Sara Dowse is a prize-winning Australian novelist and reviewer. Born in Chicago, Dowse grew up in Hollywood, the daughter of an actor mother and celebrity lawyer father. After experiencing anti-Semitism, she left for Australia in 1958 at the age of nineteen. After studying arts at the University of Sydney, she arrived in Canberra in 1968 and worked as a journalist and also as a tutor and publishing assistant at the College of Advanced Education, now the University of Canberra. Dowse became the inaugural head of the Women’s Affairs Section of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet for the Whitlam government.
After resigning from the public service, Dowse worked as a teacher at the Australian National University, a reviewer for newspapers and journals, and became a writer of novels and short stories. She was forty-five when her first novel, West Block: The Hidden World of Canberra’s Mandarins, based on her experiences in the Prime Minister’s department, was published by Penguin in 1984.
Dowse has also been awarded many prizes, including the ACT Book of the Year (in 1997 with Marion Halligan), and was short-listed for the Steele Rudd Award (1995) and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Prize (1996). She has also been the recipient of an Australia Council fellowship and a Harold White fellowship (1991).
Dowse is known to be someone of considerable warmth and generosity, along with a great political drive. Interviewer Nigel Featherstone spoke with her in the context of the publication of her most recent novel, As The Lonely Fly, about three Jewish women and their worldwide quest to find answers to reconcile with their complicated past.
Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone
INTERVIEWER
Congratulations on the publication of As the Lonely Fly – it’s a grand and multi-layered novel. Can you talk a little about the work’s gestation?
DOWSE
Well, for one thing, it was a long one – more on the order of an elephant’s, some might say. Yet the ‘25 years in research and writing’ on the flap of the cover conjures up a misleading picture of steadfast application. There were many stumbles, distractions, disruptions and obstacles along the way. That said, the mere fact of 21 years between my last novel and this one has begged an explanation.
In 1989, on a Harold White Fellowship, I started research on what evolved into As the Lonely Fly. It was meant to be a biography. Not of a famous person, but of a little-known woman whose existence I hadn’t the slightest notion of until 1974. That was when my mother told me that her father’s sister had been a Soviet apparatchik. I was still working in the prime minister’s department then so I put what my mother told me on the backburner and there it stayed, simmering along until I was ready to do something about it. At that point I had published four novels, but fiction being such hard work, as you know, I somehow got it in my head that nonfiction would be less demanding. (Can you hear the gods laughing here?)
My work on the fellowship gave me the background. I submerged myself in Jewish and Russian history. By then I had learned that much of what my mother had said about her aunt was wrong, but much else of what I heard was wrong as well. Finally, I was able to establish, through a complex network of kin in the US and Israel, that my great aunt Lisa, like my grandfather, came from Bessarabia, a province of tsarist Russia that is now Moldova. I learned that before she became a Soviet functionary she had been a Zionist in British Mandate Palestine, that she became disillusioned with the Zionist project and joined the local communist party owing to its concern for what was happening to Arab labour. After supporting the Arab riot of 1929, she and some of the other members were jailed and sent back to Russia. But these were just the bones of the story. To assemble them into a valid narrative I needed documentation, and for that I needed to travel.
I went to Israel to search for any mention of my great aunt in the Central Zionist Archives, but when I got there they were closed for renovations. In Moscow I was given a bum steer by a fixer so missed out connecting with Memorial, the organisation set up to search for relatives’ papers in the archives. I went to Moldova and found the village she and my grandfather came from. I expected to return to these places, but then my relationship of 19 years broke up. For the second time in my life I found myself a single parent, so travel of this magnitude was out of the question. I wrote Digging, a therapy novel you could say, about the breakup instead.
Two years later I left for Canada with my new partner, hoping to finish the manuscript. I still had the contract with Penguin but other developments put the kibosh on it. The widespread restructuring of publishing in the late 1990s created the landscape of multinational conglomerates we’re familiar with today. To put it bluntly, the bean counters prevailed. Books were now entertainment, to be marketed as such. Having grown up in Hollywood, I knew the model well. You were only as good as your last book – the halcyon days when publishers backed writers they believed in through to maturity were over. Literary ‘stars’ were picked, literary fiction got a body blow, and readily identifiable and marketed genres were born.
