Jessica White
OSGF
Q&A with Jessica White
Image accessed from www.jessicawhite.com.au.
Tell us a little about yourself - whatever you think is important to know!
I have been severely-to-profoundly deaf since I was four, when I contracted bacterial meningitis. I grew up in a remote farming community in northern New South Wales, Australia and I found that reading was easier than trying to communicate with people, so I immersed myself in books. Reading led to writing, which helped me to process the frustrations of being a deaf person in a hearing world. I don’t think I would have become a writer were it not for my deafness.
Growing up on a farm with a mother who is an avid gardener, and being able to wander off into the bush when I wanted, informed my relationship to the natural world – I have always had plants in my life, even though I am not brilliant at taking care of them. I am also very aware of my environment not so much through sound (although I can hear birds because of their high pitches), but touch – for example, the feel of wind on my skin - and smell. The smell of gum trees just after it has rained is one of the loveliest things on earth.
How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice? How have they changed your relationship with the natural world?
New Brighton Beach, copyright Jessica White
When the pandemic started to gather pace, I was on a writing fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. I felt completely unmoored from my partner and family and it was very stressful getting home, particularly when I arrived at the airport and found that Qantas had cancelled my flight. It took me three days to get home safely to quarantine, to my parents’ holiday house on the coast. When the quarantine finished, I found that the beach was a balm, and I tried to walk there most days. I also noticed the stillness, because there were few cars and no one was allowed out except for essential activities (Australia had some very strict lockdowns). I think that if I hadn’t had the water, sand, birds and wind to sustain me, I would have gone crazy.
My brain stopped for a couple of months from the trauma, but once it got going again I continued working hard throughout the year – for some reason I had a huge number of deadlines – so my writing practice didn’t change that much. Part of me is glad that I was busy, but another part wishes I had slowed down with the rest of the world.
Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?
As a deaf person, I have often stood on the edges of conversations, looking in but not hearing much, and so I have often felt adrift or cast out. I therefore identify with minorities who have historically been, or continue to be, excluded from the mainstream. This influences my interest in the way the natural world is represented, and in the relationships that minority groups have with nature, for example disabled people, or those who grow up in urban environments and don’t have the opportunity to get out into the bush. I am very concerned about the extinction and climate crisis, and everything that I write revolves around exploring this in some way.
Tell us about the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog. What inspired you to write this piece, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
I have been working on From the Miniature to the Momentous, my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843), for twenty years, and it seems to me that Georgiana’s obsession with the Nuytsia floribunda is akin to my obsession with writing about her life and how the flora of south-west Western Australia shaped it. South-west Western Australia is a biodiversity hotspot, which means it contains very high levels of plants that are found nowhere else on earth, which are also highly threatened. Learning about those plants has heightened my awareness of the preciousness of biodiversity and what humans stand to lose if the plants disappear. I don’t just mean physically, through the collapse of ecosystems, but psychically, as I don’t think many people realise how important green spaces are to their mental health.
So I hope that people, after reading my piece, will understand what it means to be completely consumed with the natural world, and also to become aware of what they will lose of themselves if it goes.
Georgiana Molloy, 1805-1843. Public domain. Although copyright has expired, photographic plate attribution reads "Reproduced by permission of Mrs V.M.R Bunbury, 'Marybrook'"
What creative projects are you currently working on?
I’m still working on this ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy, Western Australia’s first non-Indigenous female scientist. With any luck it will be finished next year! I am also constantly writing essays, both academic and creative nonfiction, and hope to get back to a half-finished novel about deep time and climate change very soon.
What are you reading right now?
Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron, a gorgeous, fantastical work about charismatic animals and what humans will do to possess them.
What is your favorite plant?
Argh, this is such a tough question! My mother has gardened for as long as I’ve been alive, and many of my favourites come from my childhood: jasmine, freesia and jonquils for a start. I love innumerable Australian natives: wattle (signaling the end of winter), kangaroo paw, blue leschenaultia and waratahs. Also proteas, peonies and hydrangeas … I shall stop there.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I was so disappointed that I couldn’t get to Oak Spring Garden, but still very grateful that I could connect with my fellow attendees remotely and through their writing. I think OSGF’s project of giving writers a space to think and craft their work in a beautiful location is a wonderful one, and I really hope to make it across the Atlantic for a visit one day.
Learn more about Jessica and her work here.