Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Silence Awareness Existence program / FEBRUARY 2020
Maria Takolander
Australia
www.mariatakolander.com
About
Maria Takolander was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973
to Finnish parents. She is a fiction writer, poet, essayist,
reviewer, scholar and interviewer. She is the author of two
books of poetry, The End of the World (Giramondo 2014)
and Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), with a third, Trigger
Warning, forthcoming with UQP. Her poems were selected
for The Best Australian Poems and/or The Best Australian
Poetry every year from 2005, and are anthologised in
Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (2009),
Thirty Australian Poets (2011), the Turnrow Anthology of
Contemporary Australian Poetry (2014), Contemporary
Australian Poetry (2016) and #MeToo: Stories from the
Australian Movement (2019). Her poems are also represented
internationally in special Australian-poetry issues of Agenda
(UK), Chicago Quarterly Review (US), Kenyon Review (US),
Lichtungen (Austria) and Michigan Quarterly Review (US).
Radio National Australia aired a program about her poetry
in 2015, and she has performed her poetry on TV and at the
2017 International Poetry Festival of Medellín, Colombia.
Maria is also a prize-winning fiction writer and the author of
The Double (and Other Stories) (Text 2013), which was named
one of the best books of the year by The Australian and other
forums. Maria is now finishing a novel about climate change,
the most urgent issue of our time.
A cli-fi novel
When I left Australia, the country was in the grip of an
unprecedented environmental crisis, with an area twice
the size of Belgium having been burnt by bushfires after
years of record-breaking heat. Sydney, Melbourne and
Canberra were blanketed by hazardous smoke for weeks
on end, making life in the major cities as catastrophic as
life in the bush. I arrived in Finland in February, in the last
month of the northern winter, when the land should have
been blanketed by snow and the lakes frozen. Instead, cars
were stirring up dust as they passed down country roads,
and lakes were slushy and unstable. My grief and anxiety
were profound. So too, though, was my sense of the aching
beauty of the world. Each day, from my studio window in
the ‘yellow house’ at Arteles Creative Centre in Haukijärvi,
I observed an environment that presented to me subtle but
nevertheless exquisite variations of sky and water and land.
As the sun moved along the horizon, casting its gradations
and patterns of light and shade, these silent visions of the
world moved through me, setting the pace and mood of my
days. My month at Arteles was an extraordinarily nourishing
and generative one. I couldn’t think of a better place from
which to have worked on my cli-fi novel.