The manuscript I presented was a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, and was immediately rejected. Not only did it not meet the new requirements, the personnel at Penguin had changed. Gone were the publisher and editor who had worked on my previous books. While other publishers showed interest, the manuscript was too long and would need a good edit, and budgets for editing had been cut. Even established writers began to pay for editing before offering manuscripts to publishers. Yet paradoxically, agents and publishers alike were on the hunt for new talent. The day of the exciting ‘debut’ novel had arrived.
At some stage I decided that, without the documentation, I might as well turn the manuscript into a novel. But in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, there was zilch interest in a communist central character. Nor was there much sympathy for any book that questioned the premise of Zionism or the wisdom of a Jewish-privileged state. For my sanity I took up painting, and more or less resigned myself to this novel never seeing the light of day unless I published it myself. So it would have stood had I not been led by the hand to Jen McDonald, who had just embarked on her own publishing venture. And times have changed.
INTERVIEWER
How did you approach the task of developing a manuscript that was, as you say, a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction?
DOWSE
I had a model, a book that not only touched on a familiar subject but offered a way of dealing with it. This was Kim Chernin’s In My Mother’s House, first published in 1983, but I read the Virago edition that came out in 1994, just after I’d returned from Russia and was looking for a way to assemble all the material I’d gained from my travels and the interviews I’d had. (Virago has re-released it, I see, in a twentieth anniversary edition.) Anyway, this was Chernin’s story of her mother, Rose Chernin, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who was a Communist Party organiser in New York and later in Los Angeles. So there were a number of parallels between her mother’s story and the one I was trying to write, as well as the parallels with Chernin’s story and my own. There’s the female communist relative, the sparseness of the written record, and the locale, Los Angeles, at a time when I was living there too. We are almost exact contemporaries: Chernin is two years younger than me. She had a solid reputation as a poet when the book was first published, but she’s written in a range of modes since and has branched out into psychotherapy, or what she calls ‘listening therapy’. But unlike my great aunt, whom I came to believe died the year I was born, Chernin’s mother was a powerful presence in her childhood, yet politics took her away from her daughter – so much so that Chernin’s aim in writing the book was to find what she could about the mother she really never knew. And because Rose Chernin had died and it was too late to discover everything, Chernin interspersed what she had with fictional accounts as well as autobiographical chapters, recounting what it was like to be a politico’s daughter.
Out of interest I’ve gone back to have a look at that early, mongrelised manuscript of mine, and here are a couple of excerpts that go some way towards illustrating the method, not to mention my preoccupations at the time:
My search began, of all places, in Paris, in the summer of 1989, in the middle of the bicentenary celebrations of the French Revolution. With hindsight, I see how significant this was, that time and that place. The French Revolution marks the birth of modernity and, for Jews, the first step towards citizenship in the modern world. At the time I thought my going to Paris resulted merely from a happy convergence of a number of factors in my personal life. My partner, a molecular biologist, had chosen the Pasteur Institute for his sabbatical. As a rule, I didn’t accompany him on his sabbaticals but this, after all, was Paris. I had never been to Paris, had never been to Europe in fact. My one great feat of travel had been to migrate to Australia in the 1950s, and I was limited thereafter to trips back to America. My mother, however, went to Paris often. It seemed an excellent opportunity to see more of the world and more of her too, and I wanted to question her further about my grandfather’s sister.
How much of the world that summer would that Soviet commissar have recognised? It was barely recognisable to me. I had grown up myself (if that is what you could call it) with two giant wars loping beside me. Born two nights after Kristallnacht, I had lived less than a year before World War Two was declared, and was only six when the Cold War overtook it, when ‘Communist’ became an ugly word again and my mother and stepfather were unable to get work because for a brief spell years before my mother had become one. Then, I was an adult, and the Left emerged as a credible force again, as it had been at the height of the Depression when my mother was a bristling young woman fired with a passion for justice, and in the forties when the United States and Russia were allies. The new credibility came with the swell of protest against the war in Vietnam and I let my hair frizz and marched in my bell-bottomed jeans and, overcoming my shyness, shouted myself hoarse with hundreds of thousands of others, and whole societies – American, Australian – had turned radical, as I had. But in the eighties all that had faded, a distant, melancholy, vaguely embarrassing tune. We were conservatives again, consuming with a vengeance and making new families, and the Right had risen as it had in the fifties. Right-wing governments ruled in almost all the Western democracies and even in countries like France or Australia, with socialist or labour governments, right-wing policies – smaller governments, freer markets – prevailed. Indeed it had become unfashionable even to call them such; in the changed political climate the terms ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ were said to have no meaning.
