Bronwyn Birdsall
Photos: Trish ChongEditorial: Jessie James
Bronwyn Birdsall spends part of her week writing from a corner room in Gary Owen House, heritage-listed Georgian residence in Callan Park, Rozelle. There is a sense of something like bucolic beauty here – weathered sandstone, corrugated metal awnings and windows with wavy glass set against expansive lawns, gum trees and loose hedges of plumbago in flower.
Book filled shelves line the narrow corridor leading to a humble reference library, while the bridge club is currently underway in one of the drawing rooms. Upstairs, Bronwyn’s writing room is modest and simply furnished – notebooks sit on a small bookshelf, alongside Bronwyn’s books, a gardenia flower from a friend’s garden adorns a humble writing desk. From the tall casement windows, which are full open to catch the southerly, the view over the grounds is framed by beautiful old jacaranda trees.
Where are you from?
I’m from Sydney, born on Crown Street, and now live in Coogee.
Where have you lived previously?
I moved to Byron Bay at 21, and at 24, I went travelling through Europe and ended up spending close to five years living in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
While Sarajevo was a complicated and at times challenging city to live in, for reasons mysterious even to me, I felt accepted and at home there. People still react to me living there as an unusual choice, which I guess it was, but it never really felt like a choice, more like a given that I was there. I hope I contributed to the city in my own small way through teaching; the friends and community I had there certainly changed my life for the better.
Did you always know you would become a writer?
I can’t think of a time where I didn’t write daily, often just as a way of processing my thoughts. A friend of mine in Sarajevo said to me in passing that I should think about turning all my writing into a book. It’s strange to think now that until that point, the idea of doing something concrete with writing seemed like something for other people. I guess I never thought of myself as a writer, writing was just something I did.
I started taking writing more seriously when I came back to Australia, working on a memoir that didn’t fulfil what I wanted it to say and ultimately, I didn’t pursue publication for it. In the process though, I was selected for a mentorship with Marele Day through the Byron Writers Festival, the first time someone outside my immediate circles had encouraged me in my work.
What are you currently working on?
I took the heartache I felt over that memoir not working and channelled it into a novel. I can still feel the shock of sitting down to write one morning and finding myself writing characters rather than memories. The whole plot spilled out over a month or so, and since then I’ve been essentially learning how to write a novel.
Over the last year I’ve worked intensively on the manuscript. I’ve been able to concentrate closely on the work in this space, it’s been by far the most productive phase of my practice… The novel is set over one day, and centres around a young teacher who becomes intertwined in a political crisis. I realised recently that the story is ultimately asking the question: where is our place in a society that feels broken?
What are you most proud of?
My independence and my discipline – two things that don’t come naturally to me.
What do you see as your limitations?
Overcoming my fears to be as honest as I can be on the page. I’m a slow processor and easily distracted. I take a long time to shape opinions on things, which is why I can write a novel, but am terrible on Twitter. I’d like to be able to form my ideas a bit faster and be more fearless in sharing them.
What or who are some of your influences?
I remember reading Helen Garner’s non-fiction book The Feel of Steel when I was at university and thinking that I didn’t know you were allowed to write like that, so clear and direct. I felt the same reading The White Album by Joan Didion, and more recently, the novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.
Generally speaking, I love narrative – in novels, biographies, lyrics and films – but also in sitting around talking with friends and my family. I loved that aspect of life in Sarajevo, a city of so many interweaving stories, where you’ll hear bits and pieces from different people about the same incident for years.
I try to read as widely as I can, particularly Australian writers, as well as from regions that I don’t know that well. I think he might be a bit out of fashion, but I love Joseph Campbell’s books on mythology and often read his work for inspiration when I get stuck. I’ve worked in a multitude of unusual workplaces, and I think this range of life experiences and characters has served me well for storytelling.
How do you approach your writing?
I like the idea that the story is already there. I heard a sculptor say they imagine the work is already within the lump of clay or stone, their job is to remove the excess. In this way, I hope I might just be able to write an already existing story into being. Keeps my writerly ego in check, and also helps cultivate a bit of grace and patience too.
I have a clear method in that I write by longhand, first just scenes and ideas. Once I’ve got a sense of what’s happening, then I write out the whole thing, start to finish, still in longhand. I type it all up, again start to finish, with lots of notes for my future self to ‘make better’, ‘add more’, ‘give more description’ or whatever. Then I edit and edit, trying to push each chapter to be the best possible version it could be.
After all of that, with my first novel, I kind of realised what the book was about, and then I kept ruthlessly editing until all that was left was relevant to the story. After that, I went back and added in texture and humour and tried to focus on making it an enjoyable experience for the reader.
What are your reading right now?
I’ve always got a few books going. Right now, it’s Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko and The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones. I’ve also been re-reading Danilo Kiš and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges.
Could you share a special memory associated with your writing?
A few months ago, I went to visit my mother and asked her to read my manuscript for maybe the fifth or sixth time. After an hour or two, she started talking to me about something I couldn’t follow. For a moment I thought something dramatic had happened in real life, until I realised that she was talking about a plot twist in the book. She read the chapter out, tracing the characters’ reactions and emotional journeys. I could see that the book now lived beyond me and my imagination, it had become real to someone else. The next day she read that chapter out again, finding new nuances in it.
Witnessing her engage with my work like that, as if it were written by some far away author, made me feel like I’d achieved what I’d always dreamed of doing.
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