In Conversation
Vanessa Berry
ON MEMOIR, TALISMANS AND THE POWER OF LOOKING BACK
Writer and artist, Vanessa Berry is known for her creative work covering history, memory and archives. As the author of Mirror Sydney: an atlas of reflections, as well as Ninety 9 and Strawberry Hills Forever, Vanessa crafts essays and illustrations exploring the topics of memoir and the significance of objects in her own life. Her latest book, Gentle and Fierce, sees her reflect on past experiences through an exploration of the animals that helped shape her identity. Vanessa spoke to TONE about her new book, where our memories reside and how writers can craft individual experiences that resonate on a collective level.
VANESSA BERRY
Featuring: Gentle and Fierce
Photo credit: VANESSA BERRY
“One of my strengths as a writer is an ability to bring close and sustained attention to small but significant unnoticed details.”
Photo credit: VANESSA BERRY
Photo credit: VANESSA BERRY
Tell us a little about Gentle and Fierce and the experience of writing the book. Was it an idea that had been percolating for a while?
“The idea of writing a book about animals took shape after I finished my previous book, Mirror Sydney. I'd written a chapter about animals in the urban environment and I wanted to give more attention to this idea and consider how animals are present throughout our lives in different ways. Once I decided on this idea, I gave thought to different animals and animal representations that have been significant to me, and from that point began to build the essays that make up Gentle and Fierce. I spent two years on the writing of the essays and drawing the illustrations, then another on editing and refining the manuscript, so it all came together relatively quickly.”
In Gentle and Fierce you write about how your life stories have been shaped by the presence of animals and animal representations, and how these have helped expand your perceptions and sense of self. Is this something you were fully conscious of when writing the book or did this develop and grow while working on the project?
“When I begin a book I usually have a broad idea of what I want it to be, as well as some details or moments that I want to consider and expand on. As I write this fills out into more specific and developed ideas and narratives. For Gentle and Fierce, building on the original idea of considering the animal presences in my life, more specific themes emerged as I wrote: animal encounters in urban environment, literary representations of animals, and the way that certain qualities, like gentleness and ferocity, are used to describe the behaviour of humans and of animals.
An intention I noted when I started writing Gentle and Fierce was: 'writing as attentiveness, being present, being open, being aware of the energies of things (people, animals, objects, matter, forces)'. This approach led to me following intuitive and sometimes unexpected pathways of thought and research. No matter how much I plan, I'm always surprised by some of the connections that come to me when I write. At the start of writing Gentle and Fierce I didn't know I'd end up writing essays based around the sinking horse scene in The Neverending Story, for example, or the wild wallabies on the Isle of Man.”
How do the essays in the book relate to larger-scale issues of environmental change and the disruption of ecosystems and extinction of species?
“The environment crisis is the most urgent and pressing issue we face, and in Gentle and Fierce I wanted to connect the huge scale of this with the lived, experienced and everyday aspects of our lives. There are many ways that writers can turn their talents and energies towards encouraging an environmental consciousness in their readers. This can occur overtly (Danielle Celermajer's Summertime, about the Black Summer bushfires, is a beautiful recent example of this) or in more subtle ways.
One of my strengths as a writer is an ability to bring close and sustained attention to small but significant unnoticed details. In Gentle and Fierce I use this form of attention to suggest that, by carefully observing the presence of animals in our lives, we feel a sense of connection and responsibility that is an important foundation of environmental thinking.”
Photo credit: VANESSA BERRY
Gentle and Fierce has been described as a discontinuous memoir. Was this a purposeful stylistic choice? Do you think the manuscript may have been different if you’d written it as a chronological memoir?
“While the book draws on the stories of my life, I intended it to be centred around relationships with animals, rather than relating a cohesive life story. One of my aims as a writer is to use my life experiences to spark readers' own memories and so it was important for me to leave space in the book for the reader's own reflections. Discontinuity is one of the ways I create this space. I'm also interested in the associative nature of memories. Writing essays that move across multiple time periods meant I could reflect the experience of time as its lived and remembered, which can be fluid and unpredictable as much as linear.”
The idea of viewing or experiencing objects as talismans – or even companions, is really fascinating. Can you share your thoughts on how assigning power to an object we hold dear can bolster our own sense of self?
“I'm an object-focussed person and believe that even the most mundane of things can connect to people, places and stories. Objects can be tangible reminders of intangible things. An object like the Lassie figurine that, throughout my childhood, was on a hallway shelf in my grandparents' house, takes me back into that place and time. Other significant objects are ones I've found by chance in op shops - I have been a passionate op-shopper for decades - and I love how such objects can open up imagination, through the serendipity of finding them.
One of the ideas that inspired Gentle and Fierce was thinking about the animal-themed objects I have around me daily - as figurines, decorative objects and artworks - and how these can be figures of reflection. From the object, a writer can open out a whole network of connections. I write about some of these objects in the Gentle and Fierce 'album' which documents some of my influences in writing the book.”
So much of your writing centres around the question of where our memories reside – whether within ourselves or connected to people, places, beings and objects that have had a meaningful role in our lives. What is it about meaning, memories and nostalgia that intrigues you so much? How are you able to find new and inventive ways of exploring these topics?
