Shortly after Yumna Kassab’s selection as the inaugural Parramatta Laureate, a woman came up to her at a literary event and expressed her concern that her proposed project, a dictionary documenting her thoughts and observations of life in Parramatta, “will feature Arabs too heavily”.

The legitimacy of this concern aside, the woman needn’t have worried because it’s impossible to contain Kassab’s book, Parramatta A Dictionary of Place and Memory, to one particular subject. For though it encompasses entries on Parramatta’s physical landmarks, from the Female Factory to the Town Square to the McDonalds on Church Street and the Parramatta River, the A-Z collection is not a map of a city per se.

Instead, it’s a work of psycho-geography: one that explores, delineates and uncovers the city’s landscape and its many layers through the author’s emotions, behaviours and affiliations. Not everything is about Parramatta, but so much is inspired by it.

Kassab ruminates on injustice, reflects on concepts like nationality, ethnicity and objectivity, and affectionately pokes fun at the way her family, from Lebanon’s north, pronounces her name. The book incorporates entries as diverse as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, NRL players Johnathan Thurston and Nathan Cleary, the Western Sydney Wanderers, pink football jerseys and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Kassab puts a lot on the record: the irony that the violence in her debut book, The House of Youssef, is seen as indicative of the Lebanese community, while the violence in her book Australiana is “not seen as central to the Australian experience”; that the world is refusing to acknowledge the violence enacted upon Palestinian people; that people need to consider who gets custody of their oft-frequented cafes as part of “break-up etiquette”; that she deeply considers lighting when she parks her car at night.

Kassab, who has authored six acclaimed works of fiction and has been shortlisted for some of the country’s most prestigious literary awards, also offers her takes on the craft of writing in the dictionary, with entries on topics like writing groups, what helps with editing, the practice of writing 15 minutes a day (“if you want to write large and the writing keeps coming out small, consider the container”), and quite simply, an entry titled “How to Write”.

She honours her favourite writers (both local and international) and what they’ve taught her, her love of language and translations, and her fondness for libraries as a refuge, while also revealing the extensive selection criteria that determine which cafes she writes in.

Kassab writes of her hope that people will add to, and take from, the dictionary as they need, and that people will use it as a spark for their own dictionaries.

She talks about Parramatta as a place she can “walk in [her] mind”, but she comes across as so much more than a flaneur. She has a strong sense of place, of course, but the book’s merit is in the way she draws on that place to contemplate connections that are more globally consequential.

Kassab’s fiction has explored power, community, migration, resistance and the many forms of love, but her dictionary makes her views on such topics more concrete. It’s a mix of intimate reflection, pointed critique and bold opinions.

While she does not reveal how she responded to the woman at the literary event, the dictionary cuts through the orientalist, colonialist discourse that underpinned such a concern and cements her as someone who understands her role in public life, with one entry telling us: “For months now I have been sharpening my pen to the point it has become a knife.”

Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory by Yumna Kassab is published by Giramondo ($34.95).

What else is happening in the book world?

• A split-second mistake sent author Jaclyn Moriarty on a two-decade literary odyssey.
• The legendary cinematographer for Blade Runner 2049,FargoandSkyfalltakes us behind the lenses in his new memoir.
• Here’s why you should keep re-reading your favourite book (without feeling guilty).
• And there’s a new word for when a media empire targets you.