In Germany that summer, the eastern, Communist half was disintegrating. By the end of the year the wall that had separated it from the West for twenty-eight years had come down, and Germany was on its way towards reuniting. Indeed, Europe itself was uniting, though we could scarcely have believed it even then. All the countries of Eastern Europe were shedding their Communism; the puppet regimes were toppling because Moscow was bankrupt and was withdrawing its support. One by one they went, almost without resistance, not a thaw this time but an avalanche: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Yugoslovia, Albania. Even Ceausescu’s Romania fell with only a hiccup of a struggle. In France, where it had all begun two hundred years before, where the streets were awash with signs and symbols of the Revolution – the mobcaps and toy guillotine – we were moving through a kind of docu-drama. ‘Robespierre: Est-il Coupable?’ shrieked the Express placards at the corner kiosks. Revolution was in the air, but it was another revolution. The Cold War, that chilling bipolar disorder that had dominated the globe and my own puny life for five decades, was ending.
Soon Francis Fukiyama would publish his End of History, contending that the world had rejected ideology. The West had won. Capitalism had won. Consumptor victor, consumer triumphant. But though the signs were there that muggy July of 1989, this new revolution was not yet accomplished. The Warsaw Pact was crumbling, but few could have imagined that in two years’ time the Soviet Union itself would collapse, or that the socialist fervour that galvanised so many for so long would prove so totally moribund.
And then, a few chapters later, my great aunt’s response:
LISTEN to her, if you please. It has been my good fortune to witness these excursions of hers for more than a decade, if fortune is what you would call it. Well, perhaps it is. But why do I speak in years, when time, that sly trickster, no longer has meaning for me? As a matter of fact, not much that I once knew has any meaning for me. I suppose I should find this amusing. Not time, not work, not struggle, not pleasure, not pain. No pain as I once experienced it. No, I would sigh, if my sighing were to serve any purpose, no pain. Not even memory, because memory brings with it the notion of time, and there is no time where I’m speaking from. Time as a system, place as a map: these things exist, but in no material sense – at least for me. There is, as it happens, great freedom in this, a freedom, yes, that I longed for, yet a freedom for which I was wholly unprepared and was the last to have expected. But knowing this, this unshakeable, awe-inducing knowing, is fraught with consequence, and danger – a problem we’ll face again and again in the course of my story. Or whatever story she makes of it. It is all in her hands. Don’t imagine that I don’t see the irony in this. But for now, assuming for the sake of our communication that there is a now, I am watching, watching, I’ll admit, from a vantage of unique perspective and privilege. I watch, bemused, amused, saddened, frustrated, delighted, chagrined. This woman who goes looking – what will she say when whatever it is that she is looking for she finds? Not that this frightens me – you will understand by now that it is part of this privilege I enjoy that I am no longer prey to fear. It is more a sensitivity to the inordinate complexity of the facts, the complications piled upon complications, an endlessly pebbly, jumbled moraine of gross confusion and disorder, all so unnecessary from where I stand, and all of it conspiring to obscure. I put my trust in simple things now, and if she were to stay still long enough to listen I would tell her, for these – for all time, that time that is no longer time – are the keys: a cool glass of cordial, ruby red; a piece of light cake, delicate and resilient as an angel’s wing; the warm aroma and sour-sweet taste of bread.
Perhaps it is only when one is lost in abstraction that the tangible becomes real. I see that she has an inkling of this but still she has a longing for broad themes. Perhaps it has something to do with the sky. To hear her tell it, she is a city person. It accords with her image of herself as a cosmopolitan, with no particular attachments to places, but rather to ideas and, more importantly, she would argue, to people. But I observe something different and the difference, I think, is significant. I watch, and I see that she deceives herself. Yes, it has to do with the sky. And let us make it a very particular sky, a broad sky, a low sky, a swirling, cloud-tilting sky, tipsy with latitude and depth and a blueness so pure you feel you could reach up and run your fingers through the clouds.
