Author: Danielle Dutton
Publisher: Prototype
Paperback
One of the books of the year 2024!
Cat says: This collection of writing really inspired me and made me feel like writing. The stories are really short and refreshingly ambiguous, are they life writing, are they fiction? Who cares? They’re really cool. My favourite section was ‘Sixty-six Dresses I Have Read,’ where Dutton lists descriptions from literature of important dresses. Then she lists where they come from. If you’re a big reader it’s fun trying to work out if you recognise the quotes, from various sources, e.g Jane Eyre, The God of Small Things and The Book Of Frank by CA Conrad.
Lu says: Meandering glimpses of life and its wildness threaded together with considerations of the pictorial, time, the many dresses worn/encountered/posited as bodies, landscape and feeling. Questions of what it means to write collaboratively and to resist writing altogether. She makes her sensibility explicit, expressing in one essay, ‘how might fiction be conceived as a space within which we attend to the world… of opening spaces - prairies, paragraphs, rooms - in which the world can occur… can embody a specific way of looking?’ By looking Dutton means seeing and being, and being seen, a politics of attention. Spaces conjured feel both fresh and familiar due to how she attends to those spaces, drawing the eye to what we might have previously missed.