Tag: Rebecca Giggs

King Car

by Rebecca Giggs   As a fan of the Nigerian-American writer and critic Teju Cole, I found myself last month loitering around the side entrance of the Ian Potter Centre, hoping to hustle a security guard into letting me eavesdrop on an interview Cole was giving for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The automatic doors shuddered—switched on, but still locked. It was early. In fact, I wasn’t sure I had the right day. Inside docents and at least one festival organiser patrolled with earpieces and clipboards, too far away to notice me tapping on the glass. So I skulked around; wound…

… read more

Revelation Hunger (After Charles Baxter)

by Rebecca Giggs How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, … the hives, which were people. —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927). The cloche comes off. The veil drops. A dawning recognition. Bingo. In our age of multi-track information — when official narratives are profligately revised, and zealous fact-checkers snowball inexhaustible detail online — is it any wonder this device, the literary ‘revelation,’ has…

… read more

Invincible Summer

by Rebecca Giggs Ah, better the thud of the deadly gun, and the crash of the bursting shell, Than the terrible silence where drought is fought out there in the western hell; And better the rattle of rifles near, or the thunder on deck at sea, Than the sound — most hellish of all to hear — of a fire where it should not be. — Henry Lawson, The Bush Fire (1906). On Tuesday fires on the north-western edge of Sydney festooned the city with strange atmosphere. Smoke, covert as a cat, let itself into the house. I rushed downstairs…

… read more

Elective Despair

by Rebecca Giggs “The work of this emotion [hope] requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong” —Enoch Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1938. As we slalom into Saturday’s Federal election, I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about objectionable despair. Whether at Sydney’s ‘Green-Ups’, around the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, or in the café at the top of our street, I’m encountering an inordinate number of people on the Left—many of them are writers—who are preparing to walk into a cardboard booth on the weekend and vote informally. They will declare “Boundless Plains”…

… read more

September monthly blogger – Rebecca Giggs!

Many thanks to Mark Tredinnick for his fabulous posts. This month our blogger is Rebecca Giggs. Her bio is below:   Sydney-based Rebecca Giggs is the author of After the Whales, out with Scribe in 2014. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Aeon (UK), Overland, Meanjin, Australian Book Review and The Guardian, while her fictions have been widely published and anthologised in collections including Best Australian Stories (Black Inc.) and The Best of the Lifted Brow (Penguin Books). Rebecca writes about ecology and environmental imagination, animals, landscape, politics and memory. Originally from Western Australia, Rebecca completed…

… read more