ‘Memory’, which is almost as odd to me as my phone telling me I have a new memory. The game itself has existed in many different versions: a centuries-old Japanese game with pictures painted inside of shells, or a similar matching game that uses playing cards instead.

In Calendar, the Memory Game comes linked to my childhood memory of playing it. “This is the only game I ever feel compelled to win,” I write in the story about it, which was true, then, or at least, I don’t remember feeling very competitive about any other gamess. I liked puzzles better, assembling something rather than racing.

Object Project

Since I started this month’s newsletter with Bernadette Mayer, I thought I’d share my favourite passage from her poem Midwinter Day for this month’s object project. She wrote Midwinter Day over one day in December, 1978, the winter solstice. A book-length poem in six parts, it traces her day from recounting her dreams, into what Alice Notley (who, sadly, passed away earlier this week) described as ‘an epic poem about a daily routine’. The poem follows Mayer’s day at home with her children, their trip to the library, then back home and through chores, conversations, and reflections, the flow of life from moment to moment.

My favourite passage is from the start of part two, a description of the house through a list of everything in it. This page from it describes the pictures on the walls, the children’s toys, a calendar, a world map, “vinegar, garbage”:

Every December, there are regular annual readings of Midwinter Day. In one reading that took place over Zoom in 2021, I enjoy the details of how the ginger cat is unwilling to leave the screen in the first minute, and then later that Mayer’s daughter Marie reads the description of her childhood tantrum (at 1:46:00 - ‘In which the pitch of the tones of her loudest screams/Is like an electrically driven car to the consisten sun’s/Hottest spots).

Here in the southern hemisphere, our winter solstice is on Saturday 21st June. This is when I will write to you again.

Vanessa.

For more information about Calendar, and to preorder it: https://upswellpublishing.com/product/calendar

Object Encounter

When the extra hour was scheduled at the end of daylight saving time, 2am becoming 1am, I liked the idea of staying up to experience the doubling back of time. Of course nothing much would actually happen at this moment. There would be no glitch, no jolt, only perhaps the time on my phone moving from 1:59 to 1:00, one invention inside another. But I must have fallen asleep before the hour switch came, because it was then suddenly morning.

Thinking about the extra hour makes me call to mind a corner store in Stanmore that used to have, painted on the side of the awning, ‘Open 8 Days’. Although it has not said this for a long time - it was replaced by a new, sensible sign saying ‘Open 7 Days’ sometime in the early 2010s - I still think of it this way. I liked to imagine that inside the corner store I could find the 8th day.

Between last month and this one Calendar has been typeset: always a transformation, to see the text in book format after years of working on it in notebooks, loose pages, computer files, drawings, phone notes and messages, and it taking up so much of my thoughts and days. It feels (and is) closer to being a book now. It will be out in October: if you’d like to preorder a copy, you can here.

Object of the Month (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

Anodised Apple

Writing about an object every day for a year I observed certain patterns, certain categories of things that I am drawn to. Some are predictable, such as writerly objects, or secondhand, op shop things. Others show an attraction to a symbol or shape: so it is with apples, which appear as a number of objects in Calendar, one of these being a red anodised ice bucket.

The ‘Hot-N-Cold Apple’ started local production in the 1950s, made by Lemar, the same company that made anodised lamps. The apple was available in red and green, and I’ve seen gold ones too. I’ve never used mine as an ice bucket or for any of the uses given in the pamphlet below, a surprising array of suggestions including keeping scrambled eggs warm. I just like having it around as a symbol of good, a big red apple that reflects the room in its shiny surface.

Anodised apple ice buckets must have been popular at the time: there are plenty available secondhand, although some of them are startlingly expensive (I found one for sale for €390, for example). Of their official history, I suspect they might be based on a 1950s silver apple ice bucket designed by Ettore Sottsass, but further research would be needed. Evidence from advertising points to their most popular season being 1953/54, and in December 1954, red apple ice buckets went viral in New York thanks to the Queen Mother’s Christmas shopping of items ‘well past their peak sales as novelties’.

Object Project

Over the long weekend I read On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, a novel in two parts that follows the experiences of a woman trapped within the same, repeating day, November 18th. Her attempts to understand and live within this day are described through a sequence of numbered days, advancing as yet more November 18ths recur. It reminded me of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, in which a woman on a trip in the Austrian mountains finds herself trapped within an invisible wall and must make meaning from her life in these lonely and confusing circumstances. Both novels give me a similar feeling, that I want to arrange the trick that sets time going again, or removes the wall, but there is nothing I can do but observe.

On the Calculation of Volume is a novel about time, but it is also very much about objects, which operate as companions, clues and complications throughout Tara Selter’s days. They are unpredictable: sometimes the objects she acquires on the day stay with her, other times they disappear as the day is reset back to the morning of November 18th. “It was a fact that the objects of the world sometimes stayed with me and sometimes went back to where they had come from.”

