Journal
Articles
The Juansons
In the morning, she walks over to the Johnsons’ place and knocks on the door. Nothing. She calls the police, but once the officer on the phone understands that Norma is not the boy’s kin, he brushes her off. She makes coffee and goes into the living room and turns on CNN. A banner across the top of the screen reads: INSTANT E-DEPORTATIONS ACROSS US.
Lifedorm
The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh decades filled me with bitterness. I felt like the big oak tree in the centre of our play garden, stuck in the same place forever. Except even the oak tree’s life was more interesting because when it was small Parent 3 had told us to be careful not to step on it, and now it was this huge thing with ugly tree wrinkles and scars in the trunk from the branches we cut off to build a raft one summer, but I’d hardly grown at all.
Aca-lyte
Che Guevara is white and wearing a shirt with his face on it, mansplaining Derrida or Adorno a hat like your...
how to launch a poem
i) recall democracy is pretty numbers & orange clusters, strategically bold and critically wet, intemperate type-c photographs; ii) advance stagger:...
The National Institute of Standards and Technology
I disappoint myself each day that I remember my work password I take it that seriously that I base my key on the...
Habitat
It was early. I recognised my fate in the bathroom mirror. Behind which he slept deep into the morning...
Making it work
Christine, who is labelling jars, has a visual impairment. So does Shannon, who seals the jars. Both can do this precision work by feel and sound. Young Henry, who until recently was at school, has autism and is very good at counting. It is only his second day though, so he is starting out labelling mints.
Time to catch a break
Surf Like a Woman is full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes of life on the tour, plus play-by-plays of surf heats... The opening pages hook us in with a riveting story of Pauls taking on six-metre Margaret River waves at a championship tour event in 1990: ‘As the hooter for my heat sounds, I’m jacked with adrenalin...'
Keeping it platonic
But an increasingly conservative media environment, in which sex on film has dropped by almost 40 per cent since Carrie Bradshaw and co.’s heyday in 2000, means there was valid concern about how younger people would respond to the rampant sex that saw the show’s quartet sleep with ninety-four men and one woman...
the road of ghosts
Graeme works with me almost every day of each school holidays. He conducts sessions that stretch from an hour into two. He teaches me how to shoot; he splinters my form down into nothing and then restructures it until it is exact. Fingertips: the ball slides through the air into the ring. He shuffles after each rebound, his returning pass precise. Graeme pours himself into me. He is patient. He is generous. He is firm, like a grandfather.
Seeing the bigger picture
Effective storytelling in short word limits is not just about running the red pen through extraneous adjectives, either. It demands creative problem-solving, like seeking out useful synonyms, rephrasing and reconsidering the core message. The more reading one does of well-structured short fiction, the more naturally one can recall the solutions others have deployed.
Being and becoming predictable
The argument that the internet and social media have fundamentally homogenised cultural taste is well-worn, but is the implication – that taste was more varied before the internet – actually true? Has the in/out sorting mechanism intrinsic to algorithms eliminated the possibility of individual style and taste?