“Memories, and how we experience and express them, fascinate me, particularly for how they form our life stories and sense of identity. The philosopher Edward S. Casey describes "memory beyond mind", which is how our memories can exist in places, objects and things outside of the remembering self, and I often come back to this idea. I'm also interested in the different ways that we recall, repeat and share memories, and how this activates them as present-moment experiences. Within all of this there's lots of scope for finding different ways to write with and about memories. In Gentle and Fierce I use different approaches, for example to write 'The Fly' I read through 20 years of my journals to find mentions of flies. I structured 'The Fly' as a series of vignettes, one for each year, from the first journal to the most recent. This structure was suggested by flies themselves, how they alight on something before flying off again.”
The book moves through a series of your childhood homes, many of which no longer exist but still hold such an important place in your memory. Why do you think stories about our homes occupy such a strong space in our minds? Not just as an ‘idea’ of home but as a physical structure / object that we connect with.
“Our homes contain so much of our lives and are the places in which we are most likely to retreat into our private selves. They also mark time and are a good way to step back into the memory of a particular period of our lives. There's a great artwork by Janine Mikosza and Stephanie Jones called the Share House Project that collects people's hand-drawn floorplans of their childhood homes: it's so interesting to see all the different sketches and interpretations.
When I was writing Gentle and Fierce houses became a way of locating stories in time, particularly because the essays in the book don't follow a predictable chronology. It was interesting, too, to think about the animals we share our homes with, whether those be pets, or insects: I write about spiders in one essay, for example, which are animals we share our homes with whether we like it or not.”
Is writing about place vs writing about objects vastly different? Or do they follow the same structure and thought patterns?
“There's a difference in scale, but I approach both through encounters: often through walking, if it's a place, and with objects, through close observation and description. Often places and objects work together in my writing. In Gentle and Fierce I write about places such as Ōkunoshima in Japan, a small island in the inland sea which is known as a rabbit sanctuary, and the Yorkshire town of Heptonstall where Sylvia Plath is buried, and in both the experience of being in those places is told through encounters with particular details and objects. For example Sylvia Plath's grave was decorated with different offerings that people had brought to pay tribute to her, pens and crystals and handwritten notes, and these form an important part of the essay I write about that experience.”
Writing memoir is a powerful way to engage readers but how do you make sure what matters to you translates to ultimately matter to the reader?
“Being true to the specifics of individual experience is, I believe, the best way to engage readers, even if this might seem contradictory. Readers bring their own identity and experiences with them and letting the reader into the detail and particularly of a personal experience is a good method of connection. Even if the specifics are different, the specificity forms a bond.
There's only so far you can shape or predict a reader's response, but for the writer, it’s important to keep in mind what's most important for the particular piece of writing you're working on. Often this doesn't become clear until the editing stage. This is the time to make decisions about what the minor, tangential or distracting elements are that should be de-emphasised or edited out to give space to the core ideas or effects. I do a lot of cutting in my edits - sometimes the 'offcuts' file of sentences and paragraphs I've cut is longer than the essay itself.”
Do you have any tips for writers looking to begin a memoir project? Any watchouts or potential pitfalls? Perhaps unexpected surprises that can arise from writing about the past?
“I think of memoir as writing with memories, and often this kind of writing expresses ideas beyond the personal, whether these are about identity, or a place or time or community, or animals as with Gentle and Fierce. Memoir can be satisfying to write, in the process of taking time and care to articulate significant experiences, but it can also be frustrating. Some memories can be painful to revisit, others can be vague or contradictory.
I suggest, in the first instance, to write into the memory without thinking about it being read by anyone else, and to not be afraid of the gaps or speculations or uncertain parts. Then, having written this, you can start making decisions on how you want to shape it, and what kind of research you might want to do to enrich it. Memoir is as selective as any other kind of writing, it requires decisions about what to put in, and what to leave out, what to enhance and what to emphasise. The added complexity with memoir is that it comes with the responsibility of being true to the experience. Writers can be more confident of this if they've done research and careful reflection and editing throughout the process of writing.”
Who are the writers that inspire you?
“Some of the writers who most inspire me are Nathalie Léger, for her writing on archives and biography, Anne Dufourmantelle for her writing on secrets and gentleness, Esther Kinsky for her place-writing, Maria Stepanova for her writing on memory, Annie Ernaux for her autofictions, Alexander Chee for his essays on writing a self, Natalie Harkin for her decolonising of archives, Anwen Crawford for her writing on personal and cultural memory, W.G. Sebald for his slow and meditative drifts through place and history, Judith Schalansky for her reinventions of the atlas and the inventory, Carmen Maria Machado for her contemporary fairytales, Fiona McGregor for her writing on Australian underground culture, Ashleigh Young for her acutely observed essays, Keri Glastonbury for her bricolage place poems... there are many but these are some favourites whose work energises my own writing.”
Name a book that has changed your life…
“It would have to be Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual, which I write about in Gentle and Fierce in the essay 'Perec's Cat'. It's a novel that's also a puzzle, that takes place across the space of a Parisian apartment block. My favourite chapter takes the form of a long list of objects left in disarray in a room the morning after a party, which perhaps gives you a sense of the novel, and why I love it so much: it brings close observation and attention to mundane things, and to how such things make up so much of the stories of our lives.”