The Body of Text: Beverley Farmer’s A Body of Water

Abstract

A Body of Water was written by Beverley Farmer as a notebook which would grow and evolve in an organic way, like a body, in conjunction with her body of writing. She kept this journal between 1987 and 1988 in order to comment upon her own process of composition and that of the writing of others which informed and influenced it. The metaphor of the text growing ‘like a placenta in the womb’ is a recurring one as the writer views her creativity in writing fiction as allied to the process of conception and gestation of a child.