Your upcoming workshop at Writing NSW has a focus on exploring the power of objects to shape narrative. Can you tell us some objects you have incorporated into your writing?
Objects have always been a significant part of my writing and my new book Calendar is based around them. I wrote it over the course of a year. Every day I waited for an object to come to my attention, and then that night I wrote about it – a bicycle bell, a four-leaf clover, a hot water bottle, an airline blanket, and a to-do list – 365 objects in total. In my previous book Gentle and Fierce, an essay collection about animals, I wrote about objects including a fur coat that belonged to my great-grandmother, and a figurine of an otter. Mirror Sydney derives its name from a 1960s photo album I found in an op shop, with a photo of the city on the front, and then its mirror image on the back. These objects are a tangible link to stories of people, places, and time.
Who are some writers who inspire you?
All of my books include illustrations in some form – hand-drawn maps in Mirror Sydney, line drawings of the objects in Calendar – and I’m inspired by writers who bring together text and images in interesting ways. One favourite writer who does this is Canadian artist Leanne Shapton. My favourite book of hers is a novel in the form of an auction catalogue. It is a catalogue of all the objects significant to a fictional couple, tracking their relationship from start to finish. It’s such an unusual, inventive idea for a novel. The book itself is designed to exactly replicate an auction catalogue, so much so that when I first came across it, in the fiction section of a bookshop, I thought it had been put there by mistake.
Your new book, Calendar, is about “tuning in to the unexpected, playful and solemn lives of the objects around us.” Have you always been drawn to objects?
Throughout my life I’ve had an attraction to objects for the stories they tell. I’ve felt this connection from even when I was very young when I imagined they might possess a kind of magic. I have been a passionate op-shopper since I was a teenager, and this has fostered my obsession with objects from the recent past, the kinds of things that have slipped out of fashion or use. I love that you never know exactly what you might find when you go op shopping, and it is a complementary activity to writing for me. Many of the objects in Calendar are things I found second hand, that have made their way into my life by chance. Writers are often drawn to second hand and found objects: there’s a beautiful essay by Tony Birch, ‘Things of Stone and Wood and Wool‘, that examines these connections, and it is one of my favourite pieces of object writing.
Does an object have to have profound significance to be worthy of creative inspiration?
While the first objects that come to mind for writing might be precious items that have a clear significance through their artistic, heirloom, or monetary value, humble and everyday objects are no less interesting to write with. It’s the stories they connect to that make them profound. Most of the objects I write about in Calendar are things of this kind, and it can be a creative challenge to draw out the stories of even the most mundane object, and bring it to life for the reader.
Vanessa Berry is a writer who lives and works on Gadigal land. She is the author of books including Gentle and Fierce and the award-winning Mirror Sydney, an essay and hand-drawn map collection which examines urban environments, change, and marginal and overlooked places. Her new book Calendar, a collection of 365 essays on objects, will be published by Upswell in 2025. Vanessa is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.
Join Vanessa Berry for her course, Finding Inspiration Through Objects for Memoir and Fiction, Saturday 8 November 2025, 10am-4pm at Writing NSW.
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