Hot Desking at the Wheeler Centre

For ten weeks from late April to early July, I was honoured to hold a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship. This scheme offers a small stipend and the very big privilege of access to a desk of one’s own on the mezzanine level of the Wheeler Centre building on Little Lonsdale St. To sit in the quietness of that space, with just enough sound of busyness from the office spaces below to feel companionable, and work on my fiction manuscripts was a joy. And there was joy too in my walks home, through the beautiful Carlton Gardens, the colours changing in those weeks from green to gold, and then the familiar streets and parks of Fitzroy, North Fitzroy, and Northcote. I thought of the worlds of my novels as I walked, and I always remembered, as I passed the Exhibition Building with its brides and grooms and tourists and doctors from the Hospital, lining up to receive a COVID vaccination there, the queue snaking around the paths at the periphery of the Gardens, always being added to, people smiling grimly at each other, chatting, speculating. I read Edna O’Brien’s biography of James Joyce, folding back its blue cover so I could hold it in one hand, as we inched closer to the door. We were all frightened. I’m frightened still, but my memory of this time of pandemic and strangeness will also be coloured by these walks with my words, and what it was like to be awarded this Fellowship which seemed like a injection of hope for me in uncertain times.

Coffee, muffin, computer, inspiration (🧿 inspired by my desk neighbour, Leila Lois)