Elizabeth MacFarlane

Dr Elizabeth MacFarlane is a writer and lecturer in the Creative Writing department at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches Theory for Writing, Graphic Narratives and Short Fiction. Her first book Reading Coetzee was published in 2013. Elizabeth is co-director of the artists’ residency the Comic Art Workshop, and co-director of publishing company Twelve Panels Press. She lives in Melbourne with her partner Daniel and son Henry.

Remembering Forgetting with Lydia Davis

By Elizabeth MacFarlane

Davis has been called, dismissively, ‘a writer’s writer’s writer’, which gives the impression that her work exists somewhere on the ethereal edges of what can be enjoyed by the average person. It’s true that Davis’s prose is often very close to poetry in its meticulous attention to the verbal. But to dismiss this kind of writing as gratuitously abstruse, available only to other writers, is to ignore the true gift that Davis gives us in her work: the gift of noticing, or ‘vigilance’, as one of her Booker-prize judges called it.