Eleanor O’Callaghan is a writer and textile artist in Melbourne Australia. She is an innate world builder currently crafting across the realms of both the Pen– the mind – and the Hook – the tactile experiential. Beyond co-writing two collaborative novels, she is preparing to query Those That Were Not (a solo YA high fantasy about making your place in the world) and drafting a Middle Grade mystery set in 2005 small-town Victoria.”
Her education has been non-linear and voracious. Following a self-drafted learning path, she has focused her independent studies on the interaction of psychology, sociology, linguistics and history. Fascinated by closed communities, the psychology of radicalisation and the “boundary creep”
that keeps people from recognising their own extreme attitudes, she is intrigued by the small breaches that allow people to escape coercive control. Exploring the foundations of culture and the social web as a woven system of shared beliefs, often managed by puppeteers who control the
narrative, she knows that the act of writing history is inherently biased in the writer’s benefit. She is a magpie for information collecting:everything from classical mythology to modern politics – the evolution of foundational garments to the epistemology and semiology of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
She is drawn to the questions of what creates change, and what prevents it? She studies compliance and nonconformity, and the art of the absurd.
Her philosophy is simple: continued social progress, with the beauty of past fashions, furniture and pace of life. Eleanor is forging her own story in this world and filling it with beautiful Edwardian/Victorian clothes, rambunctious stuffed animals, and a compulsive desire to dance whenever she hears classical music.
Her life is currently powered by salt, compression, chocolate and a quietly paced world. Because physical travel is limited, she travels extensively in conversations, footnotes and tangential research. Like Alice she enjoys an interesting rabbit hole.
You can catch her most days working from her portable nest, inspired by a very loud Griffin, and appropriate doses of sunshine.