“Writing friends have said, ‘Take trouble for a walk’,” Charlotte Wood says. “Whatever you’re trying to resolve in the book, or whatever. It does work: your mind can just wander.”
Most mornings see the author pacing a loop through the gentle slopes and restored wetlands of Sydney park. “I think they’ve done such a beautiful job,” she tells me. “It was old, poisoned land, basically.” But, though Wood is emphatic about the importance of staying close to nature, her walks are not so much about the park itself. They fall somewhere between routine and ritual, a buffer of personal order when the world is pushing in.
It’s a September afternoon when we meet at Wood’s home in the city’s inner west. On the short stroll to the park, we chat over the sounds of birds and mild traffic, children finishing school, our footsteps on the concrete. Posters and painted signs urging people to vote yes hang in windows and on fences. Wood’s stride is brisk and relaxed, but her voice is slightly clipped with worry. “It doesn’t look good,” she remarks. “There’s a real feeling now of … if the referendum fails, what are we left with?”
The narrator of her new novel is a woman in political retreat, grappling with her own “vision of failure” to affect change. Stone Yard Devotional is Wood’s 10th book, more acutely personal than her previous work. “I’m less and less certain, the older I get, about how to do the right thing,” she says. “I understand the appeal of running away.” She pauses for the familiar overhead roar of a plane taking off, or coming in.
“I find it easy to fall into despair, to be honest … But I don’t want to be despairing in my work.”
“Sometimes you read literary fiction that just sort of bludgeons you with how fucked the world is, and I don’t want to write like that. The transformation happens in trying to make it into art – not just putting sadness from the world on to the page and offering it up.
“What I hope I’m doing is somehow making that sadness into something bearable, by shaping it, and combining it with other things.”
We reach the chimneys from the old brickworks that mark the park’s north-west entrance. As the road noise fades behind us, she seems to make up her mind to broach something. “Last year I got cancer,” she tells me. “And two of my sisters got cancer at the same time.
“Everyone’s fine,” she hastens to add. “[But] it was full on.”
The disease killed both Wood’s parents before she was 30 – losses that, as she has previously described, divided the world sharply into what did and did not matter. “I sort of thought that I knew that,” she says wryly. “Then this happened: really, really, an understanding that I am mortal, we are mortal. We all know that … but we kind of, most of the time, pretend we don’t.
“It was like I had acid poured on my whole life, and only the essential things remained.”
(“But in a good way,” she adds, quite genuinely.)
One of these essentials is Wood’s awareness of the physical – a current that pulls beneath all her fiction. “We are much more our bodies than we acknowledge,” she says. We crest the hill, discussing a scene in this latest novel where her narrator’s body makes itself suddenly and dramatically present, and pass a man whistling to his dog. “It’s about crisis,” Wood says. “I do think your body tells you things before your mind understands them.” Bodies are, she points out, “a great equaliser”. “Also, I just think they’re interesting. They make us vulnerable.”
She is fascinated and moved by what it might take for any of us to understand events that befall us outside our control, and recalls trying to explain this to a close friend.
“I said, ‘I feel like I’m caught in a rip, taken away from my life. Everybody’s there on the shore, and I’m being taken out.’” She and her sisters had no choice but to surrender, she says. “Then [the rip] brought us back. But not to the same place.”
For Wood, 2022 was a time of “being totally removed from your normal things, your normal certainty”. It’s easy enough to connect this sense of openness to her artistic practice. There’s less anxiety in her writing now, she says (being ten books in doesn’t hurt), and with Stone Yard Devotional she wanted “to give a lot of space, have unanswered questions”. Wood, quoting Amanda Lohrey, tells me she likes work “that has some mystery in it”.
She admires Anne Enright, Deborah Levy, Joan London, Jude Rae, Céline Sciamma, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Strout – women whose ostensibly quiet art “is about more than one thing”. A mother and teenage daughter walk by us holding hands – a rich, unexplained moment that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Wood’s stories.
We chat about her love of peaceful things – pottering in the garden, working in the little backyard studio she shares with her musician husband, Sean; the creative importance, for her, of limiting time online, of meditation (“I’m really bad at it,” she says contentedly), of “an orderly life”, of a partner “who wants to be with you because you’re an artist”.
By now we’re back among the cars, and the light has deepened into early evening. Wood peels off home, but a moment from the walk lingers vividly, and a line she shared from artist Rosalie Gascoigne.
“She said, ‘All I want is for the work to be self-respecting.’ I love that so much. It’s hard-won, that self-respect – and I feel like that about my work now.”
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood is out now through Allen & Unwin
