Ahead of their Writers Victoria workshop, Caitlin McGregor tells us what drove them to exploring weird writing and how ‘the weird’ can help us push limits, play with genre and reading more widely.
Cailtin is an award-winning writer and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, where they also teache creative writing. Their work has been published in a range of places, including Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, Overland, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and the non-fiction anthology Someone Like Me.
What first drew you to the idea of the “weird” in non-fiction, was there a particular writer or moment that sparked it for you?
I think it was a few different things that clicked into relationship with each other over time. I’ve always loved weird fiction, so that’s definitely an influence. And I mean this in the classic Lovecraftian, tentacular sense of the term, but also in the sense of stories where something strange or unsettling is found in what’s ‘normal’ or familiar—stories like ‘The Summer People’ by Shirley Jackson, or ‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman.
I think we’re more forgiving of the confusing or the strange in fiction than we are in non-fiction, but I find the real world strange and confusing a lot of the time. I’ve been thinking a lot about how far non-fiction can be pushed into weird territory without becoming fictional. For me this is also a political question—there’s nothing neutral about who gets to decide what is real or true or correct enough to be counted as ‘non-fiction’, so I’m interested in writing that pushes back against the power dynamics defining the boundaries of the genre.
There are lots of writers already doing what I think of as weird non-fiction – Annie Dillard’s descriptions of nature and Tito Mukhopadhyay’s whole oeuvre both come to mind. Closer to home, so do Beau Windon’s essays and poems, a lot of Eloise Grills’ non-fiction pieces, and Heidi Everett’s wonderful book My Friend Fox.
When you’re stuck in a draft, do you have a go-to way of making it weirder or more alive?
When this happens, I think it’s usually because I’m not close enough to what I want to say. I get stuck when there are barriers in between what I’m my writing and what I actually think. Sometimes this is fear of being properly honest, sometimes it’s that I’m actually borrowing someone else’s ideas without having fully worked through them myself yet, and sometimes it’s because I’m trying to be too clever.
One of my favourite tricks to get around these blocks is to go for a walk or a drive and record myself talking out loud, pretending that I’m trying to explain my ideas to someone else, as clearly as I can. Then I get back to my computer and transcribe the recording, and it’s usually a bit more alive-feeling than what I was trying to do on the page beforehand.
When you talk about identifying and subverting “normative frameworks,” what are some common ones you see shaping contemporary non-fiction — and how can writers recognise them in their own work?
I have come to think of some frameworks as inherently ‘unweirding’ (derogatory), in the way they take something strange and explain all its edges and inconsistencies away, and I think this is what I mean by normative frameworks. They’re normative in the way that they normalise, but also in the sense that they are normal, and therefore difficult to spot. An example relevant to my own work is the framework of psychiatry. Abolitionists tell us to ‘kill the cop in our head’, and I try to comb through my drafts removing spots where the psychiatrist in my head has snuck in—which, despite my best efforts, is still disappointingly often.
Another way of articulating this idea comes from Johanna Hedva, who writes about reading stories about illness and asking, How did you come to this thought? And I like that question as a tool for weird editing.
We all have layers of these frameworks that shape our thinking—frameworks and logics that emerge from colonialism, capitalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy—and training your eye to notice when that’s happening in our own thinking and writing is difficult (maybe even impossible to do completely?). But I think, like with most writing-related problems, this training starts with reading—more widely, more weirdly.
For writers who feel like their work is a bit safe or conventional, what’s a small way they could start experimenting with the weird?
They could come to my Writers Victoria workshop on 14 March!
Alternatively, they could try to describe something very familiar to them—an object, an idea, a bodily sensation, a habit, an interaction—as though it was their first time encountering that thing, trying to avoid relying on any prior knowledge they think the reader might have. This helps me to see whatever it is I’m writing about more clearly, in all its inherent oddness, and makes me more aware of the language choices and assumptions I’m making.
What books are you reading now and which would you recommend for those interested in non-fiction?
At the moment, I’m reading How to Tell When We Will Die by Johanna Hedva, and re-reading White Girls by Hilton Als. I would very much recommend both.
For people interested in writing non-fiction, I would recommend reading fiction and poetry too! Recent favourites of mine have been Stinkbug by Sinead Stubbins, The Slip by Miriam Webster, and The Rot by Evelyn Araluen.
There’s nothing neutral about who gets to decide what is real or true or correct enough to be counted as ‘non-fiction’, so I’m interested in writing that pushes back against the power dynamics defining the boundaries of the genre.
– Caitlin McGregor
Explore the weird in Caitlin workshop on 14 March 2026. Places are limited. Enrol now to avoid disappointment.