Glossus

Francesca was commissioned to contribute to this collection of nonfiction and fiction pieces about the fraught and difficult 'truth' about female friendships. Other authors in this anthology include well-known prize-winning Australian writers such as Jane Caro, Cath Crowley, Nikki Gemmell, Gate Kennedy and Melina Marchetta. The foreword has been written by well-known and well-loved writer Helen Garner. As she notes in the foreword, 'it is a rich read, often a challenging one, and always, even at its funniest, an earnest attempt to understand and pay tribute'. Helen Garner is at the forefront of thinking and writing in nonfiction, as demonstrated by her keynote address at the prestigious international NonfictionNow Conference in 2012. Pan Macmillan is a large, prestigious established publishing house. Already there has been press interest from the Courier Mail, Good Weekend, TV and interest from forthcoming writers festivals. Francesca's nonfiction essay in this book 'Just Between Us', entitled Glossus, takes as its conceit Bailliere's 'Atlas of the Female Anatomy' and follows the line of the body- blood, muscle, bones, skin, nerve - as a method of dissecting and re-membering friendship and love. It is a piece that builds on previous practice-led research into different ways of writing and approaching memoir, how a writer's body operates and survives as the language of process, and the space between nonfiction and the telling or re-telling of stories. Glossus is a sort of 'afterword' to the major work 'Bite Your Tongue' (Spinifex 2011) (a culmination of a significant research project) published as a novel-cum-memoir that explored and celebrated 'everything to do with tongues- eating, kissing, licking, singing, spitting and biting'. This story and Francesca's specific contribution to the anthology has attracted interest from the Courier Mail, as well as from programmers of writers festivals.