And so it went, as my great aunt launched into her story, with intermittent squeaks from me. I had a lot of fun with it, but it wasn’t acceptable in 2001 when I presented the manuscript, and was even less so three months later when the US was attacked on 9/11. Not only that, it was far too long. But for me it was an education, not the least for using what I could as scaffolding for the novel I came up with in the end. Most of all, I slimmed down the narrative, cutting out quite a few characters (including myself), episodes and scenes. Killing my darlings? More a massacre, you could say. Though bits of it I did use almost verbatim as I folded them into the novel.
INTERVIEWER
At its core, As the Lonely Fly is about social justice, perhaps even more so than about finding home or a sense of belonging. Do you agree?
DOWSE
Absolutely. I was drawn to my great aunt’s story (once the many misconceptions about her had been scraped away) because of what it had to say about being a Jew. At some stage in the process of uncovering her story I was forced to ask myself what my experience of being Jewish had given me. And the answer came straightaway: a passion for justice. For most of my life I have not been an observant Jew, but I treasure to this day that central tenet of Judaism. The character of Clara/Chava embodies that. Even her name – Tsedeska, Tsedek, is a play on the Hebrew word for justice – tsedaka. And there is absolutely no justice in what the Palestinians have suffered through the Zionism she once embraced and then came to reject. This, remember, was in the 1920s, when she and some of her comrades woke up to what the consequence of their arrival in Palestine actually was. There’s a passage in As the Lonely Fly where she articulates this to her employer – ‘Not the kind of place we dreamt of,’ she says, ‘where Jews do the excluding.’ Of course this passion of hers, based as it is on compassion, gets her in a whole lot of trouble. But at the same time, it’s what ennobles her. The other thing to note is that hers is a voice that was silenced. It has taken many decades for others to comprehend that the creation of a Jewish-privileged state has become a betrayal not only of the Palestinian people, but of Jewish tradition itself.
It’s of no small significance then that the novel begins and ends in 1967, three months after Israel became an occupying power. By this time Clara has been missing for a number of years, and this is when her American sister Marion visits their niece Zipporah in Israel. Though neither Marion nor Zipporah can be sure of what has become of Clara (other than she may or may not be alive somewhere in the Soviet Union), each finds it difficult to shake off Clara’s influence. The novel ends with Marion coming to understand what her older sister had taught her: ‘Because there was Clara, and this had been her tradition … If she could convince herself – and she couldn’t – that it was in their blood, their genes, this passion for justice, it would add nothing to the explanation. The history was enough – more than enough. Of persecution, of wandering, of false messiahs and uneasy bargains. But, more, a yearning for justice …’
Of course, not all Jews come away with that. Centuries of persecution ending in the Holocaust have made many put tribal loyalty above all other considerations, and I can understand that. But that doesn’t mean I can accept it. And there are many Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora who feel as I do. As with my great aunt and the character Clara based on her, for decades their voices have been silenced, but that is changing, and changing very rapidly now. If only our politicians would keep up with this.
INTERVIEWER
For you, is writing fiction always a political act?
DOWSE
Not consciously. There are some who argue that everything in life is political, so perhaps writing for me is too. What I can say is that I’ve often been drawn to political subjects in my reading and that’s why history interests me so. And politics have had an immediate impact on my life. But from childhood I’ve been intrigued by consciousness as well. As far as I can tell it remains a mystery. So that is why in some of my books, most of them actually, I find myself flirting with the mystical, the mythical or paranormal. It’s there in Sapphires and Schemetime and As the Lonely Fly, a little less so in Digging. But because I think I’m seen more as a political writer, this element in my books is usually overlooked. Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that, if I’m noticed at all, it’s because I have written on political themes – there aren’t that many fiction writers who till that field and I think it’s important. Although nowadays, given what our world has become, it’s hard to imagine any writer not getting tangled up with politics, whether she wants to or not.
But I do get a kick out of knowing that if any of my readers do pick up that other, mystical strand in my writing, there’s always something extra in there for them. Because even if social life is political (we humans are herd animals and there’s no getting away from that), for the individual human it’s ultimately something else, her consciousness or, if you will, her soul. And when I say consciousness I mean the unconscious too. I guess when it comes down to it, that’s the difference between novelists and historians, and it’s occurred to me while addressing your question, that that may be the real reason I’m a novelist and not an historian and why I never published that biography.
