Bundanon

Lindsay Tuggle is the author of  The Afterlives of Specimens (2017), which was glowingly reviewed as a cover feature in The New York Review of Books. 

Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018),  was one of The Australian’s Books of the Year (2018), shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award and Australian Poetry’s Anne Elder Award.  Lindsay won the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and was the first writer to be awarded three research Grants from the Mütter Museum of Philadelphia  Her work has also been supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Lindsay will be a Writer-in-Residence at Château d’Orquevaux  in France.

Lindsay is currently writing a collection of poems and essays, The Autopsy Elegies, and a work of auto/ generational fiction, The Whisper Sisters.    

In Residence at Bundanon

Bundanon is the perfect place to begin writing my next project, a collection of poems and essays on the poetics of solastalgia. The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to describe the sense of desolation people feel when their homeland is lost or irrevocably altered. It is a homesickness experienced not because you are far from home, but because you are witnessing the devastation of your home environment. After the succession of climate disasters Australians have endured in recent years—prolonged drought, the Black Summer bushfires, the ongoing floods—we are all, to varying degrees, living with solastalgia. This phenomena is not only central to the experience of living in my adopted homeland, it has recently become vital to my expatriate understanding of the place I first called home. 

I grew up in rural Kentucky, a landscape graced with sublime natural beauty, yet increasingly scarred by poverty, agribusiness, addiction and inequality. And that was before December 10, 2021, when a tornado devastated my hometown of Mayfield. Unprecedented in scale, this was not the kind of storm we had generationally learned how to weather. A tornado in winter is strange enough, but this one remained grounded for over four hours, stretching across 200 miles and four states. This was a storm born of a rapidly changing world. The town I called home for the first twenty years of my life, which is still home to my family, was largely wiped from the map. 

Bundanon, with its history of resilience and regeneration after fire and flood, and its architectural design to protect the Boyd collection from future disasters, is an ideal location to begin thinking about how to elegise a vanished home—specific and abstract, individual and global—and how to protect what remains.