Tag: writing life

Hearing Voices

SoutherlyBlog

by Marija Peričić In my ideal world, I’d live alone in my own apartment, which would be in a small block, filled with books and houseplants and perhaps a cat. The apartment would have large windows, be on the first floor, and look out over a lovely garden. This pretty much describes my current apartment, minus the cat and plus a partner,[i] so I am very lucky to be so close to my ideal. I am by nature an apartment-dweller. I am an introvert (89% so according to Myers-Briggs); read and write a lot, for which I prefer silence; and…

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Caravan to Yale – A Tjindarella Story

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by Natalie Harkin I am above the clouds, floating on my contemplations and looking for patterns and remnant bush in cleared and carved-up landscapes.  I’ve just parted ways with my friend and fellow poet at the Adelaide airport – she to Sydney and me to Canberra, each for work.  We talked briefly about this blog, as I’ve been thinking a lot about the way her work has been represented in the mainstream media when news of her literary Prize went viral. The March 2017 announcement for the Windham-Campbell Prize, administered by Yale University in the US, was truly sensational.  It…

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My ‘Avant-Garde Card’: Five Aesthetic Categories

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by A.J. Carruthers ―For Pam B., Michael B., Fiona H. & Justin C.  In this final blog post I want us to all get making. To get into the spirit of active experimentation, I want to share some personal writing practices here in the form of five achievable aesthetic categories: stale, flat, daggy, austere, and vaporous. These “categories” are also primers for writing. At the end of each section there are exercises to try. To speak about aesthetic categories in poetry is to issue a pragmatics of the experimental writing process. These primers are pragmatic and constructivist. Sianne Ngai, in introducing…

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The Australian Neo-Avant-Garde: Beginnings, 1973-1992

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by A.J. Carruthers   It is imperative that studies of the neo-avant-garde in Australia, and I think avant-garde studies in general, strike a balance between theory and history. One cannot just have a history of the avant-garde: a slew of good examples without a theory of what it is that makes these examples avant-garde (and in poetry, to catalogue an exhibit of key works without interrogating their poetics and aesthetics). Neither can one simply have a theory of the avant-garde that doesn’t take into account its specific histories, especially transcultural avant-gardes, those outside centres of cultural influence, those that cross…

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Pocket thanks

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by Alison Whittaker     Dunno if you remember me, tid. You and me went to school together in 2005.   I’ve got these vignettes of you in my head. First we walked together on a tour of the school grounds like fluffy juvenile magpies – except it was so hot we were slick, drippy and dragging. Then, we sat at the front of English class together and didn’t speak. I remember you doodled in your corners and I anxiously marked out a margin (three centimetres; parallel to the page edge; red pen).   Year 7 is hard enough. We…

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Talking about: talking about

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by Alison Whittaker   ‘In conversation’ is the lie I tell myself to get to a venue where I’ll talk about writing.   Harmless little chat. It’s a harmless little chat.   Here’s the real harmless little chat, twenty minutes before: From there, a writerly discussion event is just projecting some tight-packed, thought-out writerly version of myself at someone else and a smattering of people who watch on.   I think: ‘Don’t look at them. Probably shouldn’t look at them.’ I also think: ‘Chin up, gut in. Surely you know what you’re talking about.’ I think: ‘On brand.’ When was…

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Why do we bother to write?

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by Roanna Gonsalves     A few days ago, the National Human Rights Commission in India noted the suspicious deaths, over the course of a decade, of 500 indigenous (tribal) girls in government-run Ashram schools in the state of Maharashtra, India. In Australia we heard that a white supremacist was stockpiling weapons with the intention of carrying out a mass shooting in a shopping centre on the Central Coast of New South Wales. On the 26th of January, Invasion Day / Survival Day / Australia Day 2017, a group of concerned citizens issued statements condemning the physical and psychic violence…

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Lessons from the State Library of Victoria

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Nic Low I spend a lot of my time writing in a cottage in the bush. As an antidote to isolation, when in Melbourne I work out of the State Library of Victoria. I love the atmosphere beneath the reading room dome: readers deep in their cups, students flirting in echoing whispers, security guards watching like snipers from the galleries above. I’ve become fond of some of the guards over the years, particularly the eastern-European woman with short blonde hair, and the older caucasian bloke with a big white moustache. They never remember me. Anyone who’s worked in the dome…

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On Writers Block

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I’m meant to write this final blog, I said I would, I made a promise. I must, but, I can’t, I’ve tried for a week and nothing comes up, a blank abyss, I’m writing fiction at least – my head is engulfed in fiction right now and there is absolutely no way I can maneuver it to this promised blog post. I’ve been trying to write about Virginia Woolf’s electric, 1929 call to arms essay, A Room of One’s Own and muse on that early line that – “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. But I can’t write about it because my desk is literally in the living room, the kitchen, the front door and the back door at once and I just couldn’t grab an ironic break to think this week.

In Sickness and in Health

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 by Tara June Winch We’re home now; I’m at that vantage point, sorting boarding pass stubs into the recycling, shaking the sand out of bag linings, looking back at photographs, at diary entries without dates; looking back with the fogginess of a fresh return. Earlier this week in the AirBnb on the headland in Tamarama, I wrote: “Disney channel is on in the background. There is nowhere to hide on the road. There is no time, no length of quiet in my mind to write. We’ve been sick too, I couldn’t write then also, but I didn’t fight through that…

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The Vegetarian Regular at the Meat House Cafe

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by Tara June Winch I’m typing this on my best friend’s deck, during a winter that feels like a summer. I’m using her laptop, I don’t own one myself. I’m the writer without the laptop. Back home in France I have a PC, the keyboard is AZERTY and this one is QWERTY so q’s are appearing where a’s are meant to and so on. Home now is France and the best friend’s deck is Australia, the edge of the Gold Coast. Here birdsong lasts 24 hours, the baby in the far room wakes at 3am, 5am, and refuses with indignation…

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Writing ‘The Burning Elephant’

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by Christopher Raja “startling”, “ vivid” and “compelling” (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November, 2015) The Burning Elephant is a Young Adult novel that deals with the assassination of Indira Gandhi and it is completely set in India; it is also about a family’s journey to Australia. It’s a lot more than this and difficult to categorise. When I began writing this novel it was as a response to my father’s untimely death. He drowned when I was eighteen, and for years I was rudderless and I got very sick. Looking back at our time in India was a way for…

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