My friend Sarah and I ran a creative writing workshop out of a musty classroom in the Western suburbs. We were told that the students had limited English skills. So I spent the two weeks prior texting my aunt for Arabic translations of English and Assyrian words.
by Moreno Giovannoni John Clarke, who died a month ago, said it: Our minds were on fire at that age. He was talking about the creativity he discovered in himself when he went to university. In my late teens and early twenties which is more or less the age he was referring to, my mind was “on fire” too, except that I became hungry to absorb knowledge and ideas and if anything create a world view for myself. When it came to reading fiction (and non) for me it had an unusual beginning and then continued…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
by Alison Whittaker The writer and the writing life, two off-cut conversations that have planted themselves anew in 2017. On the Southerly blog last month, Roanna Gonsalves breathed The Double Lives of Writers, a sobering bulletin that etched out the invisible financial and labour roots that give water to even prolific writers. Katerina Bryant in Overland wrote Have You Thought About Law?, on the tensions between practice and prestige and the ‘day job’ in writing. Both are relatable; I bring in most of my money through working in law and legal research. While this continent descends into another…
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…
Nic Low For five of us over the last week, life’s been defined by the chug-and-whir of digital copiers sucking in page after page of reject literature. With the support of the State Library of Victoria’s Storage and Digital Collection Services, a small group of volunteers has been digitising a portion of the archive relating to Australian literary magazines. Edmund La Touche Armstrong, Chief Librarian from 1896-1925 after working his way up from junior assistant, championed a policy of archiving unofficial as well as official culture. His vision meant that from the 1940s until the late 1990s, the SLV stored…
Nic Low After long weeks of open-ended writing, I crave concrete tasks. Out at my house in the national park north of Castlemaine, if a chapter ending’s giving me grief I might head into the garden of an evening to pick slugs off the basil. If I can’t pin down a character or find the rhythm for my prose, I might take a break and dig a hole. It’s always a purposeful hole – a flat area for a new watertank; stairs up to the outside toilet – but the digging is really the point. It gives a sense of…
Nic Low Last week I mentioned the State Library of Victoria’s archives relating to Australian literary magazines. I’ve since learned that their existence is well-known among literary scholars, and several studies of individual magazines have drawn on the material. But I think the original point stands: it’d be valuable to look at that body of rejected work collectively, as an expression of Australia’s literary unconscious. A week of fruitful conversations with various editors and archival staff means we’ve come up with a method for analysing what’s there. More on that in a moment, but for now, the manifesto I…
