Q&A with Erin McFadyen

Erin is a writer and editor from Awabakal and Worimi land in Newcastle. Her writing can be found in Foam Magazine, Overland, Art & Australia, The Mascara Review, Review 31, and Artist Profile, where she was Deputy Editor from 2020 to 2023. She also writes catalogue essays and copy for arts organisations including Blacktown Arts Centre, and works occasionally as a freelance copyeditor, mainly on books about art.

Hi Erin! ‘People on Public Transport Essay’ is a wonderful piece of writing. Reflecting on your affinity for public transport, you describe being ‘side by side with trusted strangers, sitting delightedly on seats filled with dirt and dust and worse’. Was this essay sparked by a particular memory or experience, and did you write any of it while in transit?

Hey Ruby, firstly, thank you for being such a sensitive reader and editor of the essay 💜. I sometimes do work while I’m in transit, but I try to avoid this as much as I can because being on the train or bus is such an unmissable opportunity to either observe other people or to drift off and have ideas. I’ve learned a lot by looking at what shoes people are wearing on different tube lines or watching how strangers respond to each other at different times of day.

There are a lot of memories embedded in the essay itself, many of which centre on a particular image or sensation, like light moving across someone’s face, a half-laugh, or a moment of touch. The essay itself was sparked by something that I don’t recount in it, though, which was a conversation with Claire in the ‘map of the world pool’ in Muloobinba/Newcastle when we were both home last. I truly believe that there’s no such thing as ‘working independently’ and am thrilled that that conversation while swimming has led to a realised, published work!

Some readers might recognise you as The Suburban Review’s former Deputy Editor! I learned a lot from you over the course of multiple TSR production cycles, so working on this piece felt like a lovely full-circle moment. I’m curious to hear more about how your sharp editorial instincts complement—or complicate—your writing practice. Is it hard to produce a first draft without refining as you go?

It was a privilege to work as an editor with TSR, and I learned a lot about writing and editing from the team. One thing I’ve learned through working with other writers is the value of a draft as a field across which you can try things that fail, and present ideas while they’re still in development. It’s been interesting to see the great things that can happen to written work through contingency and collaboration. I tell myself when I’m starting to write that the best thing I can do is produce something awful in which there might be something useful.

Your essay has a sort of scrapbook effect—juxtaposing colourful vignettes with photographs and a fun YouTube link. The combination of these elements made me think about your work writing catalogue essays and copy for arts organisations. Can you tell me about any visual artists you’ve been inspired by lately?

I think I say this every time someone asks me about artists, but I love Simryn Gill’s work and always will. I love the avid research that underpins it, the humility and confidence and generosity, and the senses of warmth and touch about it. I’d advise anyone who can to go and encounter her work as often as possible.

Perhaps this is also an obvious answer, but everyone in the arts has a lot to learn from the wisdom, conviction, and grace that Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino have demonstrated throughout their careers, and especially in the last couple of months. Khaled is a passionate and patient artist and also technically amazing at his crafts.

Other than that, the artists who inspire me the most and most often at the moment are those around me in Cambridge and London who use their work to build community and a better world when the one we currently have, more broadly, is incoherent and hostile. It gives me hope and joy to see queer and trans people performing in celebratory spaces. It fortifies me to see the posters people create for rallies against the genocide in Gaza. It thrills me to see the graffiti on the back of the bathroom doors at my local.

Ruby Hillsmith

Ruby Hillsmith is a writer, editor and poet living on Wurundjeri land. She was a Writers Victoria Writeability Poetry Fellow, a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow, and co-editor-in-chief of the 31st edition of RMIT’s Visible Ink. She has mentored local and national Writeability groups on behalf of Writers Victoria.