EM: Here’s the dog. Let me get the dog. She’s got a cone on, so she can’t come in through her dog door. She just had a lump removed from her leg. She’s a pit bull. They get lumps.

SW: How old is she?

EM: She might be close to 12. She’s a mature girl.

SW: Have you ever tried painting? I was thinking about Etel Adnan and how she paints on the same desk that she writes. Have you ever gotten into that?

EM: As a child, I did, but I’m more oriented towards drawing than now. I’ve always liked ink, and I like all kinds of pens and pencils. I still draw, and part of what I think is my practice is drawing. When I was in my twenties, I discovered a writing tool. Let me see if I find it …

[Eileen gets up to retrieve something and returns.]

EM: It’s a china marker. Do you know what a china marker is?

SW: I have no idea.

EM: It’s like a grease pencil. I first saw it because the butcher in my neighbourhood would be wrapping a pound of hamburger, and I saw how he could write on wax paper with this pencil. And so, you’ve probably seen versions of this kind of marker, usually in stationery stores, you have to unscroll the point a little instead of sharpening it. It makes a nice, thick mark. I used it to do the table of contents for my first poetry magazine, and it became my thing. People will ask me if I would do the lettering for their poetry book covers, and it’s just been with me all my life. And now, when I do activism and make flyers, I always use a china marker. I drew cartoons a lot as a kid, and I loved it. I was obsessed with the talk balloons and the handwriting style. Each cartoonist had a distinct handwriting style. I think my poetry is very related to my feelings about what goes on in those balloons in relation to the picture. There’s a pace, and it’s almost muscular – that relationship.

SW: Did you ever keep any of the cartoons you did when you were younger?

EM: Probably, stuff from my twenties exists in my archive. But childhood drawings, no, unfortunately.

SW: What were you working on at this residency at Bozar?

EM: What I’ve been doing, which is fun, if somebody asks me to go someplace and I want to go there, I’ll say, ‘Okay, but you have to give me a residency.’ And so Bozar gave me a couple of weeks. I’m going to Norway in September, and they’re giving me about ten days and an apartment. It’s a good idea.

I’m working on a big novel that I started in 2013. I’ve published lots of books since then. And then I returned to this work. I began to work on this project in 2019, on and off before and during the pandemic. And some older things I’ve written that I never published are going into it. It’s a novel called ‘All My Loves.’ And the intention is for it to be like 1000 pages. Once I decided that was the scale, I thought to expand the notion of love to places and animals and poetry, politics, whatever I want to put in there. But the backbone is something about love and relationships, living with people and habits, and things like that.

SW: And it’s mostly prose?

EM: There are poems in there, but it’s a novel.

SW: Do you wake up and work on it every day?

EM: Most days. Yesterday, I didn’t work, but today, I felt it, so I’ll work today.

SW: Exciting. Are you in the editing stages, or do you still have writing to do?

EM: I have somewhere between 500 and 700 pages. But what I’m determining now, and what I’m doing, is going section by section and editing them, cleaning them up and stuff. Then I’ll see what is in and what is out. I’m slowly moving towards spreading them out physically and starting to look at the gaps and write. I’m very excited about that – figuring out what the gaps are and writing. Because it’s almost like a third novel that will thread through my work, it won’t be precisely linear. I have many thoughts about what it will be.

SW: When will it come out?

EM: Oh, I don’t know. I’ll be working on it for another year or two. And then there’s always about a year to production. So, I bet 2027 or something like that …

SW: Are you excited to get it done? Do you get antsy and want it out there? Or you enjoy the whole process.

EM: Both. I’m interested in what it is. And since it’s still becoming. I’m not in a rush. I don’t know who’s publishing it. Grove is my publisher, but that doesn’t mean they’ll love this book. And I don’t care. I’m not worried about that part.

SW: You mentioned it’s about habits. Can you speak more about the kind of habits you talk about in the book that you’re working on? About relationships and habits.

EM: Well, when you live with somebody, in a way, you civilise each other. You establish rules and boundaries and things like that. When those people are not there anymore, those things often become your personality. We adapt to these things. And it’s a version of this that I’m thinking about.