While no one she encounters on her 18ths remembers her on the consecutive day (which is also the 18th November), Tara’s mark on the world is shown through the produce she consumes, and which is not replenished. In this way, she describes, she ‘eats up the world’. In the supermarket near her home:

More things are disappearing. All the caramel flavoured chocolate has been eaten up. Some of the bread baskets are now empty and on the bottom shelf in the bread section there are only two packs of biscotti surrounded by thin air because I have taken the rest. Several sorts of cheese have vanished from the cheese section, there are no tomatores in the fresh produce aisle and there is no ignoring the great dents that have been made in the shelves. I did this, it has happened gradually, one day at a time.

Questioning the rules of time, space and matter by which we understand the world is a powerful thing, to show that what might feel fixed and stable about life is in fact ‘improbable, unpredictable, remarkable’.

Elsewhere this month

In early April I was in Newcastle for the Writers’ Festival, to launch the zine collection at Newcastle City Library: this includes the Octapod Zine Library collection, which began in the 1990s around the same time as the National Young Writers’ Festival. A selection of zines are available for browsing and borrowing, and the collection is well worth a visit if you are in Newcastle. And in further zine-related news, the new Cockatoo Comics shop has opened in Lane Cove, stocking independent comics and zines.

Coming out soon I have an essay about Bernadette Mayer in the May issue of HEAT literary magazine. The essay is about Bernadette Mayer in New York City, and includes a sequence of photos based on Mayer’s Memory, that I took in NYC following her practice in Memory of taking a roll of 36 photographs every day for a month, though I only did it for one day. I hadn’t used an analogue camera (my much-loved LOMO LC-A) for years, and it felt good.

Wishing you good days, dear readers,

Vanessa.

It is the last weeks of daylight savings time, which I love for its extension of day into the evenings and thus, expanded walking time. I watch my tall shadow stretch out in front of me, enjoying being a different shape, a fairytale version, thin and flat enough to slide under doors and around corners.

After I took this photo, standing on the edge of the curb in the quiet dead end street behind my local shops, a man walking along the other side of the street called out to me, ‘hey! hey!’ I looked over and he said, ‘are you alright?’ Yes, I replied, unsure exactly what he was seeing that was causing him this concern. Too much attention to my shadow? Then he went on his way, and I on mine.

Object of the Month (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

Day in the Life Scarf

Scarves often appear in my writing, as an object on the borderline between animate and inanimate with their ability to shapeshift, their tendency to unknot and slip away. One of my I am a Camera zines (#20) has a whole passage listing them:

The scarves are coiled up in a basket and each has a particular identity. This one is olive green silk with a silhouetted pattern of people catching butterflies printed on it. When I tie it, looping its tails into a knot and settling it back against the hollow of my throat, I feel its protection. I wear it on green days, on days when I'm chasing something.

Another, the memory scarf, is patterned with easily forgotten objects - gloves and keys and umbrellas - and the words ‘don't forget’. Knotting it secures my memory, activates its powers. If you're with me while I'm wearing it I will be able to remember the first time I met you - where we were, what we said to each other.

This scarf, printed with brandy, cigarettes, dice and cards, is the scarf of vice, of bad things that feel good. It has a recipe printed on it, pictured on a grey scroll, for the Brandy Scaffa - because it sounds like scarf? - maraschino, chartreuse, cognac, poured in layers so each settles separately, and to drink it is to swallow tears, then envy, then love.

The scarf in Calendar, object number 69, is fittingly something of a calendar itself. It pictures a sequence of cartoon images of activities one might fit into a day: a typewriter, a letter, a cocktail, a train, a telephone, some coins and banknotes, a chef carrying a dish, two poodles sitting waiting, a figure in a wide dress (and scarf) walking another dog in the park.

Most of my days include something, if not many of the things, pictured on this scarf, or I would like them to (more typewriter, less telephone). I bought it from a favourite vintage clothing store, House of Edgertor, which sells ‘unusual 20th century garments’. As well as the clothes themselves, which are always interesting, I love it that the garments in the store are presented with the stories of their designers, original advertisements, and their social and historical context. I love clothes for the stories they tell, and here was the calendar scarf, with its recombining elements, a story in itself.

Its origins were mysterious, though, and even today as I sat with S in the cafe (cue chef carrying platter) we tried to decode whether the ‘P’s indicating parking signs (surely not - she takes the train?) or were the brand insignia. Paloma Picasso produced a ‘day in the life’ scarf, although later, and with a more freeform style. Or could it be textile designer Pat Pritchard, known for her scarves and handkerchiefs? There was no conclusive evidence, and we settled back into thinking the P stood for parking lot after all.

Object Project

How much can you tell about a person from their objects? In 1981, the French artist Sophie Calle embarked on a project to find out. It required an elaborate subterfuge: travelling to Venice, taking a job as a hotel chambermaid, and carrying a camera and dictaphone in her cleaning bucket so that while she was cleaning the rooms she could document the objects she came across.

