Arnold Zable has been reading my mind. In his post, ‘Getting back to the source’, he writes about being by the foreshore on a summer’s evening, alert to the lights on the bay and ‘the countless conversations that rise like a collective whisper from the edge of the city.’ (Beautifully put, Arnold.) He is curious about people; what they say and why they are alone. During the writing of Dissection I spent a fair bit of time down at the St Kilda/Elwood foreshore. I didn’t listen to people’s conversation so much as watch people as they walked by, especially those who walked alone. I was looking for a sense of unhappiness and isolation (those of you who have read Dissection will know why) and while the foreshore is often a festive place, it can also be dreary and windswept and abandoned, especially in winter. I found that the beach and the bay started to creep into my writing and, eventually, to become integral to the novel. The appearance of the water – whether glassy and sparkling or grey and wild – affected my mood, and I took note of the feeling I had when I looked to the horizon; a feeling of expansion and possibility, as if you could simply climb aboard one of those hulking cargo ships and sail off to a new life. (Not that my current life is in any way unsatisfactory, but you know what I mean: sometimes you get that hankering to leave all responsibility behind.) I found that the foreshore began to represent something important to my main character in Dissection – a sense of reprieve, a temporary escape from her self-criticism and guilt. When at the foreshore, instead of looking inwards and despairing, Anna McBride looks out to sea and feels the faintest stirrings of hope. I set the ending of Dissection at Elwood beach, where Anna goes one summer evening with her two sons. It seemed right to end the novel at the place from which she had derived some comfort during the most difficult time of her life.

I also discovered while I was writing Dissection that water is an important and widely-used symbol in literature. (As a reader, I was already vaguely aware of this, but it’s different when you have to think about the symbolism, intentional or otherwise, of your own work.) I can’t give you an exhaustive list of what water symbolises but I think it mainly involves life and rebirth. (If any of you plunged into a pool or the ocean on one of those 44 degree days recently, you will understand the idea of water as rebirth!) Carl Jung saw water as part of the female archetype and also representative of the unconscious. (See his book, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.) Certainly there’s a lot of literary criticism around that takes the view that the Modernist writers (like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) used descriptions of water in their work to suggest the feminine. Once I read a little of this I was pleased I had started to write about the foreshore, as it seemed I had accidentally hit on something that was very relevant to my character’s psychology. Above all, I wanted Dissection to be a novel about a woman’s inner life, so the idea of water representing something intrinsically female was important to me.

If you like books that deal with the imagery of water then I can suggest two magnificent novels: The Sea by John Banville and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Both of these superbly written works use the imagery of water to tell of loss, death and abandonment.