Refresh, New Update

Background: This work is situated in the field of creative nonfiction practice, specifically the experimental and lyric essay (Tall and D’Agata 1997). In the contested context of the Anthropocene, with the prospect of catastrophic climate change (Yusoff 2018, Kolbert 2014), nonfiction needs to find new ‘modes of attention’ (Dillon 2017) to the unfolding real. This research asks how the lyric essay can deploy innovations in form and point of view to address the observed and felt experience of collective crisis in everyday life. Contribution: ‘Refresh, New Update’ deploys a plural voice that eschews the narrator’s ‘I’ familiar in the personal and lyric essay, to critically engage with the politics of ‘we’re all in this together.’. It both borrows and bends the hermit crab form (Miller and Paola 2012) of the online news update to perform an ironic doubling of the immediate crisis of Covid-19 with the temporally extended crisis of climate change. In so doing, it suggests avenues for further research into how the essay can attend to the interconnections between different scales of experience and subjectivities, as these post-normal times demand. Significance: This essay is published in Sydney Review of Books (SRB), a journal housed at the Writing and Society Research Centre of University of Western Sydney. The SRB’s mission is to ‘publish longform criticism and essays by Australia’s best critics, writers and thinkers.’ The essay is one in an SRB series responding to Covid 19 including essays by leading writers and scholars including Jeff Sparrow, Wu Qi, Simon Wang and Eliza Burke.