Voyeuristic and intrusive as here investigations were, the strongest impression created by the photographs and Calle’s diary entries is how little you can really tell about anyone from their things. The rumpled beds, postcards, garments, handkerchiefs, appointment diaries, photographs, toiletries, are all at once particular and generic. Ultimately, you can only speculate on the identity and life of the couple who smoke Camel cigarettes, read Last Exit to Brooklyn, wear Ray-Bans and leave their socks to dry on the bathroom radiator.

As a reader you can slip between being an unsuspecting hotel guest, or being Calle, covertly eating one of their chocolates from the box they’ve left in the room, as she photographs their unmade bed. Now, three decades afterwards, we are also examining the details of a pre-digital world, with Hotel C's floral and flocked 1970s wallpapers, clunky rotary-dial telephones, and analogue devices.

Published by Siglio in 2021, this version of The Hotel is the first to be published as a standalone book in English, although most of Calle’s projects are published in book form as well as exhibited. Many of them feature objects, either as intermediaries signifying (often broken) relationships or memories, or as talismans, connected to some kind of resonant life story or event. They are familiar kinds of things, but made particular, charged with emotional and psychological significance.

(For those interested in the academic side of things, I’ve written a chapter about Sophie Calle and objects: “Self Extension: Material Agency, Intimacy, and Chance in Sophie Calle's Object Relationships” as a part of the book Material Selves: Object Biographies and Identities in Motion. I can send you a copy if you’d like to read it and don’t have access otherwise.)

Elsewhere this month

This Saturday, 29 March, I have a table at the Blue Mountains Zine Fair at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre: do come by and say hello if you’re around. I’ll have my new Disposable Camera, and recent books and zines.

In early April I’m travelling to Newcastle for the excellent Newcastle Writers’ Festival where I’ll be speaking on a panel about the Newcastle Library zine collection with Bastian Fox Phelan, Nina Katzmarski, and James Turvey.

If you’d like to pre-order Calendar, which will be published in October, you can do so at the Upswell website.

Thank you for reading, enjoy the change of season, and I will see you in April.

Vanessa.

Early on in 2022 when I was writing Calendar I decided I would use numbers, 1-365, rather than dates. I wanted it to be a calendar - a structure for organising days - rather than a daybook that was attached to specific dates with all their associations. When January was over and I proceeded with object 32, it came with a feeling that I was breaking free, committing to making something new.

I know the year as objects, I know it as numbers. I am writing this on the 53rd day of the year. The sun is out and when I go into the yard to rake up some leaves, I find a tiny soft rainbow feather that springs into vibrant colour when the light catches it. Objects are still appearing daily for me. Maybe now they always will.

Object of the Month (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)

Perkins Paste

Object 34 is a pink plastic pot with a cracked white lid, and item recognisable to people who went to school in Australia up to the 1980s - or maybe even only NSW? I'm not sure how far its distribution extended. The paste was made in a factory in western Sydney, on a street that now has auto repair shops and fibreglass and flooring factories. The address was printed on the label, as well as rosettes that proudly announced 'Since 1934'.

The glue stopped being made sometime in the 1980s, making me the last of the Perkin's Paste generation. Even without the 1934 rosettes it had seemed like a product from another time, and as a child such anachronistic things appealed to me. Perhaps it was because I spent so much time with my grandparents, in their house full of objects from before I was born, that I had this affinity. I can't say for sure, but this attraction to objects of the past has been a part of me ever since. Now the objects of the past include many from my own lifetime.

The paste was a white jelly that smelled of almonds but was made out of potato starch. You smeared it on the back of whatever you were seeking to affix using a white spatula on the underside of the lid. It stuck fast for a while, but over time would dry and crumble. The label said 'Non Toxic', but it could have very well said 'Edible', because that was the use many children put it to.

In a few more years it was the 1990s and I was a teenager. One day, walking along Oxford Street, I came upon an unusual department store called REMO. It stocked a careful selection of practical and novelty items, among them pens that could write in space, striped Breton shirts, chocolate sardines, Fortune Teller Miracle Fish, and t-shirts printed with the Perkin's Paste logo. Seeing this shirt was perhaps the first time I encountered nostalgia for a product from my own past. It was an early instance, too, of me recognising the phenomena whereby the thing you think only you notice, you realise others do to.

My Perkin's Paste pot is missing the label, but I well remember the crimson pink tub with white lid and how it was to pop it open, releasing the marzipan smell of the glue. I found the empty pot in the early 2000s among a collection of back-shed items in an op shop, priced at 20c. A find! Occasionally I had searched for Perkin’s Paste on Ebay. Results came up sometimes, but then I was not in a position to spend the $50 I remember one seller charging for a pot of dried up glue ($50 was a lot, then). Since I acquired the Perkin’s Paste pot the lid has cracked in multiple places, the plastic wearing out like the glue used to so quickly, and I would imagine there are very few of them around now, outside of landfill where almost all of them would have ended up.

