Emma Wilkins

I’d been reading Richard Powers’s novel Bewilderment — the story of a nine-year-old boy grieving his mother, the story of an unmoored father, raising his son in a dying world — when I heard a philosopher on the radio offer an all-encompassing solution to human suffering.

In Bewilderment, the boy’s mother, a passionate animal rights activist, would say the Buddhist prayer, “May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering”, when she tucked him in at night...

According to a friend of mine, when I talk about feeling embarrassed, ashamed or misunderstood, my hands become claws and I run them down my face with exaggerated angst. I hadn’t realised I did that but as soon as she said it I knew it was true.

While still performing that move, we identified another: reeling in rope, cast too far out, at frantic speed. Both feature often when I talk about my writing – about the risk of sharing words I might regret.

The first question I ask ecologist and jewellery maker Dydee Mann is not the one I planned: “Do you want to tell me why you’ve brought dead birds to my house?”

The threatened species biologist is visiting me for an interview during her lunch break. She’s just come from the museum, where she borrowed a box of swift parrot specimens for a training course she’s running. She wants attendees to see the birds up close and appreciate their unique beauty.

She was about my mother’s age, petite with long grey hair and an equally delicate dog. I steered the pram to the edge of the footpath to let her pass. Instead of walking by, she stopped and spoke.

“I’ve been watching you for years!” she said.

What’s more, I wasn’t surprised.

Over the years I’d sometimes wondered whether anyone in our neighborhood had ever glanced out their window before dawn and squinted at a strange, shadowy figure walking down the street. I imagine the sight...

We met over a damsel in distress. The damsel had just given birth to twins and urgently needed a bar fridge to store breast milk in. I posted a request on our neighbourhood Facebook page. Within minutes, a lady named Veronika had replied offering a “lovely” fridge we could keep for several months — and call “Louise” if we wanted to. She was even willing to delay a non-urgent outing for potting mix and chook food, so I could pick the fridge up that morning.

Pick it up I did. As we lugged the...

My kids brought their report cards home last month. I’d been thinking about the election campaign, and about society’s obsession with productivity. I’d been wondering how ‘the unemployed’ and ‘pensioners’ might feel — like a burden? Like a problem to be solved?
I’d been thinking about my own productivity too as an employee, as a freelancer, as a parent; about what left me feeling satisfied, worthy, competent, or guilty, unproductive, unfulfilled...

One of the best opinion pieces I’ve read this year was a friend’s Facebook post. It was 1,600 words long. He wrote about moral choices that have no clean solutions; about how sometimes a path of action must be “walked with tears”.

Among the thoughtful, appreciative comments that followed, I noticed one that began, “Couldn’t read all of this”. She went on to say she’d be removing him from her Facebook as words couldn’t express how strongly she disagreed with him. I began to lament the author’s...

Photographs aside, the record of my children’s childhood I’ll treasure the most is one I never planned to keep.

It began when, at the age of two, our first child started speaking in sentences. I was so delighted by the gems he came out with—so eager to share them with my husband and yet so prone to forgetting them before he finished work—that I’d reach for my phone.

“The act of sharing those gems, of having friends and family delight in them too, added to the fun ...

On the first day of our country holiday, I almost had to drag my eldest son to the willows. I’d been picturing the fun our boys would have there—climbing from one tangle of branches to the next, swinging and jumping and darting and dropping. As soon as the car was unloaded, I struck:

“Let’s go to the willows! The fields! The creek! Let’s explore!” He said I could take his brothers, he would stay behind. I said fun was compulsory—no one was watching television or eating chocola...

The house next door goes on the market within weeks and sells within days. The plum tree in the front yard ripens.

I think of Byron — white hair, blue eyes, a gardener's skin, a gardener's hands — who loved to share and hated waste; who offered us its fruit each time we spoke.

The tree was ancient but tireless. Year after year it gave our neighbour more fruit than he could ever eat, and more than he could use or give away.

Kate, a gardener too, took cuttings, to graft they don't make them like this anymore, she said. It was true of Byron too.

It happened at the theater. The kids and I had just seen a 90-minute Peter Rabbit production and my 10-year-old said he was going to the bathroom. I told him there’d be a huge queue. We were heading to the library next, which was practically next door, and so he could go there. In retrospect, I should have made sure that we were on the same page before I turned away. Instead, while I gathered my bag, their drinks, and my four-year-old’s hand...

My son had COVID-19 and we were under house arrest, so when a friend asked if I needed anything — a cake delivery, perhaps? — I made no attempt to dissuade her. She arrived at the door with a huge slab of mud cake layered with creamy chocolate ganache. I cut a sliver, just to taste, then another. I cut a generous slice for my husband, and generous slices for our kids. I cut a sliver, just to taste. And another. Technically I never had a slice.

The stars were so bright that instead of looking where I was walking, I kept looking at them. Then I stopped walking—maybe even breathing—and stared.

I’m no expert on the constellations, but I was sure that if the sky usually contained a line of about a dozen stars, I would have seen it before. And then I noticed the line was moving.
I blinked. I exclaimed. I looked around for someone to tell, but it was before sunrise in the suburbs on a very icy morning...

In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel Fleishman is in Trouble there is a scene where the main character, Toby Fleishman, is having dinner with a woman he found on a hookup app, but has only ever met for casual sex.

As she studies the menu, Fleishman studies her:

“If you looked closely, she had about two centimetres of gray hair at her temples. She had said she was forty-five. She might actually be forty-eight. That’s almost fifty… She reached across the table to take his hand. He squeezed hers back. He never realized her arms were so hairy. It was a dark, thick hair that grew somewhat...