Featured in
- Published 20250506
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook, PDF
Already a subscriber? Sign in here
If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au
Share article
About the author
Isabella G Mead
Isabella G Mead’s debut poetry collection, The Infant Vine, was published in 2024 by UWAP. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Island, Rabbit, Westerly,...
More from this edition
A half-century of hatchet jobs
Non-fictionAuthors and publishers worry that bad reviews kill sales. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case, but plenty that bad reviews distress and demoralise their subjects. Many people who care about literature endow criticism, and especially negative reviews, with magical powers. They hold dear the fantasy that if critics did a better job, if they were braver soldiers, the profound structural problems that bedevil Australian literature – books rushed to press, low pay, policy indifference, plummeting reading rates, crisis in higher education, not to mention the racism and the classism – might somehow disappear. A cracking review ennobles its subject with attention and consideration, but I’ve never seen one earn an author a higher advance on their next book or buy them more time for revision, let alone shift the federal arts budget.
Resisting the ‘Content Mindset’
Non-fictionWhen we hear publishers, broadcasters or gallerists describing creative work as content, we know immediately that their approach is transactional. When we hear people describe their own work as content, they have already become complicit in their own exploitation. Social media profiles the world over feature bios identifying their owners as ‘content creators’: people who produce interchangeable matter to fill someone else’s space. Social media accounts are available free of charge on the basis that we will keep creating the work that feeds and evolves the algorithm, provides a culturally authentic context for ad placement and keeps us all scrolling – our number-one self-selected addictive behaviour.
Bypassing the gatekeepers
Non-fiction IN THE OPENING scene of the Copa 71 documentary, we see US women’s soccer great Brandi Chastain watch archival football footage on an iPad. (Chastain...