Object Project

Usually my experience of visiting Perimeter Books in Melbourne is to sigh over the beautiful, interesting art books not feeling as if I can justify buying them, but sometimes one will compel me. This was how it was with Elizabeth Smolarz's Encyclopedia of Things: Smolarz is a photographer who works with people and their personal objects, spending time with them to create an arrangement and then a portrait of their most significant possessions. The photographs form enigmatic still-lifes. Even if the objects are familiar kinds of things, you immediately wonder about what they might mean in relationship to each other, and to the person they belong to.

In the book, the object portraits are accompanied by texts on the facing page. Rather than explain the objects or describe the people who they belong to, the authors speculate with them, connecting with their own memories, or writing something reflective, descriptive or playful with them. This capacity of objects to connect, to link up to speculations, daydreams, life stories and histories, is something I investigate in Calendar.

This collection could be objects bought in one afternoon, but we know it's a collection of someone's most precious, talismanic items. What's the significance of the shirt printed with shirts and palm trees? Who made the cumbersome pottery mug? Is the religious book ('The Man of Sorrows') an heirloom, or something the owner of this shirt printed with shirts reads for guidance? The text that accompanies it (by Jillian Steinhauer) is something like a tarot reading, with objects instead of cards: 'There's a freedom here to envision who you are and who you want to be. Freedom inherited or gifted or simply made by shaping material between your hands.'

Elsewhere this month

I’ve made a new issue of my zine Disposable Camera, written while I was at Lighthouse Arts last month and photocopied a few weeks ago, as I watched kids in back-to-school stationery shopping frenzies (I was touched this still occurs). If you'd like a copy send $5 to PO Box 1879 Strawberry Hills NSW 2012, or you can also order one on Etsy or contact me for Paypal.

I spent a weekend watching back to back episodes of The Young Ones and wrote a piece about the series for HiLoBrow: The Young Ones

If you're in Sydney I'm doing a talk at the State Library in March, about artistic responses to the city, for Portraits of a City, with Michael Kelly and Reg Mombassa.

And of course if you’d like to pre-order Calendar before its October release, you can visit the Upswell website.

Take care and I'll see you in the 90s (i.e. the end of March).

The rooms in the lighthouse cottage are very bright, up here on the top of the headland. The room I am working in is white and plain, a blank canvas to set up however I like. My usual writing environment is to have things everywhere, with plenty to catch my eye and act as my companions, and it didn’t take me long after taking this photograph to spread out everything I've brought with me across the table. Notebooks, papers, folders, index cards, teapot, and a talismanic pencil box which I bought the day before I left to come here.

The pencil box, wooden with a ship inlaid into the lid, once belonged to David from Moss Vale (his address is written in blue fountain pen ink under the lid). I went straight to it in the op shop, drawn to it almost before I saw it. After my Calendar year, hyper-aware of the objects in my days, I have finely-tuned my object radar into a sixth sense. It often feels now as if things find me, rather than the other way around. The pencil box has a pleasing action, the top tray swiveling out from the one beneath, all secured by the sliding panel that makes up the lid.

Object of the Month - Pebble

Looking through the first month of objects in Calendar, I remember starting it. For the first few weeks, everything went smoothly. I had a new notebook and a new document, 'calendar.docx' (this has now proliferated into 40-odd versions with increasingly unwieldy names like 'Calendar100_edit_Aug23' and, most recently, 'Calendar_Final MS_Jan2025'). Trusting the events of the day to direct me towards an object was working as a method, objects and stories were forthcoming. Maybe it would all work out after all, and the objects and days would roll out neatly, all the way to the end of the year.

Writing in real time makes you vulnerable to unfolding events. By object 13 something happened that was so stressful and awful that I thought I had no choice but to stop and consign ‘calendar.docx’ to the realm of false starts. Writing is my anchor in difficult times, but this writing is of a kind that turns inwards: I rarely publish directly what I write in times of crisis, even if I do end up writing about the experience later. Obviously I kept going, because Calendar exists, but I remember now how almost didn't get beyond the first two weeks. The nature of the objects changed, too, so number 21 is a sharp pebble I hold onto in a doctor’s appointment, ‘so the discomfort of this becomes the difficult thing we have to face'.

Writing this an unease comes over me - do I even still have the pebble? (Later update - yes, of course, as if I ever throw anything away. It’s in an ashtray full of assorted little things - tube of glitter, lucky handbag penny, knitted Swiss Roll by my much-missed friend Miss Helen, blue-beaded shoe clip etc. - on my desk, exactly where I remembered it being.) I am thankful to the pebble for being a connection to the earth and to slow time. It joins some of the more elemental objects in Calendar - rose quartz, a seashell, a dust bunny (which for some reason has become the object that comes first to mind whenever someone asks me ‘like what?’ when I say ‘I’ve written a book of objects for every day of the year’ - asking this seems to be an excellent way for my mind to go completely blank, apart from dust).

