Tag: Australian writing

Australian Writing and Essays on Illness || Katerina Bryant

SoutherlyBlog

Words || Katerina Bryant  When I first became ill, I tried to find stories like mine. I needed to see myself on the page to believe I could adapt to a new life: a quieter, restrained life. I will not go into the particulars of my illness here—it is a sticky blend of mental illness and seizures that takes over the page once I begin to write about the details. But I will say that for the first few months of my illness, I left the house only for work. I did not dare live a life that could compound…

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Agreeable book reviewing is a dangerous, vapid “epidemic of niceness”

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Words || Jack Cameron Stanton  Over the weekend I visited my parent’s house for brunch with the Lebanese side of the family, and in order to cater for political differences I strolled to the service station and purchased The Weekend Australian and Sydney Morning Herald. Over a breakfast of fresh manoush and lahembajin, the Lebs scoffed at two wildly different headlines—‘SCOMO LEADS A NEW GENERATION’ vs ‘MORRISON SNATCHES TOP JOB’ (I’m sure you can guess which is which)—while I slid out the review sections of each paper to examine them. The Weekend Australian offered six pages of substantial book reviews,…

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Fierce/Peace: The Creativity of Disability

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by Jessica White Everything begins with the body. With lying on a trampoline on a spring morning, the season in which wattle bursts across dun hills and chilly air tickles bare legs. Except now it scrapes my cheeks and the clear light hurts my eyes. An ache spills from my shoulders, across my neck and down my back. My mother, sensing something is wrong, scoops me up and takes me to the local doctor in town, a half-hour drive away on gravel roads. He sends us to the regional hospital, another hour’s drive. They stick a needle in my back…

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A Short History Of My Sentimental Education

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By Moreno Giovannoni A Sentimental Education My father who died a few weeks ago left me a legacy. He left me the Italian language and Italy and he left me a book. Working backwards through that list of three, the book he left buried inside me and I had to work hard to make it come out. The Italian language he left all around me although over time it became tarnished. But that’s OK. You can’t live in a foreign country like Australia all your life and not start to lose the pristine first language of your youth. Italy itself has…

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Call for Papers: The Long Apprenticeship

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Southerly calls for papers for their new issue, 77.2 The Long Apprenticeship.For this issue, Southerly seeks writing from students from secondary and tertiary students, as well as established writers. The techno-driven, identity- and flag-obsessed, post-modern, post-human, post-capitalist, post-truth world fissures thinking from making, craft from responsibility. Writing is the time to think deeply upon world and language, the fusing of thinking and making. The journey from fledgling writer to author is often long, beset by hardships, both existential and economic, and too often only ends with death, or defeat (not mutually exclusive). Yet Creative Writing is the growing discipline of…

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A Short History Of The Italian language

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by Moreno Giovannoni   Morè.   Morè.   Only an Italian can say that properly and there’s only one person left who calls me that. The rest are dead.   The first words I ever heard were Italian ones. The first word I ever spoke was an Italian word – papà. This was according to my poor mum who stopped speaking Italian when her vocal cords froze, together with the rest of her, in a nursing home bed, a few weeks before she died. We sat with her and exchanged the occasional Italian word. We spoke Italian words to her even…

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May Monthly Blogger – Moreno Giovannoni

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Moreno Giovannoni emigrated from Italy at the age of two. He grew up in north-east Victoria but left his heart in San Ginese where he was born. A translator and writer who has been published in The Age, Island and Southerly, he was the 2015 inaugural winner of the Deborah Cass Prize and is currently writing The Sweet Life set among the Italian Community in North-East Victoria in the 1960s. Black Inc will publish his Tales from San Ginese in 2018.

Sovrenaissance

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by Alison Whittaker Wangal land, in the memory of colonial records at least, has never been hotter. Today while I write, its sky is some thick full-handed slap of cyan on an unwilling canvas. Every new humid day that it’s like this, I’m reminded that we’re heading towards some new series of precipices even as we cross the last. Sitting in this office chair, lazily sweating and glowering at a close and motionless tree, there’s the tug of momentum under my pelvis. We’re rapidly headed towards something. Hottest year to another hottest year and some accelerating heavy panic that the…

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