Enza Gandolfo

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I am a writer. I have published two novels, The Bridge (Scribe, 2018) and Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009). Swimming was completed as part of a PhD in Creative Writing. Swimming is an exploration of childlessness, friendship and art. The exegesis focuses on the challenges of writing about being childless as a feminist writer. I have co-authored two non-fiction books - Inventory: On Op Shops with Sue Dodd and It Keeps Me Sane: Women Craft Wellbeing with Marty Grace. I have also published short stories, essays, autobiographical pieces, reviews and articles in various literary and academic journals, magazines and newspapers.

I am an Honorary Professor of Creative Writing at Victoria University, where I taught Creative Writing and supervised postgraduate students undertaking PhDs and MAs in Creative Writing for over 20 years. I came to writing and academia in my 40s, after working as a secondary school teacher, a youth worker, and a policy officer in local government.

In 2020, during the first of Melbourne’s lockdowns, I took up embroidery. While making – especially sewing and knitting have been part of my life since I was a child, beginning to stitch in 2020 felt like falling in love…I have found a new happy place in the world of textile arts and have now exhibited work in several exhibitions. One of these exhibitions, Time Passing, a collaboration with fellow artist, Annie Bolitho was held at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in Melbourne in 2022. Among the artworks exhibited were collaborative pieces exploring our experiences as childless women.
 

Across both writing and textile art, my interest is in the power of stories to create understanding and empathy with a particular focus on feminist and political fiction. I’m also interested in women and creativity, and the use of narrative research and practice-led creative arts research methodologies that produce alternative ways of knowing and understanding.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
I always wanted to write but growing up as a working-class girl in the 1960s in Australia, there were no writing courses, and I didn’t know anyone who was a writer. My parent were Sicilian migrants working in factories. I was able to go to university because when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister, he abolished university fees. I went into teaching because I was offered me a studentship (an allowance while studying), because the only strong independent women I knew were teachers, and because teaching was seen as an acceptable career for a girl by my strict parents. Teaching English also meant I could spend my time reading books and sharing my love of reading with my students.
 

I left teaching in the 80s, feeling disappointed with the education system. I moved into Youth Work hoping to find a different way to work with the marginalised young people. In my early 30s, I decided if I was ever going to be a writer I should do something about it and enrolled in one of the first writing courses in Melbourne. After that, I went on to do an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University.
 

Up until my late 20s, I had not wanted to have children, and my husband agreed. But in my early 30s, I changed my mind. I realised that I did not have to replicate the dysfunctionality of my family of origin, that my husband and I had a good relationship, and we could make our own family. However, I had several miscarriages and was not able to have a child. During the last period of this journey, exhausted and grieving I decided to do my PhD and write a novel based in part on my experience. I wanted that experience to mean something, I wanted to share it with other women and to challenge the silence around childlessness and infertility.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
My writing is often based on my own experience. Swimming was based on my experience of infertility, and the way that childless women – both those who choose to be childless and those who are infertile are depicted in the media and generally in society.
 

My second novel, The Bridge, is partly based on the collapse of the Westgate Bridge in Melbourne in 1970. It was one of the country’s worst industrial accidents, 35 men were killed. I was 13 when it happened. We lived close to the bridge, in the same area as many of the workers and their families. This tragedy stayed with me and inspired the novel which has a second narrative set in the present and includes a car accident that happens at the base of the bridge. The novel is about trauma and grief, and about culpability and responsibility.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
Writing is a way of thinking and a process of making. I have an initial idea and then it’s a process of writing and rewriting until the story starts to emerge. I am not good at planning out a novel (at least not until the first draft is done), I follow the writing and see where it takes me.
 

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
Writing is a way of making sense of the world. A way of communicating ideas, a dialogue with others. Writing gives me pleasure as well as being challenging, it gives me a purpose, a way of contributing to the world.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
Having the two novels published was exciting and terrifying. I’m proud of the work I have done and the impact it has had on others and I’m grateful for that opportunity. To be a writer is a privilege, to have people pick up your novel and read it is wonderful – they are giving up their time to spend with my words. I don’t think being published per se has changed my sense of myself in terms of my childless status. However, writing Swimming gave me a sense of purpose. I had gone through this awful experience that left me feeling empty, but I could share that experience with other women so that maybe they felt less alone.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
I had a few women I know talk to me about their experiences and feelings about having children or not having children. Some of these women I knew well but we had never talked about these issues before. I had women who I didn’t know write to me about their experiences of infertility, miscarriages, and childlessness. They told me their stories. There is still too much silence about these issues and so it has been great to see that Swimming opened some conversations about these issues. I am not sure that it has changed my sense of myself as childless.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
One of the main issues that irritated me as a childless woman especially in my 30s was the way that people (mainly the media) set up mothers and non-mothers against each other. Representations of childless women as selfish and self-indulgent vs mothers as self-sacrificing. Some of this has changed as more women choose to be childless but ideas about women and infertility remain problematic. When I was trying to have a child, doctors assumed I would do anything including putting my health at risk to have a child. ‘If you really want a child…’ When I refused IVF, the doctor’s attitude was that I obviously didn’t want it enough even though my chances of having a successful pregnancy on IVF were very low. This comes from the idea that persists – that a woman who doesn’t have children is not fully a woman. These ideas are changing but too slowly.
 

Women who choose not to have children are often seen as selfish – they want a good, easy life. Women who are infertile are often seen as tragic. During my PhD, I read several novels (mostly Australian) with a central character who was a childless woman. These were hard to find and identify, but I did find some. I found that in fiction, infertile women are often broken, even suicidal. Women who choose to be childless are often driven, radical or selfish; qualities that are often admired in successful men but not so much in women. Obviously, these are stereotypes, and things are changing as more women without children tell their stories.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
For me, the main point is that there are as many different experiences of being non-parents as there are of being parents. I don’t think there is a binary with women who want children and one end and women who don’t at another. Some women who want children, have children and love being mothers. Some women who want children and have them and find motherhood challenging. Some women who want children and can’t have them spend years grieving others come to terms with their childlessness and have happy, satisfying lives. Some women don’t want children and are happy never being mothers. Some women don’t want children but have children and become good mothers and others don’t. Some women are ambivalent about having children, some women change their minds about wanting or not wanting children …. and so on. It's about understanding that there is a range of human experiences of parenting and not parenting, and all stories have a place.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
I keep writing and have a few projects on the go. But I have decided that 2025 is a textile art year – and I will see what stories I can tell with fabric and thread.