Bundanon

Mran-Maree is a poet, writer and psychotherapist with a long academic training in philosophy. Born in WA, raised on a fishing trawler, in New Guinea, the remote Australian bush and on a yacht travelling the world, she currently lives and writes on the land of Dja Dja Wurrung and the Taungurung people in Victoria.

She writes to make sense of her life and the world around her, to open doors to new ways of feeling, thinking and connecting to the world and the ineffable, and for the sheer pleasure of creation, which is always there, even in the depths of the slog. She loves that writing is a never-ending apprenticeship.

Mran-Maree’s poems, essays and short fiction have appeared in Best Australian Poems, Meanjin Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, 4W, An Anthology of Poetry and Place, the ACU Poetry Prize Chapbook, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize Anthology, and elsewhere.

Her unpublished poetry collection Falling Upwards was shortlisted for the 2024 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Award and awarded the 2023 Varuna Flagship Poetry Fellowship. She was awarded the 2014 Varuna Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship for her short fiction.

In Residence at Bundanon

During my residency, I will focus on my memoir project. Memory fascinates me – we often seek the facts of our histories, but I find the power of memory arises from the way it lives on in us, ever shifting, always multifaceted and in constant conversation with itself and those whose lives are interwoven with ours.

For me, writing and practicing as a psychotherapist is a process of learning to listen to and speak from and to memory and emotion and our quieter voices. In this project, I am also experimenting with form as a way of attuning to and expressing the altered states of mind in which I have often experienced myself and the world.