Object Project

Of all the forces that guide my writing one of the strongest is chance, and especially so for Calendar, determined as it is by the events of the day. It guides my reading, too: I'm always on the lookout for books I've hitherto not encountered, and am rarely able to walk past a secondhand bookshop without feeling the pull of what I might find inside.

Walking past Rice's Bookshop in Hamilton, I felt the lure. Rice's is the oldest secondhand bookshop in Newcastle, and I imagine it didn't look all that much different in 1969, when it opened. It has changed location a few times over the past decade, and is remarkable for the fact that in every one of these locations, it has managed to look pretty much the same inside, a world unto itself. The guy who runs the shop was in his usual position, reading behind the counter with his feet resting up on it, listening to a CD of The Cure's singles compilation Standing on a Beach.

There was a copy of Jenny Erpenbeck's Not a Novel there, and I opened it to read a favourite object-essay: 'The Pressure Cooker'. It's only two pages and takes less than the length of 'In Between Days' for me to read. It coheres, in its short length, a set of distinct feelings around parental objects and the difficulty of letting them go. The pressure cooker had belonged to her mother, the 'pot of my childhood', in which her mother had made a certain cabbage stew. Erpenbeck has the pressure cooker in the boot of her car, ready to drop it off to the recyling centre as rubbish, but it's not as easy to discard as she expected. Her tone is pragmatic, making it all the more deeply strange when Erpenbeck cannot let go/the object persists.

The brevity of the essay fits its subject, like it was itself concocted in a pressure cooker, condensed down from a wider set of experiences. Its ingredients are the interrelationship of memory and objects, physicality, emotional connection. I think of the 1970s crockpots and slow cookers I often used to see in op shops, their orange or brown ceramic pots weighty and capable. One day I bought one, and found it still worked perfectly.

Elsewhere this month

I’ve set up an account on Bluesky for Calendar and other writing updates, if you use that platform and would like to follow or send me a message there: I’m just new to it but it’s good to have a non-Meta social media option.

Or use the post! If you’d like a Calendar postcard let me know your address and I will post you one.

Thank you for following along; I’ll write to you again in the shortest month of the year.

I would sit in an accommodating hollow of sandstone, watching the waves and the diving cormorants, and the people doing laps of the pool. That could be me, I thought, if I was a better swimmer, if I wasn’t drawn to the sidelines. From the rocks I would write notes in the back of the marble-patterned hardcover index book, I was using at the time:

Notes/ Ocean Not a to do list, just thoughts

The Calendar book - a year, the day of ‘x’ like the French Republican Calendar, some object.

Later, in another entry, I elaborate:

‘Calendar’

Some moment/ incident connects to an object, which lights up a shade of feeling. A contemplation. A space for quiet. Moment // OBJECT // Feeling

The idea of it gathered force over that December, with the new year approaching. It could, perhaps, have started on any day of the year, but I wanted it to follow the pace of the year as it is shaped by the conventional calendar. Although it is only one way to measure time, this calendar determines so much of our lives; it felt important to have it running in the background.

Starting Calendar on January 1st made the project a resolution of sorts, although I’m not generally in the habit of making them. At the end of each year I’m much more inclined to look back, rather than look forward, to remember rather than predict. Most years, in the quiet last week of December, I read over my account of the year in my journals. This way a year is something I can hold in my hand, before it joins the more amorphous and discontinuous processes of memory.

I do have one list of New Year’s resolutions that I earnestly wrote out in 1999, a few pages of minor ambitions that’s more like a to-do list than anything else. It begins:

Despite still avoiding swimming, and as yet having no capacity to ‘tidy and pare down belongings’, my young self can be assured I did pretty much everything else. I got the computer monitor and my self esteem fixed. I would also, many years after making this list, take ‘write every day’ to the next level by spending an entire year writing a book day by day.

Object of the Month

This month in Calendar records the objects that came to my attention as the year reached its end, some of them particular to the season, others as unexpected as ever, such as a bottle of 4711 cologne that is object number 354. As in previous newsletters I will keep the story I wrote about it in Calendar for the book itself, and reflect in other ways on the object: there’s always more to say.

The label design of 4711 cologne is blue and gold with filigree ornaments and medals from its successes at various 19th-century world’s fairs. If the stock of it in chemist shops is to be believed, it is still a popular item, although it’s hard to imagine anyone under the age of 70 taking it up as their signature scent. It smells a little like gin, a little like lemons, and the whole package looks like something that would be on the bureau in one of those time-capsule houses that are discovered after having been sealed up for decades.

