Abstract
All writing begins “somewhere” and in Chap. 2, I play around with the histories of “there and then” with the memory of “here and now” to provide an understanding of how this book came to be written. Central to this meaning-making is conversation with my personal-political-pedagogical-professional past and present as a white-settler-colonial-woman working with and in relation to Indigenous Australian peoples and families, as well as engagement with the words and works of Helene Cixous and Virginia Woolf. This process of “unforgetting” brings us close, so close, to the what, where, when, how and why this book came to be as a critical autoethnographic, feminist and decolonial writing project.
Fate always contrives that I begin the new year in February. I ask, why another volume? (but here’s an innovation: this is not a book but a block—so lazy I am about making writingbooks nowadays). What is the purpose of them? L. taking up a volume the other day said Lord save him if I died first & he to read through these. My handwriting deteriorates. And do I say anything interesting? I can always waste an idle hour reading them; & then, oh yes, I shall write memoirs out of them, one of these days.
Woolf ([Diary entry, 3 February, 1927], 1980, p. 125)
Here I had come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper?
Woolf (1929/2001, p. 30)
The mind is like a dog going round & round to make itself a bed. So, give me new & detestable ideas, I will somehow trample a bed out of them.
Woolf ([Diary entry, 5 October, 1927], 1980, p. 156)
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Mackinlay, E. (2019). Ending Writing, at the Beginning. In: Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04669-9_2
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