During the pandemic, Charlotte Wood, one of Australia’s most accomplished writers, responsible for novels of extraordinary psychological acuity, stepped away from the keyboard to become a temporary employee of her husband’s art transportation business. She was tired of being locked up, and he had a job delivering work to an artist (freight was exempt from restrictions) down on the Monaro plains of New South Wales — the place, incidentally, where Wood had spent her childhood. She hadn’t been back there for many years, but the windswept landscape of rolling grass and rocky outcrops was, when they arrived, “bodily familiar”. The work trip had time for a visit to her parents’ graves, and it all affected her deeply. So deeply that Wood decided, once she returned to Sydney and her keyboard, to write about home, about memory and about the Monaro.
She was already mulling an unrelated question: “Why might a contemporary woman become a Catholic nun?” Instead of setting that enigma aside, she put it into play: Why might a contemporary woman enter a convent on the Monaro plains? “One of the ways that a lot of artists work,” Wood says, “is by bringing unconnected things together. And that connection point is where the art starts to form itself.”
Wood is no stranger to literary experimentation. Each of her novels — there are now seven, plus three works of nonfiction — tackle very different subject matter, often from a surprising direction. “The Natural Way of Things”, for example, which won both the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2016, began with the Hay Institution for Girls, a maximum-security prison (in all but name) for “wayward” young women, run by the NSW Child Welfare Department until 1974. Wood saw a documentary about the horrendous place and “couldn’t get it out of my head”, just as she couldn’t shake her “fury” at the general misogyny of the Tony Abbott era. “The Natural Way of Things” was her response: a disturbing feminist fable about a group of women who, as punishment for the crime of offending men, wake up to find themselves incarcerated in an outback hellhole rimmed by electrified fences. By contrast, “The Weekend” (2019) sees three older women reflecting on ageing, and on each other, as they sort through the beach house of another friend who has recently died. For that novel, which unfolds almost like a stage play with its moments of comedy and pathos, Wood asked herself if it was possible “to have a really long friendship over many decades that is still alive and rich, and not just a calcification of an old friendship”.
The nunnery idea was originally meant to be “lighthearted”, Wood says. But the pandemic was a grim time. “Everything suddenly became a lot more serious in our world, and all the certainties we had were just gone.” The novel she ended up writing was spare and quiet in tone but loaded with difficult questions: a stark meditation on death, grace, forgiveness and the nature of belief. In “Stone Yard Devotional”, an atheist abandons her career, her husband, her friends — her whole life — to live out her days in monastic seclusion on the Monaro, in a convent with the feel, as the novel puts it, “of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune”. But despite her retreat from the world, a series of troubling events — a plague of mice, the return of a familiar face — plunge the woman back into her past, which she cannot escape so easily. This fictional scenario is married with “the freight of my real life”, Wood says, because many of the narrator’s memories are based on the author’s.
“Stone Yard Devotional” was published by Allen & Unwin in October 2023. A shimmering, gently radical novel, it has been recognised in the past year with nominations for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Barbara Jefferis Award. It was also longlisted, and then shortlisted, for the 2024 Booker Prize, a major honour that left Wood in “complete shock”. “It’s so unlikely,” she says of the shortlisting. “Being an Australian, you know, it just doesn’t really happen so much. It was never on my radar.”
But neither, for the longest time, was writing novels. Though Wood was an avid reader as a child, “creative writing didn’t exist at school”, she says. Whenever somebody suggested she might be a writer one day, she scoffed at the notion. (“I was like, ‘No’.”) She dabbled a bit at university — she studied communications at Charles Sturt, in Bathurst — but even then, it seemed impossible as a vocation. “How do you write a novel? I thought you needed to have an idea and then write it down,” she says. “It took me a long time to understand that you can start with a fragment, an image, a question, just some really tiny random thing, and follow it.”
What changed Wood’s thinking, what made her a writer, was the death of her parents: her father when she was 19, and her mother when she was 29. There is a scene in “Stone Yard Devotional” when the unnamed narrator, upon learning that her mother’s illness is terminal, visits a general practitioner. The GP observes her grief, then suggests that her life has been “stripped down to bedrock”. This encounter happened to Wood, who suddenly found herself living on “another plane of existence” once her parents were gone, a plane that none of her friends could access. Writing offered comfort. Fiction became “a place to take all this very chaotic emotion and experience that there was no other place for in my life”. It became, Wood says, a place to “work out what you understand about the world, in a very slow and gradual way”.
“Stone Yard Devotional” is structured as a journal: a daybook (thus the “devotional” of the title), followed by a more freewheeling first-person account. Like Wood, the narrator uses the act of writing to process her grief. It is grief, in fact, that brings her to this “cloistered religious community” in the first place. The contours of her former life are kept deliberately vague by Wood, but we learn that the woman once worked at an environmental NGO, a refuge for threatened species, and that her “loss of hope”, as she calls it, is directly related to climate change: “Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat, causing ruptures of some other kind. Whereas staying still, suspended in time like these women [the nuns], does the oppose. They are doing no harm.”
Climate change was weighing on Wood as she wrote. “I don’t know how people are not despairing about this,” she says. “I don’t think despair, though, is a morally acceptable way to proceed.” “Stone Yard Devotional” shows a woman struggling with what some might call “solastalgia” — climate distress — but it offers no easy answers. In another scene, also borrowed from Wood’s life, the narrator suggests to the daughter of a friend that things are probably hopeless. When Wood did this herself, the daughter reacted with disgust. “She looked as if I’d slapped her really hard in the face, that I had assaulted her with this decision of mine to go ‘Oh well’, and she basically said, ‘Well, if you decide it’s over, it’s over.’ ” It was, Wood decided, not over — “I remember thinking that was a terrible thing to do to her, and I’ll never do it again” — and “Stone Yard Devotional” is her contribution to a growing collection of novels that attempt to wrangle, as honestly and directly as possible, with the biggest existential crisis of our time.
As Wood was finishing her draft during the pandemic, her older sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. Then Wood, too, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Then her younger sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. Wood set aside the manuscript for six months to deal with “this maelstrom of sisters and treatment and chaos”. When she came back to the book, she says, “I was in an even deeper state of the same kind of elemental feeling I had through lockdowns, that all the certainties had gone, all the comforting lies had gone. I was a different person now.” She did another pass on the novel, another draft, deepening the themes, sharpening the language, adding new sentences that reflected her evolving feelings about illness and death. She resisted the urge to over-explain, to spell things out for the reader, because if cancer had reminded her of one thing, it was that life is full of inexplicable turns, mysterious silences.
“My life,” Wood says, “kind of caught up with what the book was already trying to do.”