I have two bottles of 4711, one very small, 20ml, and the other very big, 800ml. They’re a memory object more than anything else. I grew up being told stories of how my great-grandmother would dab it on her wrists in hot weather or when she had headaches. This medicinal use impressed me and I liked the idea it could potentially be that powerful. My grandmother kept a bottle of 4711 on her dressing table, my mother keeps some in her bathroom, and I have kept up the tradition with my two bottles. Sometimes I put some on, though the smell is sharp and volatile, and I can never tell if I like it, or if it is comforting or disquieting.

Object Project

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay is a collection of ‘essayettes’, short essays on daily joys - bird feeding, palm reading, pecans, fireflies, flowers in the hands of statues, carrying a tomato seedling on a plane - written daily over the course of a year. ‘I came up with a number of rules,’ Gay writes in the preface, ‘write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand.'

After setting out the rules, he continues: ‘Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up…’ The parenthetical note of how he ‘skipped some days’ stuck in my head. It made me think about rules, and writing within constraints, and how these mechanisms operate as structures, aids, and complications (a topic for another newsletter: much to say) - do you stick faithfully to the rules, do you break them, and how? There are 102 delights in The Book of Delights - that’s roughly one delight every three and a half days - and this pacing, spaced out through the days, felt true to the experience of delight, which is unpredictable, and is most delightful when it takes you by surprise.

The essays are, like the experience of delight itself, brief and exhilarating, capturing moments, memories and reflections, centred around delight as a sensation, a form of attention, a feeling, a response, a guiding principle. They are both compact and effusive as they capture and stretch beyond their moments, and show the capacity of delight as a connective human force. They are also funny, and often a little goofy (in ‘Bobbleheads’: “the toy alerts me regularly to the fact that people are delighted by such goofy, ridiculous things, which reminds me of a fairly common childlikeness, which encourages softheartedness, I think.”)

When I began writing Calendar, I wondered - would I skip some days? Some days I was tempted to, but I stuck with it, writing day after day, usually at night, in the hours before I go to bed, which is my favourite time to write. Objects aren’t as fundamentally unpredictable as delight. Rather than focus on emotion, I wanted to focus on the things themselves. Part of this was to show how objects are in profusion, all around, and every one of them has a meaning, character, presence or story that can be scrutinised or considered. Profusion was essential, too, to showing how readily things are discarded or sidelined, regarded as invisible. What would happen if I made it my mission to observe them properly, day after day?

New Year

We are into the last days of the year now, when the holidays interrupt the usual pattern. The days can feel parenthetical, aside from regular time, and I’ve always enjoyed them for this reason. Today I’m going to start to read over everything I’ve written this year, see what I remember, what I’ve forgotten, what I might carry forward into the year to come. See you there.

Making Time

Writers have the ability to manipulate time: to make it run backwards or forwards, to extend, compress or pause it. In this way, a writer can attempt to put into words the experience of time, which is never as predictable as measurements register. While the standard Gregorian calendar is based in part on celestial phenomena - the year is the earth’s rotation around the sun, the day the rotation of the earth on its axis, the month, roughly, the cycle of the moon - it is an invention, culturally wrought, with its origins in financial and religious schedules and their systems of control (the word ‘calendar’ comes from the Latin word ‘calends’, the first day of the month, when debts were due).

The grid of days, divided into weeks and months, is only one way of measuring time. Many other ways co-exist. Lifespans, lifetimes, memories, souvenirs. Cycles, repetitions, echoes. There are the patterns of weather and plant and animal behaviour that determine Aboriginal methods of marking time through the seasons. Where I live, on Gadigal country, this time of year is Bayin Gura in the Dharug calendar (as described in the Six Dharug seasons) - cool getting warmer, with the bright purple dianella berries out in profusion by the river. I notice them when I go walking and fight the urge to squeeze them to release their colour.

Calendars provide structure, giving form to cycles and repetitions. Within these systems, memory is an unpredictable experience of time: past in the present, emerging or interrupting, folding time back. Writing Calendar, one of the time relationships I was interested in was the memories connected to objects, be these personal, cultural or material memories, as a way of showing the complexity of time in any one moment.

Object of the Month

In each of these newsletters I will choose an object from the corresponding month in Calendar, and give its backstory. This month it is object 317, Giant Comb.

The comb came from the Marie Louise hair salon, which I wrote about in Mirror Sydney, an iconic Sydney business with a pink and purple 50s facade (the facade remains fronting a restaurant, the salon closed over a decade ago). When I went in for haircuts in the early 2000s it was a much for the experience of the salon, which was decorated with bright kitsch objects. A tame white cockatoo hopped around between the backs of the chairs while Nola, the hairdresser, snipped away.

