In 2016, at the ripe young age of 25, I completed my honours in creative writing at the University of Adelaide.
INSERT GRADUATION DAY PHOTO HERE
That was a strange and difficult year which yielded strange and difficult writing, the first of which was a muddled collection of pages I eloquently called ‘shuffle’ or 🔀.
I struggled immensely with the direction of my writing at the time (still do in many ways) but what I lacked in purpose I made up for in activity. So I wrote and wrote and wrote. Nearing the end of first semester, though, I was left with a collection of disconnected fragments with no central theme or motif so I contrived a way for the to all exist coherently within the logic of a story. Hmmm, story is probably too strong a word. It’s more of a set-up.
Here’s how it went: a writer finds himself in a room. He can’t remember how he got there, nor for how long he’s been in the room. In the room is a toilet, a mail flap through which the writer is fed, a giant eye in the ceiling, and a box with a hole in the top of it.