Ashley Hay

And I think as a reader, it was certainly something all of us in the Griffith Review office had a particularly wonderful experience of being one of these kind of pieces of writing that bears you along with it.

And perhaps that is because you are literally in the sort of slipstream process that the character's in as well.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So this is a work of non-fiction, creative non-fiction, that Chrissie Neen's been working on for the past couple of years.

We're particularly excited to support it.

We supported this through one of our Arts Queensland, Griffith Review Queensland writing fellowships.

And we're excited because Chrissie had actually published an earlier extract in an earlier edition of Griffith Review.

So this is a kind of a, this is, you know, part of the growing of the project in a sense through us.

This is, you know, Chrissie's exploration for her grandmother, who was one of those women who, like all of us, had a completely extraordinary repository of stories, but withheld most of them from Chrissie.

And after her grandmother died, she went off in search of her grandmother's story and she went overseas and

And she found this kind of incredible tale, not just of her grandmother's migration from Slovenia to Egypt before she came to Australia, but of a whole movement of women that sort of undertook these journeys.

Now, Chrissie's also written about her grandmother in poetry, and her poetry collection won the Thomas Shapcott Prize.

Prize a couple of years ago, Eating My Grandmother.

And what I can feel this piece doing is it's bringing Lottie's story into focus.

It's Chrissie doing some really interesting research work.

It's also bringing in, you know, different things that she's interested in around folklore.

different things that she's interested in, almost around science and science writing, and making this very complicated exploration or recovery, I guess, of a woman's life that can't be recovered now because, you know, she's no longer with us to tell us her story.

It's part of the book that's coming out next year.