When the contents of the Marie Louise were sold in 2013 I queued up outside, ready to acquire some mementos of the salon, which ended up being a bottle of blue rinse and a giant comb. When I was in the salon with Nola and the cockatoo my eyes had roamed around the objects decorating the mirrors: photographs, artificial flowers, the Giant Comb. I noticed the comb in particular because as a child I had seen such items as prizes at amusement parks and video arcades. They were the kind of useless, desirable prize I never had the manual skill to acquire. However now I was an adult and I had developed other skills that allowed for me to recoup such childhood disappointments.

As is the case with all of the objects I wrote about, there are many stories associated with each, and I could choose only one. The Marie Louise was only the start, and I ended up writing something different entirely about the comb in Calendar. But now when you read it, you will know where it came from.

Object Project

One of my favourite books is Douglas Coupland’s short story collection Life After God, which was published in 1994. This was a few years after his debut novel, Generation X, which popularised the term and propelled Coupland to stardom and the difficult position of being the spokesperson for an entire generation. The edition I had of Generation X was a big square book with wide page margins, in which were printed definitions of 80/90s neologisms (McJob, Sick Building Syndrome, emotional ketchup burst) and Jenny-Holzer-esque slogans (‘The Love of Meat Prevents Any Real Change’, and my favourite ‘We’re Behaving Like Insects’ which, to my now-embarrassment, I painted on a t-shirt and would wear around combined with a purple tie-dyed petticoat and 14-hole Docs with purple laces. But it was the 90s and I was a teenager, what choice did I have?)

Life After God was also published in an unconventional format, smaller than a usual paperback, a size that might fit in a pocket and be easy to carry around. On the cover was a photograph of a little kid in the chlorine-blue water of a backyard swimming pool, that seemed to me to be a resonance with the cover image of Nirvana’s Nevermind. In the late 90s I found a copy for $5 in the Half Back book exchange in Crows Nest (on a recent visit to Crows Nest I was astounded to find this shop much the same as it was thirty years ago - I had to check I was not wearing my homemade t-shirt and purple petticoat, in case I’d traveled back in time).

The stories of Life After God are about broken families, driving, shopping malls, nuclear fears, depression, and the transcendent power of everyday moments. Reading it back then felt like a transformation, a realisation that a quiet, observant way of being could be powerful. The stories put into words something of the way I often felt, that by paying close attention to the details around me and to my thoughts, I would break through to an understanding of the world and my place in it.

Every section, most of which were only a couple of pages or less, included funny little drawings, also by Coupland. They were carefully but simply sketched, and of scenes and objects like a piece of toast, a swingset, a balloon, a martini, a tent in the rain, a shopping centre parking lot, a camera, a broken vase, a packet of dental floss… mundane things around which each vignette or moment cohered. Later I found out that Coupland had originally made a DIY version of the book which he gave to friends, as described in this 1994 interview:

In search of a low-tech topic after writing his take on ambitious twentysomethings, Shampoo Planet, Coupland decided to explore - no kidding - the Irish potato famine of 1845 to 1847. But somehow, short stories "started popping out of me."

Coupland fashioned them into small books, bound at a nearby Kinko's Copies center, that he gave to friends. "I had no idea they'd become a book-book until near the end."

So that Life After God kept the feel of these "mini-books," Coupland asked that it remain smaller than the average hardback.

This made sense: the stories have a conversational tone, as if they were being told to a friend. There is a quietness and playfulness about them, a sense of a curious mind figuring something out, trying to match the precise detailing of the outer world with inner wisdom.

As well as the similarity with the combination of drawings and vignettes, the Kinko’s versions also reminded me of my work on Calendar. When I’m editing I like to make a book version of the manuscript, so I can read it that way rather than as a document.

This way, I can also carry it with me on my travels and read it in the way that I would any other book, as if it was written by someone else, an important distancing mechanism.

Other Projects

Earlier this year I visited my friend and writing partner Katie Haegele. We’ve made zines together (Winter Here, Summer Here; Mugs) but this was the first time we had met in person. Of course, we had to make a zine together to mark the occasion. The zine, Hour of Blue Sky, is made up of alternating autobiographical stories from us both, written after walking together in Laurel Hill cemetery, a hilltop cemetery above the Schuylkill River. Being together in the same space and time we wanted to write something that was of this moment. We liked the idea of a book of hours, short texts linked to particular times of day. I had also always liked the title of the Clarice Lispector novel The Hour of the Star, and we devised four different hours based on our time together: blue sky, falling leaves, nests, aunts.

As well as making the zine, we recorded the stories and pressed them as a 7” record, on the record cutting machines that Katie’s partner Joe uses for his record label Displaced Snail. Their machines are from the 1930s and 40s and were used to make recordings of live radio performances. Now such machines have been repurposed for making DIY vinyl records.

You can listen to and download Hour of Blue Sky here and buy a copy of the zine here.

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Thank you for reading this month’s newsletter. I’ll be back again before the year is over.

Vanessa.

