Interview #227
Jeff Fatt in conversation with Emma Do

“For me, sustainability is always beyond just fabric. It's about how I can sustain my business, my team, myself and my mental health so I can do this for the long run, especially being a mum as well.”

“I don’t have the nerve to go back through the novel to examine its sentences; it would feel too close to being confronted with past crimes.”

“Being who I am, namely Australian Chinese and female—two distinct drawbacks in mid-20th-century Australia, especially in the small apple isle of Tasmania—I grew up totally outside the norm in white assimilationist Australia, when those with non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds were expected to merge with the majority and forget their own cultural backgrounds.” 

“Writers seem to come into their literary prime, so to speak, later than other artists because it can take time and long years of lived experience to create something fresh and moving on the page.”

“Art is expressed in so many different ways and forms—you’re wearing a piece of art when you’re wearing my silk, but I see it as more of a design that’s made from pieces of art.”

“Working in telly, it’s astonishing how much writers’ rooms feel like the engine rooms of cultural production—whose stories we [decide to] tell determines whose humanity we value. I think the centrality of cis straight white characters in our major narratives facilitates a grave dearth of empathy in this colony.”

“So much of what we live is complicated or conflicted, and based in feeling, and not in words. Language allows us to get very close to saying what we mean, but to me it always falls just short.”