an amazing organisation indeed

The very idea of an artist holding back from exploring anything confounds me. I think we have to accept that whatever it is we’re afraid to write about is valid
– Heather Taylor Johnson

I have only recently stumbled across ‘Writers Victoria’ and to say I was pleased I did would be a gross understatement. Their website is a virtual museum of the written word, and although there is no sound, you can almost feel the books, writers and those who enjoy this amazing art screaming at you to stop and buy a membership (once I have some more spare cash, I certainly will).

The Melbourne Writers Festival is fast approaching. You will find all of the details in plentiful supply …

Writers Victoria produce one of the best newsletters I have ever had the pleasure of receiving. I hope they don’t mind, but this piece was too good not to pass on to you.

On Writing the Body in Flux: A Q&A with Heather Taylor Johnson
Monday, 20 April 2026
Featured Writers, News, On Writing, Writing Life
By: Digital

Ahead of her Writers Victoria workshop, Heather Taylor Johnson discusses with Program Manager Gabriella Munoz her experiences of representing the body in flux, experimenting with structure and legitimising women’s issues through discussion and writing.

Heather’s recently released poetry collection is I Lost Someone Then Found Them in My Body, where she discusses among other things her experience of perimenopause. Her work has won or has been shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Fiction, ABR’s Calibre Prize, Island’s Nonfiction Prize, and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain.

As an editor and writer, how do you feel about the way the body in flux is being represented in literature? Are we getting better at representing the hormonal and biological realities of aging without turning them into tragedies?

There are more women being published now than ever, and I think that means that women’s issues will inevitably be more in focus in the literature we read. I think about Rachael Mead’s book The Art of Breaking Ice, which is historical fiction based on the expedition Nel Law made to Antarctica, where she became the first Australian woman to set foot on the continent. She was the only woman on the ship, and she was in her late 40s. While not a book about menopause, bringing perimenopause into Nel’s character, as the author does, not only adds greater nuance to her situation, but it’s completely authentic. How can you write a perimenopausal female character doing anything without taking into consideration the complexity of her physical and emotional state? I’m not saying we should mention the word menopause every time we write about a fifty-three-year-old woman, but we should acknowledge that fluctuating hormones would play a role in her inner dialogue and therefore her actions.

In your recent poetry collection, you talk about the ‘the change’. Why this book now? Tell us about it.

Quite simply, it’s what my body was going through when I wrote the poems. I’ve been thinking and writing about the body for 27 years, since my first symptoms of Meniere’s disease disrupted my life. Writing about illness has been central to my work as both a political move and as a means of coming to terms with chronic illness. Making the marginalised or taboo visible has to be political, and turning the living-with into art is part of coping, part of probing and trying to make sense and coexist. It’s essential for me, so it seems perfectly natural that I’d write about my body and myself when perimenopause hit.

I didn’t question the need and the want, but I did question whether any journal would ever want to publish a poem about perimenopause. I mean, would such a thing ever win a contest? I’m not convinced we’re quite there yet. I’m not convinced we ever will be. But I’m enjoying the minefield of subject matter perimenopause and menopause offer me, especially in the essay form. And I’ve just begun a new novel about a woman who sees spirits, and that amps up when she hits perimenopause. I’m having a lot of fun.

The very idea of an artist holding back from exploring anything confounds me. I think we have to accept that whatever it is we’re afraid to write about is valid.

Do you feel that hormones and biology are the final frontiers in terms of what we are ‘allowed’ to discuss honestly in literature?

That’s a really interesting question. I kind of don’t feel that there is such a thing as a final frontier in literature. The very idea of an artist holding back from exploring anything confounds me. I think we have to accept that whatever it is we’re afraid to write about is valid. Once you can legitimise a subject matter, I don’t think there are any barriers. Of course, I’m just coming at this from a creator’s point of view, not a publishers.

‘The change’ is characterised as erratic (changes in cycles, mood swings, etc). In terms of narrative structure or rhythm, how does this come into play?

If I were to flip through I Lost Someone Then Found Them In My Body and pick out the perimenopause poems, I’d say they absolutely play with structure. I have one poem called ‘the room closes in’ and it’s about looking in a mirror and being unhappy with what I see. I wrote the first draft as a run-on-sentence prose poem: ‘in front of the doorway’s a mirror, it’s critical positioning, there are sliver-thin streaks and a smudge by my head, I’m drowning in a pain of glass, I think it’s me but I’m morphing, middle-aged a hyphenated word,’ and on and on. When I finished it, I felt very who’s going to want to read about me obsessing over my flabby middle-aged body? So I replicated that poem and made three stanzas out of it, each one beginning with ‘in front of the doorway’s a mirror,’ and then the rest of the phrases are completely mixed up. So the stanzas are mirrors of one another, but they’re jumbled up, disjointed, and the repetitive but sort of frantic outcome really reflects the obsession. It’s like I needed the form to do the work in the poem that I wasn’t sure I could do with language because my language felt so solipsistic.

And in essays, to avoid the narcissistic feelings I have about writing about my own hormonal experience, I pair it up with something totally unexpected. I’ve got one coming out in Splinter that’s about Andy Warhol, Kath Day-Knight and my own perimenopausal body. It was such a surprise, discovering where that essay was taking me.

What can participants expect from your workshop?

I think it’ll be grounded in legitimising women’s issues through discussion and writing. I feel it’ll be fifty percent personal (because whenever you write about your body it’s intrinsically personal) and fifty percent communal. At least I hope that’s how it’ll play out. When I think of a group of perimenopausal, menopausal and postmenopausal women getting together for a writing workshop, I think of joy. I think of witnessing and recognition, airing frustration and pain, and I think of laughter.

What is the one book about perimenopause/menopause that you recommend to others who would like to write about ‘the change’?

I could say Miranda July’s All Fours or Joanne Harris’s Broken Light because they’re popular, but there are other novels, too, that’ve bravely gone in the menopausal direction, like Fran Littlewood’s Amazing Grace Adams and Kirsten Miller’s The Change. There really are so many. Doris Lessing, Rachel Cusk and Leslie Jameison have written books where their protagonist is going through a transcendent phase, and she’s clearly of that ‘certain age’. Honestly, I’m waiting for a collection of creative essays. The one Joan Didion could’ve written. Maybe Olivia Laing or Fiona Wright will get it done. I’ve written quite a few essays on it, so maybe it’ll be me?