Faces of NewLit: Fiona McFarlane (Spring 2023 Simpson Workshops)
Profile by Giovanna Lomanto, NewLit Assistant Director
“It’s so beautiful to be in a space where literature matters.”
—Fiona McFarlane, on the importance of the Simpson Fellowship workshops
At New Literary Project, Fiona McFarlane beautifully and generously coordinates the Simpson Workshops, one of NewLit’s key initiatives. With the partnership of U.C. Berkeley’s English Department, this NewLit program subsidizes five creative writing workshops led by creative writing teachers from the Berkeley English Department, who are named Simpson Fellows. Fiona is continually working in coordination with different nonprofit organizations and school sites all around the Bay Area so that the Fellows can teach free creative writing workshops to a diverse group of youth. Her work allows all the cogs to run smoothly, the machine well-oiled and well-tended to.
Fiona knows precisely how creative workshops work—the vulnerabilities of sharing their work, the joy of breakthroughs in a community. Her role in preparing the Simpson Workshops revolves around ensuring that joy and vulnerability go hand-in-hand, and what comes afterward depends largely on the individual Simpson Fellow. However, Fiona acknowledges a symbiosis: “What they’re setting out to do in the community is to connect students to the joy and power of writing, which isn’t the same thing as studying the sonnet structure or having a full craft discussion on dialogue, so it’s a reminder to them to bring an expansive joy and enthusiasm to it. The students in the workshops need to experience what it’s like to have a voice. And so there’s a difference between teaching in community and teaching in the English department, and that’s what we’re here to do.”
To her, NewLit’s Simpson Workshops are an integral part of an institution like U.C. Berkeley, serving to reinforce connections between it and the community, as a privileged institution that is a part of a larger cultural movement. Further, Simpson Fellows have the experience of communicating their joy and love of writing while simultaneously giving students a space in which to speak. “Most importantly,” she says, “the Simpson Workshop is creating a space where voices can be listened to, can have intention, and can have attention.”
Fiona, in regards to the Simpson Fellows’ workshops, then simply stated the reason that NewLit holds this project in such high esteem: “It’s so beautiful to be in a space where literature matters.”
Fiona McFarlane’s writing has won the Voss Literary Prize, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Nita Kibble Literary Award—all earned while working as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Fiona teaches classes on literary fiction, her genre of choice, alternating between literary analysis of contemporary works and teaching workshops to shape young writers as they submit their own stories, to see how their words resonate in the community of the classroom.
Fiona’s path to writing was instinctual. She cites her first “novel” at age six, a chapter book of paragraph-long chapters, published by her mother, who worked as a children’s bookseller, then a librarian.
Fiona insists that there’s a duality in writing, as evidenced in her first “novel.” The beginning of any writing project, she says, is individual. As a fiction writer, she is in charge of every word, and it’s intimidating… and fun. Books don’t exist in isolation, in the end, and Fiona cites that one of the most rewarding things about writing is working with an editor, who can see through and past the thickets that get caught up. Fiona says it best: “External eyes give the work a new life.”
These external eyes could be yours, too—Fiona’s upcoming book, The Sun Walks Down, hits shelves this month. Rave reviews have flooded in from seemingly everywhere, and for instance in Kirkus: “This tale of a farming community’s search for a missing child offers intimate human drama, ruminations on the intersections of art and life, and a sweeping, still relevant review of race and class in Australia . . . A masterpiece of riveting storytelling.”
Fiona McFarlane's blazingly brilliant new novel, The Sun Walks Down, tells the many-voiced, many-sided story of a boy lost in colonial Australia.
In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the entire community is caught up in the search for him. As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly—newlyweds, farmers, mothers, indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, artists, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen—confront their relationships, both with one another and with the landscape they inhabit.
The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is noisy with opinions, arguments, longings, and terrors. It's haunted by many gods—the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found, or lost forever.
Told in many ways and by many voices, Fiona McFarlane's new novel pulses with love, art, and the unbearable divine. It arrives like a vision: mythic, vivid, and bright with meaning.
And if you’re in the Bay Area, her book release is set for February 15, at Books Inc. in Berkeley. We hope to see you there: https://www.booksinc.net/event/fiona-mcfarlane-books-inc-berkeley