In 2022, I resolved to write a new book. My essay collection Gentle and Fierce had been published the year before and, as it was now making its way in the world, something new was beginning to feel possible. For a while after I finish a book it is difficult for me to properly conceive of writing another. Everything I try to write is in the pattern of the book I have just been working on, and I start to suspect I have come to the end of my abilities for invention. But by now I know that this happens after every big project. With patience the new idea, the new way, will come.

When I say I resolved, I quite literally enacted a new year’s resolution, and began the book on January 1st. Every day for that year, I vowed, I would write a short essay/story/meditation/reflection based on an object that, at some point during the day, made itself present to me. My inspiration for this was the French Republican calendar, which was used in France for a little over a decade at the turn of the 18th century. The calendar stripped the year of religious associations and revised the pattern of the months, giving them names based on seasonal changes (such as Pluviôse, winter rain; or Thermidor, summer heat). Each month had three ten-day weeks within it, part of a drive towards decimalisation that also saw daily time revised into ten, rather than 24 hours. Each day was also given the name of an object, all of them from rural and agricultural life: day of the horseradish, pickaxe, cucumber, or tulip. In this way, there was an identity for every day of the year.

With this as a model I decided to write my own calendar, made up of the objects around me. Every day I would stay alert, waiting for an object to stand out or, more accurately, for the object to make itself present to me. Ideally, that was how it worked: I didn’t force it, it was as if the object chose me rather than the other way around. These were not the bucolic objects of the French Republican calendar, but the daily and memory objects of my urban life. Some were precious things that had an established personal significance, but I more often found myself writing about objects that were ephemeral or trivial, that might be seen as junk or not worthy of notice. Being a lifelong op-shopper and a clutterbug, I was already well attuned to this category of object, and my days were full of such things. A chess piece, silica gel packets, a bobby pin, a skip bin, a silver pendant in the shape of a peanut… in this way, I gradually devised an object for every day of the year.

Choosing the day’s object was usually not difficult, but the dedication to writing about it every day was. I knew that if I missed or skipped days I would lose the important connection to writing in real time: I wanted to come as close as possible to the pace of writing and living being one and the same. Every night I wrote that day’s object, so the following day I could be receptive to the next one. I did this no matter how hard the day had been (and some days were indeed very difficult that year). Later in the process I drew an illustration of the object, as a further way to focus attention on it. All this comes out of my fascination with projects that have a daily intensity to them, and an elaborate logic/constraint - such as Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, and Georges Perec’s Lieux - Calendar is my own attempt at such a project.

In this monthly newsletter I will share some of my writing processes and the influences that made Calendar, ahead of it being published in October 2025, by Upswell. Thank you for joining me, and do be in touch if you have any questions or curiosities, or aspects of the book you’d like me to write about.

Object of the Month

In each issue of this newsletter I will share one of the objects from Calendar from the corresponding month. The objects in Calendar are numbered, rather than dated, to de-emphasise the calendar as we know it, and instead focus on the cycle of the year and the succession of days, presenting time as a succession of experiences, impressions, memories and patterns.

Despite strong competition from a message in a bottle, a panda nightlight, and a carved pumpkin, I have chosen a memory object this time. It is the object that anchors my first memory, and I was led to it that day by the ‘core memory’ trend on TikTok, in which people were posting their core, self-defining memories. Although there is neurologically no such thing as a ‘core’ memory - memories are rewritten every time you experience them - it led me to my own first memory, which I recall only because this Minnie Mouse Matchbox car anchors it.

The story itself I will leave to Calendar, but I will say that I have, a couple of times, come across this Minnie Mouse figurine elsewhere, in an op shop or antique store, and when I do it is always a shock. It is so tightly woven into my own life story as the place where my memory starts. Encountering it elsewhere I have a moment of dissonance where the object - as novelty as it is, a plastic Minnie Mouse huge inside her tiny car - opens up beyond my associations, as a thing in the world that leads to so many other stories, histories, and memories. In Calendar, Minnie is object #301.

Object Project

From month to month I will also share projects that connect to Calendar in some way, with a focus on small-press literary works, artworks, and object and constraint-based writing.

The first is One Story a Day by Genevieve Callaghan. Callaghan handwrote a story a day for 1001 days, posting each to @one_story_a_day and the stories then went on to be published in book form by no more poetry in 2022. These poetic microfictions reflect captured thoughts, narratives and daily moments under evocative names (‘Things that don’t exist anymore’, ‘Of Woodsmoke, of Lilac Evenings’, ‘The People Want to Pat the Dog’). Poetry, fiction, autobiography and diary all at once, the stories are charming and poignant, electric in their brevity. This reading experience of the book is different to following the project day-to-day as it was being written: there’s a thrill to be able to move so quickly through time, story after story, day after day, page after page. One Story a Day has all the companionable powers of a daybook while being attuned to language and the strangeness of life.

Until next month

Thank you for following the making of Calendar - I’ll see you next month.

Vanessa.