Sally-Ann Murray

Sally-Ann Murray (born 1961) is an author from South Africa. Quotes Ah, clever trap. See how you make ‘roles’ sound like significant achievement, in the first question – and like lack, in the second! Tricky… Anyway, once we add in all the female reciprocities, for good measure (wifemother-daughtersister….), then maybe I don’t juggle very adeptly, after all, and only muggle by, adaptly. But look, I have become more forgiving of myself: if a woman drops the ball, I like to think that in scrabbling to find it there’s the opportunity to discover something you otherwise wouldn’t have. A kind of aleatory, chance procedure! More systematically, I’ll admit that I am a mental list maker, a virtual box ticker, and even creatively I find deadlines helpful, a way of working to task that stokes the old engine. Overall, as a professional person, while I take things seriously, I don’t take myself too seriously. It’s liberating to own the accomplished persona of the satirical clown, the provocative gadfly. A predisposition to playful curiosity, even in situations that prefer doxa and gravitas, this makes space for creativity, inventiveness, odd new alignments and lived connection. Your second question, about the ‘long gap’. So, I have several poetry collections. An odd novel. But don’t forget that writing – across various modes – hasn’t stopped, since Small Moving Parts came out in 2009. Hardly. There have been scholarly articles and chapters, several successful PhD and MA supervisions, and I’ve had many short stories published, some of them formally unusual, others focussing on difficult areas of gender and sexuality. There’s a stand-alone collection there, advanced in the making. The image resonates with the collection. It’s a piece by artist-architect Renée Rossouw. A 2018 linocut called ‘Kabuki in Ochre’, part of the series ‘Line Kosmos’. Even the simple, geometric Bauhaus typography and the layout of the text…these feel beautifully designed but also visually experimental. At the same time, the image carries with it some of the Kabuki characteristics: not only a type of Japanese theatre, but a Japanese drawing practice that follows meditative, unplanned forms in making and drawing. The artist tries not to lift her pen so that the lines flow like life organically and without the driven idea of a determinative ending. (Apparently the word ‘kabuki’ derives from the verb ‘kabuku’, meaning ‘to lean’ or ‘to be out of the ordinary’. Very loosely, kabuki can be interpreted as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘bizarre’ artistic practice, and this sits well with several elements of Otherwise Occupied. External links Category:Living people Category:1961 births Category:Women authors from South Africa