Susan Hampton began her writing life as a performance poet. Her latest book is a memoir called Anything Can Happen, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2024. It recently won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be?

Kyoto, maybe a hundred years ago.

What’s your idea of hell?

Rabid autocrats or a mosquito plague.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

I’m so non-virtuous that I tend to admire all the virtues – they seem unattainable.

What’s your favourite film?

Babette’s Feast. Plus, on television, all of the Ozark series.

And your favourite book?

When I was six, it would have been a Phantom comic: Ghost Who Walks. I no longer have favourites in that sense – I have phases. Currently, it’s all about Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. Then there are Annie Ernaux, Claire Keegan, Percival Everett, Rachel Cusk, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Not that I can read much of it at a time. I need long breaks.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine?

Cathy Wilcox, Simone Young, Penny Wong. 

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

I would retire ‘awesome’ and ‘robust’. ‘Stupefaction’ deserves a comeback.

Who is your favourite author?

To refresh my brain, I read Michael Connelly’s crime fiction. When I was writing my memoir, I learned a lot from him about keeping the action moving, even if at the level of tone or rhythm. I learned a lot about narrative.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

I don’t really have one. I did like Frankie in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946). I liked Patti Smith in the memoir Just Kids (2010).

Which qualities do you most admire in a writer?

Lack of mannerisms.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

I didn’t read much. We were told to go outside.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

I liked Richard Ford the first time I read Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). Years later I read it again and found the voice disaffected, bored almost with the trashier side of American popular culture, the weather events, the radio, the public discourse. First time round, what I noticed was Frank as a patient witness to the pain or disorder of others.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Conversations on Radio National.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Myself. I need to get out of my own way. It’s the same with anyone. Don’t intervene. Don’t editorialise.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Intelligence.

How do you find working with editors?

Fine. I enjoy it.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I rarely go. But when I do, it’s usually better than I thought it would be. Good and sometimes adept discussion.

Are artists valued in our society?

Sometimes.

What are you working on now?

A short novel narrated by a hospital orderly.

By the end of April 2020, more than 600,000 Australians had lost their jobs as the economy was locked down in response to the emerging Covid-19 crisis. Images of long lines queuing outside Centrelink offices inspired despondent think pieces and tweets. Here was proof of what had become of Australia’s welfare state – not quite dead but hollowed to a shell after decades of retrenchment and privatisation driven by a neo-liberal ideology embraced by both major political parties. Amid a national shutdown, the social security net appeared to have been cut to shreds.

Looking down on Athens from the Acropolis, a first-time visitor observed, ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ As he noted later, ‘the person who gave expression to the remark was divided … from another person who took cognizance of the remark’. The first person was surprised to see something whose reality had seemed doubtful, the second astonished that the reality of the Athenian landscape could be in doubt. Both people were named Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s fleeting experience of estrangement is a well-known example of what came to be called derealisation. It frequently co-occurs with depersonalisation, a feeling of disconnection from self. These phenomena share a sense of alienation and unreality and fall on a spectrum extending from momentary wooziness to chronic mental illness. Once understood as expressions of hysteria, depersonalisation and derealisation later became recognised as among a group of dissociative conditions that involve alterations of consciousness, selfhood, and memory.

The selected work of a long-lived poet presents the reviewer with so much to consume. A long life and career give a poet plenty of time to make their way through different styles and themes and, perhaps most importantly, to witness moments in history and shifts in culture. In this case, we have a career spanning fifty-something years and a life that ended in 2021.