SW: Do you ever pick up words from other people as well? If they say something all the time?

EM: I’m not sure. I feel like it goes the other way around. When I’m involved with somebody, I notice that I begin to talk a bit like them, but they always feel that they’ve started to sound like me. I think I have a stronger speaking habit.

SW: Is there something you say all the time? Do you have a speech tick that you say all the time?

EM: That’s not for me to know. I wouldn’t know this. I’m not performing for myself.

SW: Have you ever been with an artist or with another writer and then lived together with them and had to balance? When I was researching Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal, I was thinking about them living together for such a long time and working together in the same place. Have you ever had to navigate that? And what was that like?

EM: Yes and no. I’ve not had the kind of relationship that they had. I mean, I’ve lived with someone when I had a writing practice, and they didn’t quite have this, but they wanted to have one. Then, I was with an academic working on a novel, and I’ve lived with a writer who wasn’t writing. She should have written, but she didn’t. And she was always mad at me. The academic was probably the best because she focused on her work. There was plenty of room for me to work. But my last girlfriend was an art historian and was slightly competitive with my writing. I mean in relation to the time it took. I’ve never been in a great relationship with another writer or artist. I’ve been with lovers, but we’ve not lived together. I think it would be much more interesting to be with somebody who wasn’t making, maybe painting, but definitely not writing, you know? I don’t want to be inside somebody else’s work.

SW: It would be terrible. But painting can be just as bad sometimes as well. I don’t know. I briefly saw a painter I was kind of in love with, and all they wanted to do was paint. We didn’t see each other for long, but it was long enough for me to think I was in love with them. And then I went back to Australia, and they would make all these paintings, and I would think, is that me?

We can talk about love poetry if you want.

EM: Oh, my book should be pretty close by, but I didn’t think about that. Why don’t you go ahead? Why do you ask about love poetry?

SW: Well, when I watched Etel Adnan’s interviews, she talked about beauty and how it’s kind of démodé, but we should also be looking at it. It’s so simple, and we love it, and it’s beautiful, and we need it, especially in times of crisis. And then, if you’re writing a book called ‘All My Loves,’ I was thinking how when I tend to write sentimental things, or if I’m writing what could be considered love poetry, I feel frivolous doing it, especially in times of crisis. What do you think?

EM: I don’t think so at all. I’m not in love at the moment, but I recently read a really interesting book … Hang on one second …

[Eileen gets up and returns with a manuscript.]

I read this amazing book called The Tale of a Wall (2024) by Nasser Abu Srour. He’s a Palestinian guy who’s in prison for life, and the publisher sent it to me. I get books sent all the time, usually for blurbs, and I couldn’t blurb it, but I was interested, so finally, months later, I read it. And it’s astonishing because it’s a very cerebral book, and I kept throwing it down when I started. I initially looked at it and thought, this is this bad writing? I feel like I can’t – it’s so abstract, and I don’t know where to start, and then perhaps because of who he is, I kept trying, and then suddenly I hit it, and the book opened up for me. It’s just an amazing telling. But I mention it because halfway through the book, he falls in love with a woman, a lawyer, who is coming to meet and talk to him. I witnessed the way love poetry or being in love was an altered state. And so, when you’re in that altered state, every detail of your existence is heightened. And there’s a way in which all you must do is an inventory of everywhere you look because the world is ignited when you’re in love with somebody, and I think it was like seeing a person who is in prison for life get fucking high on devotion, you know?

I feel like love honours all that is not killing in the world. There’s violence, and there’s killing, and there’s war, and there’s capitalism, and there’s dominance. And then I think there’s love, incantation, and devotion – all the things in the world that are a fact of being a sentient being and your relatedness to every other thing and how fragile and precious that is. Especially when you step into this other state of feeling that with another person, it’s one of the gifts of being – of being alive. You know? I think that’s why people feel so alive – they are addicted to being in love because they feel more alive. And I guess I also think of sports – the high you get from doing physical things, and violence probably does that too – there’s an exaltedness to it. I think they’re all related, and you can’t ever downgrade love. I feel like it’s almost like the only reason to oppose war.

SW: I feel like it cuts through everything.

EM: Absolutely.