Take my novel Sapphires. This is saturated with Kabbalistic mysticism, particularly its numerological system gematria, in which every Hebrew letter has its numerical equivalent. It gave me a template for the narrative, along with another numerical phenomenon, the Fibonacci Sequence. I’m not saying you need to know these things in order to enjoy the stories, but it may enhance the reading experience while providing the glue for holding the disparate fragments together. It’s what writers do in layering. I adopted a similar approach with Schemetime, a novel about filmmaking and its magical elements. And the Kabbala makes its appearance in As the Lonely Fly in the person of the cobbler Yehudi Ha-Kohen, the man who makes Clara/Chava a pair of sandals ‘should you ever need to fly’. He’s there years later in the novel’s very first scene when Marion visits the cemetery. And Digging opens with the ghost of the narrator’s dog. The only books that don’t have this in them are Silver City, which was Penguin’s experiment with a film novelisation, and West Block, arguably the most political book of all. The inspiration for West Block’s structure, apart from the building itself, came from John Dos Passos’s USA and James Joyce’s Ulysses. As each of Ulysses’s chapters has an art as its theme, so does West Block. So it’s not that I ‘believe’ in mysticism in any straightforward way; it’s more that when I’m writing I’m drawn to the aesthetic possibilities, it’s a conduit, if you like, to my art, a way of expanding its symbolic import, the essence of art to me, even political fiction. All fiction, I think, is composed of ‘what-ifs’ and you need to maintain an open, inquisitive mind for that, and I do think fiction is an art.
INTERVIEWER
Might fiction, especially the novel form, best have its impact on the reader at the unconscious level? Perhaps that is how a work like As the Lonely Fly can bring about change?
DOWSE
I hope this novel can contribute to change. But I can never be confident about that. Readers read different books. And by this I don’t mean physically different books, or even different genres. I mean that they read the same book differently. Sometimes radically so. As a writer I wish I had more control over this, but that isn’t the contract we metaphorically sign. For a long time a novel like As the Lonely Fly was difficult to publish, for reasons I mentioned earlier. But now as we approach the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British foreign secretary promised the Jews ‘a national home’ in Palestine, the profound injustice to the Palestinian people resulting from this is far better recognised than it was when I embarked on the book. Now the imperial implications of Balfour are so patently evident that the novel’s critique may even be too mild for some. But it’s not enough to preach to the converted. The novel would never succeed as a novel if it didn’t transcend polemic.
If the aim is to illuminate the dilemma (the two ‘wrongs’ Amos Oz once wrote about) and through the ‘lived experience’ that fiction offers draw out the essential questions that need to be asked, then the novel is a marvellous form. Like all art it deploys the unconscious as well as the conscious. But that will always ask a lot of the reader, I think, for the novel, like opera or film, contains so many elements – its power and its weakness perhaps. There’s the story and the structure in which it unfolds; then the music, if you like, of the prose; and the symbolism of the leitmotifs; the visual effects, the imagery, of the setting; and last but certainly not least, the characters that people it and the emotions they arouse. And as readers read different books, so they pick up on different things. By that time, it’s out of your hands, though publicity and critical interpretation can help. If you’re really lucky you will have dipped into the well of the current zeitgeist, that collective unconscious of Jung’s, and everything will click.
Yet I’ve come to rely on the unconscious to do the initial work. It’s only after a draft or two that motifs and symbols begin to emerge. It’s then up to me to sculpt them, a bit like you would for high relief. That’s how I came to have the storks flying through As the Lonely Fly. The stork is a Bessarabian (now Moldovan) symbol. You see it everywhere there, on murals, as decorations. The birds nest there, then every year flocks of them fly over Israel-Palestine on their way to Africa, and take the same route back. You can draw this migration of theirs as a straight line on a map, from Moldova through to Africa. But like most symbols, storks are replete with more than one meaning. As they came to me, they represented all kinds of things: migration, of course, but a very particular one, because of that route; freedom, but freedom with its limits; birth, death, and release of the soul. There’s the theatre motif: history as theatre, as one Australian historian, Greg Dening, described it. There’s the ambiguity inherent in the concept of a Jewish nation, as evidenced in the illness of Talli, Zipporah’s stepdaughter. It may not matter if readers don’t consciously respond to all or any of these, yet I always hope that on some subliminal level they will.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of hope, As the Lonely Fly is your sixth novel over a 33-year period. Have your hopes for your work changed?
