Dying of tuberculosis in Rome, the poet John Keats requested his epitaph: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’  

A few weeks ago, I attended a presentation about the first attempts at universities in Australia to support the inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities. Laudably, these programs aren’t limited to vocational paths but allow participants to study the subjects they are most interested in.

Back in 2013, I began an epic novel. For the next three and a half years, I consistently worked on this project. Its working title changed at least three times, before I finally settled on Dreamers.    

I couldn’t move to Australia even if I wanted to, due to having two children with autism.

Juvenilia is frequently bad, but charmingly so; it seems emotionally lucid and unembarrassed of its own literary shortcomings.

Art is a magnificent illusion of possibility. It expresses the best of us, as well as the worst: it encompasses everything we are.

None of us can rehearse grief. It is an intangible force that comes into focus and disables us when we are least prepared to deal with it.

‘Loud’ writing attracts attention with its zeitgeisty theme or high-concept plot. An ambitious, edgy approach to form or genre that demands to be read as spectacle. A punchy, fast-paced writing style that doesn’t so much invite you into the story as hustle you along with it.

Whether Abbott’s position is genuinely held or simply a vindictive political gesture is difficult to assess. I don’t think it matters as much as his goal – the goal of denialists more generally – to ‘keep minds turned off on the meta-level,’ as philosopher Elizabeth Minnich puts it, so there are ‘no questions about [the issue], no looking back and wondering, no reaching for connections to beliefs.’

All living things are categorised, in order to make the dazzling, teeming variety of life comprehensible. Scientific taxonomies run from the general to the particular: human beings, for example, are in the domain of the Eukaryote, the kingdom of Animalia, the phylum of Chordata, the class of Mammalia, the order of Primates, the family of Hominidae and the genus of Homo, hence our species name, Homo sapiens – ‘wise man’.

There is a word I love in Italian for which there is no equivalent in English: dimenticatoio, the place for things you want to forget, or have forgotten already. You might say, for instance, that an old, cherished custom has ended up in the dimenticatoio, a concept you would likely render in English with the phrase ‘has fallen into oblivion’.

When I was sixteen, I wrote a romance short story by stringing together clichés from Jean Kent and Candace Shelton’s The Romance Writers’ Phrase Book, a kind of thesaurus for expressions such as ‘his strong hands roamed like carefree mustangs over the melting softness of her body.’ Now, as I reread ‘The Dark and Stormy (And Writhing with the Raw Sensuousness that Pressed Them Together like Soldering Metals) Night’, the story sings with supercilious delight at my own cleverness. You can tell I felt no stake in this story. It was not about me, or for me.

This is your bedtime ritual. After playing a tune at 528 Hz – a frequency billed to ‘release inner conflict and struggle’ – you settle into a simple weightlifting routine. Then you drink a casein shake, put on your headphones and turn on the music player. For the next several hours, the player will recite a list of words in French for you to absorb while you sleep, as you lay your head on a pillow that smells faintly of vanilla. In eight or preferably nine hours, you will wake up slimmer, energised and slightly more fluent at French.

A few weeks ago I was on the invite list, along with my colleague Professor Gary Foley, to the opening of a major Indigenous art exhibition at the University of Melbourne. The reasoning for the invitations was threefold: we had both, at one time, been senior curators at the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum (the museum is involved in the exhibition); we had both been recipients of the Chancellor’s Prize for the best PhD in the arts faculty; we are both, obviously, alumni of the university.

The #MeToo movement was founded more than a decade ago by a black woman, Tarana Burke, as a way of helping survivors of sexual violence in low-wealth black communities in the United States. Since then it has become shorthand for so many things, many of them far removed from the grassroots approach to healing advocated by Burke. I have watched as it became a lightning rod for anger. I have watched the inevitable backlash gather force. I have watched it turn into a weapon used against women by men.

I always hated school. Hated the teachers who beat us at the first nervous twitch of the morning. Hated sitting in a box of a room, watching the hands of a clock crawl across its own face. Hated being barked at by teachers: ‘Look this way, Birch!’ they would yell whenever I became transfixed by the river flowing outside the window. But I did love reading.