I have not blogged for the longest time since I started LiteraryMinded, in 2007. But I use other forms the way I used to use this, and I write pieces both longer and shorter, both well thought-out (essays) and blasted (mini reviews or moments on Instagram or Twitter).

Like this essay about literary bisexuality for Killings.

Like pieces I have coming up in Antic and Overland.

And then sketches in my notebook. Bad poems in my phone notes.

And I’ve just started oil painting.

I read slower, now, outside of work. I read a lot for work. Reading carries different pressures than it used to, when I was reviewing a lot. I don’t have to finish everything. But there is the weight of knowing the time and effort that goes into writing a manuscript. Outside of work, I read for pleasure and for projects – for research, to be immersed, to be read myself, to be cracked open. My boyfriend reads to me sometimes. Currently William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. He has a beautiful, masculine, Australian voice. Maxwell was fiction editor at The New Yorker for a nuts amount of years. He published John Cheever, with whom I’ve been having a literary love affair over the past year. Partly because of the topic I explore in the linked essay above. I’m writing more on it. Reading Frank Moorhouse, too. The Edith trilogy. Finally. Though I think I’ll be reading them over a year or three. I used to feel stressed about things like this. You do get calmer over time. Or perhaps you just shift the stress, the sense of urgency, elsewhere.