A Powerless Form

The Australian writer Jessica Zhan Mei Yu and I spent several months exchanging emails about her 2023 novel, But the Girl, and the affinities between postcritique and contemporary fiction. We first met in 2019 when I was giving a talk at the University of Melbourne, where Jess was a Ph.D. student in creative writing. She is now a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Melbourne and a writer of fiction, poetry, academic criticism and essays.