' "One life, one writing," Robert Lowell proclaims in one of his poems in For the Union Dead. It's a condition any serious writer takes for grnated, and living up to it is what such writers use a test of their integrity, of whether what they are tempted to write belongs to the real body of their work. In the end a writer is the work that appears under his name, not a personality or character; all that in time gets lost. What remains, embodied in the work, is a consciousness with its own peculiar pre-occupations, quirks, questions, doubts, insights; a set of responses to the isness of things, the great plural world of phenomena - light, colour, landscape, atmosphere, all the tumbling paraphernalia of livingand, more quiretly, a voice with its individual cadence.
It takes a little time to discover you may be a writer.What consolidates it for you, as they come (slowly sometimes) and accumulate, are the writings: poems, stories, the second novel rather than the first.
Until these are solidly there your being a writer is an aspiration more than a fact. After that it is the body of work that defines you and the body of work to which you are committed.'
(This is the opening to an essay titled "A Life in Words" by David Malbouf published in The Weekend Australian: Review Section May 5-6 2007)
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