In this episode of Fully Lit, Erin Vincent, in conversation with writer and academic Sarah Attfield, reflects on returning to a subject she once believed she had left behind in her verse novel, 14 Ways of Looking.

Moving between memoir, research and constraint‑based writing, the book is a fragmentary work that reimagines how grief can be written, building a mosaic of memory around the the number fourteen — Vincent’s age when she lost both her parents.

Drawing on the playful constraints of the Oulipo movement, Vincent constructs the book through fragments, each linked by the repeated appearance of the number 14. The result is a work that is at once formally inventive and deeply personal, where meaning emerges through juxtaposition, white space, and the connections made by the reader.

Together, they discuss the creative possibilities of constraint, the challenge of shaping fragments into a cohesive work, and the emotional and structural role of white space on the page. Vincent also reflects on the difference between writing in grief and writing about it — and how distance, precision and form can open up new ways of expressing loss.

At the heart of this conversation is a question central to Fully Lit: how do we find new language for difficult experiences — and what happens when form becomes a way of thinking, feeling, and remembering?

This episode was recorded live on Gadigal land at Sydney’s Gleebooks.

Voices

Erin Vincent is the author of Fourteen Ways of Looking as well as Grief Girl, which was named a New York Public Library Best Book and an American Library Association Best Book Nominee. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, the Guardian, Electric Literature, and the Offing, among other publications. She holds a Master of Arts in creative writing from the University of Technology Sydney and is currently studying for a PhD in creative writing.

Sarah Attfield teaches creative writing at UTS. Her academic work focuses on the representation of working-class life in literature, popular music, film, TV and art. She has published books on working-class cinema and Australian working-class literature and is currently working on a new book about working-class participation in popular music scenes. Sarah is also a poet, and her creative work is informed by her working-class background and continuing connection to her working-class family and friends.

Credits

This episode was recorded on Gadigal land at Sydney’s Gleebooks – for more literary events like this one, see the Gleebooks events page.

Fully Lit is brought to you by Impact Studios at UTS, the Sydney Review of Books, and the UTS Writing and Publishing Program, and is produced by Regina Botros.

Edited and mixed by Regina Botros.

Executive Producers: Sarah Gilbert and James Jiang.

Find more episodes of Fully Lit wherever you get your podcasts.

Further reading

‘Piecing Together in the Afterlife’ – Rosalind Moran reviews Erin Vincent’s Fourteen Ways of Looking for the Sydney Review of Books.

You can buy Fourteen Ways of Looking at Gleebooks, in the bookshop and online.