‘In dreams foreignness is absolutely pure, and this is the best thing for writing.
Foreignness becomes a fantastic nationality.’
– Hélène Cixous

MADLY IN LOVE with the city of Rome, I was certain I wouldn’t be able to stay away from it for long. It was my city of beginnings: my parents met and married there, presumably it’s where I was conceived; twenty-eight years later I wrote the manuscript of my first book there. Another twenty-eight years later a short touristic return was part of ‘one last look at Europe’, but I soon found myself vowing to live there again and by the next year I had left my last home in Australia on a one-way ticket. A yoga conference in the US, five months at the Binger Film Lab in Amsterdam, then to the six-month residency in Rome.