the bts of the bst #2

Is the essay about lesbians* in sport finally arriving?

A self-portrait

I open the second instalment of the bts of the bst with the news it seems the turning, an essay exploring sexuality¹ and shame in professional women’s sport, has finally found a home.

I wrote it in 2021! It is 2025! I have been tempted to publish it here, to let it free, but I ultimately felt its topic required the legitimacy of an external (and physical) publication, which might at last have happened. For those of you who subscribed purely to read it, firstly, very sorry, and secondly, forgive me—you will be able to get your hands on it soon. Happy Friday.

seven (and a half) failures

1. Received a rejection email in September from the National Writers’ House for my Varuna Residential Fellowship application.

   1. Really fun fact: in 2022 and 2023, I also received a rejection email from Varuna, although both times I was shortlisted. However, third time not lucky however in 2024.

      

      2022’s rejection email

      

      2023’s rejection email

2. Wrote 5,000 words for ABR’s Calibre Prize but did not finish the draft in time to submit. The essay is called [redacted]. Here are three sentences of it:

   I do not know exactly when I stopped being a pulse: of breath and desire and sensation. I am unsure when my essence calcified and became my body, when my understanding of myself threaded to the physical shape I was moving through the world inside. I was conscious, suddenly, of being within a vessel but also outside of it and simultaneously somehow the vessel itself.

3. Received a rejection email from Island in October for the turning.

   

4. Received another rejection email in October from Island for the storing

   — which, as I had already finalised edits with Kate Kruimink, turned out to be a mistake.

   

   Also: Kate has a new novel out.

5. Missed the submission date for the Dal Stivens Literary Award, even after I was reminded by the talented and deeply generous Daniel Ray.

   

6. Received a rejection email in November from Westerly for a piece of fiction called vehicle.

7. Also received a rejection email for vehicle in November from Griffith Review.

one acceptance

1. I applied for OurWatch’s Change Makers Program. This is why:

   Why do you want to join the Change Makers Program?*
   I feel incredibly fortunate to be alive in a time where there is an increasing amount of awareness, education and action against gendered violence. It is a privilege to be in a position, as a professional athlete, to learn and have access to resources that can then be shared with others who do not always have the same opportunities. I am passionate about the democratisation of knowledge, and the importance of acknowledging and trying to combat barriers individuals encounter due to intersections of identity, like race and class and dis/ability, for example. Violence against women, and its manifestations of family and domestic violence, is something I have always been very sensitive to and passionate about.

submission

1. The first draft of Working Body, a piece exploring the tension between gender, performance and aesthetic, specifically with women athletes and their relationship to their bodies, was sent off to Griffith Review for editing.

Here is a snippet:

I played elite sport through the entirety of my childhood. At twenty-six, I have spent eight years in professional sporting environments, across two codes. Sport has consequently existed alongside me through various physical and emotional puberties. It gave me a lot of things: diverse skills, support structures, a wider understanding of myself. It still did not rid me of the self-consciousness attached to existing as a girl then woman. It perhaps worsened it.

Do you know if you refer three friends you can read [all the] bst for free?

one update on the novel