Novelist Charlotte Wood is Notre Dame Uni’s new writer in residence

Novelist Charlotte Wood is the University of Notre Dame’s new writer in residence.

Charlotte Wood, the University Notre Dame’s new writer-in-residence, will bring feminism and the church together in a novel about nuns. Picture: James Croucher

Charlotte Wood has lived to be grateful for the weekly masses she attended as a girl, “bored into stupefaction half the time” ; she wonders if she would have become a writer otherwise.

“There was a sense of otherworldliness and quiet space inside your head and imagination that was kind of precious,” the multi-award winner says. “I wonder if I would have become a novelist if I hadn’t had that sort of childhood of being encouraged to imagine things in silence. You know, at least once a week.”

The child of Catholic parents who were devout — “in the social justice sense” — at 18 she rejected the church and embraced feminism and atheism. Now she is bringing feminism and the church together in a novel she is planning about nuns.

When the Sydney campus of the University of Notre Dame, already keen to appoint a writer in residence, heard about that via a connection of Wood who works there, it seemed a good fit, so they applied for and received a $30,000 grant from the Copyright Agency.

“I also have always known that Catholicism was really crucial to forming who I am, you know, those early years,” she says. “I know that my ethical attitudes and my political attitudes about protecting the vulnerable and the obligations that the strong have to protect, and help create equality, all of that real­ly did come from my Catholic schooling and my Catholic parents.”

Her attitude to nuns is a nuanced — she finds the popular culture representations from Julie Andrews’s Maria in The Sound of Music to Sally Field’s Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun and Whoopi Goldberg’s Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act patronising, “comical or saccharine”.

“In the real world there are all these radically rebellious nuns like Patricia Fox, an Australian nun who was deported from The Philippines after standing up to (President Rodrigo) Duterte, and the Nigerian nun (Sister Veronica Openibo) who last year faced down the bishops at a Vatican summit very courageously laying (the sexual abuse crisis) out as their failure,” she says.

“I think it must be infuriatingly restrictive, being a Catholic nun with a very full-on Catholic patriarchy and yet nuns are also free from a whole lot of the constraints that secular capitalist patriarchy imposes on women like me.

“I want to use fiction to look at the blurry line, that area between these contradictions. I write to explore the grey areas and kind of challenge my own certainties, I guess, about that kind of thing.”

She hasn’t yet put fingers to keyboard, or developed plot or characters, because this has all coincided with the release of her latest novel, The Weekend.

The residency also includes three lectures to students and two “conversations” — one with Tegan Bennett Daylight last year about creativity, collaboration and community, and the other with Christos Tsiolkas about how Australian literature engages with spirituality or religion (or not). She also will write an essay on the latter theme.

Wood’s advice to students wedged between academic demands and the need to earn a living during their degrees is to somehow find time for the arts.

“We can’t depend on institutions to bring us to that any more. We can’t depend on the government. We have to do it ourselves,” she says.

“I would say reduce your Facebook time, just breathe, and go to galleries and listen to music and actually imbibe because it’s all there. The world of art will consistently open your mind, you know, and let you see other perspectives.”