DOWSE
Hope. Interesting that you should ask that. I often think of myself as a pessimist, but when I examine that, as I’m wont to do at this stage in life, I think I may be wrong about that. When it boils right down to it, I’m an optimist. How else could one be a writer? I mean to closet yourself away for long periods of a time, searching for words and images to convey something you want to say, with no real idea what that something may be until you scratch that itch with a pen, and with no assurance of reward of any kind at the end? I think it was Simone de Beauvoir who said that she wrote because she wanted to be loved, but I’m not sure about that. Like anyone else I appreciate praise, and get mad when I think I’ve been criticised unfairly, or misunderstood, or overlooked. But mostly I’m incredibly grateful to be writing. I love language and words and stories. And I do believe that deep down inside I have something to say.
But fame. That’s another matter. When I cast my eye over the long chain of events behind me I realise that I’ve always been a little afraid of that. That’s the Hollywood influence. That may surprise some, especially here in Oz. Australians I think are especially susceptible to the blandishments of ‘success’ – the premium marker is to make a splash overseas. It used to be England, for the past thirty years or so it’s been America. But I saw Gatsby up close, so to speak. I saw the ugly side of fame, on both sides of my family. I saw that neither fame nor wealth brought happiness. I learned that early. I’ll do the publicity stuff because I owe it to my publisher and all the people who have supported me. And having had an actor for a mother I can perform when called on. But none of that can replace the sheer slog and satisfaction, indeed joy, of working creatively.
Yet for all that there’s a little tree of hope growing shoots inside me. I’ve written five books, all different, each succeeding I think on its own terms. And that bumptious little tree with its irrepressible shoots makes me hope, in spite of myself, that one day that will be recognised. (I don’t count Silver City because it was someone’s else’s story, although my contract gave me carte blanche to do what I thought it needed to make a novel.) In each of them I’ve taken on themes that were challenging for me and difficult perhaps for some to warm to. I mean, who would be mad enough to write a book about the public service, set in, of all places, Canberra? Or a book about an Australian filmmaker leaving for Hollywood that’s structured like a film and has all kinds of cinematic resonances? Or a book about Jews who eschewed the Jewish state? You have to have a crazy kind of quixotic hope for that.
After I’d finished the final draft of As the Lonely Fly I started work in earnest on a series of thrillers. I thought it would be fun, and it has been. Will I finish it before I go? I can’t guarantee that. But I do know that I’ve been extremely lucky, for all the chances I’ve taken. I have five kids I’m terribly proud of, nine super grandchildren, and I have known love. Love and creative work – who could want more than that?
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Note: the introduction to this interview is based on information sourced from Trove.
As the Lonely Fly can be purchased from For Pity Sake Publishing.
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Nigel Featherstone (by Jonny Lewis 2012)
Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer of adult fiction – his contemporary dramas plunge into family dynamics, new relationship types, masculinity, history, and the lure of secrets. He is the author of three novellas: The Beach Volcano (Blemish Books, 2014), I’m Ready Now (Blemish Books, 2012), and Fall on Me (Blemish Books, 2011). His novel Remnants (Pandanus Books, 2005) was published to acclaim, as was his story collection Joy (2000). In 2015 Featherstone was commissioned by the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium to write the libretti for a new work that is being composed by James Humberstone from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Featherstone is also the author of 50 stories published in Australian literary journals including the Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin, Island, and Overland, as well as in the US. Between 2007 and 2014 he was a frequent contributor to Panorama, the weekend magazine of the Canberra Times, and the Fairfax Media network more broadly. Featherstone has also written for Australian Book Review, BMA Magazine, and Capital. He has been awarded residencies at Varuna (Blue Mountains), Bundanon (Shoalhaven River), and the Kingsbridge Gatekeeper’s Cottage, courtesy of the Launceston City Council, Tasmania; in 2013 he was a Creative Fellow at the Australian Defence Force Academy/UNSW Canberra. Featherstone was the founding editor of Verity La (2010-2014), for which he received a 2012 Canberra Critics Circle Award. He lives on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. Visit Nigel’s website here.