Journal
Articles
victoria pedretti is my sleep paralysis demon
act one i try to write a happy poem but...
I Cavalli after Bella Li’s ‘Il Bambino’
At the beginning of all motionthe horses galloped towardthirst. A land steeped in droughtexcited them. In each countrydecayed the...
LIFE
And Hyperion’s edict went forth thus: take the ground pig, sleeve it in its guts, build a blaze on the beach...
Cherry chapstick
Before we railed on Katy Perry for her love of astrology, we piled on her lipstick lesbianism. Pseudo-sapphics copped a lot of shit – maybe we should shovel some of it onto the pseudo-socialists. Evidently, there were plenty of liberal cosplayers who are now back in their weekday clothes and killing it at the (government) office.
Nature through a different lens
Over the course of his remarkable career, Attenborough has taken us not merely to places most people are unlikely to visit but to places that are impossible to visit – into birds’ nests, burrows, termite mounds and the deepest recesses of the oceans. We’re shown things we will never encounter ‘in the flesh’ and that are simply not available to our senses as we navigate our daily lives.
A tough sell
While mine is a unique pathway to publication, the length of time it’s taken, the number of rewrites I’ve completed, and the thinly (and sometimes not-so-thinly) veiled racism that I’ve experienced are not unique when it comes to the journeys of authors who are First Nations and People of Colour (FNPOC).
The drifting Miles Franklin Literary Award
Collectively, these works reveal to us, if we care to listen, an Australianness that is weird, wonderful, awful, impossible, contested and messy – less chicken parmi, more all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, including the odd cut of meat that’s turned.
Who’s next?
Tackling societal issues and politics in horror is, of course, nothing earth-shattering. Horror has long been grounded in political allegory – always passionate, often cheap and gory – to push against cultural boundaries and confront the ugliest sides of humanity: misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, classism.
Trans as monster
A near future in the West in which access to gender-affirming surgery and cross-sex hormones is outlawed is no longer unimaginable. Those of us who have updated our sex markers on our passports have begun to wonder if they will be soon declared invalid with the stroke of a pen. It’s already happening in the US and the UK, once the global torch bearers of queer liberation. Why couldn’t it happen here too?
Double vision
My memories of growing up in New Zealand and Australia are a technicolour whirl of cartoons, comic books, science fiction and arcade video games – I guess I’m instinctively drawn to imagery of that era. I love using readymade imagery as a starting point for my artwork. Sixties Pop Art taught me the joys of subverting the mundane and incorporating everyday imagery not necessarily intended to be viewed as art.
Is poetry disabled?
In poetry’s capacity to self-define, to reject conventionality, to be in a constant state of flux and to hold the contradictory together in its granularity, it subverts formal systems of designation time and again. Poetry then avoids simple diagnosis, at least pre-emptively.
A half-century of hatchet jobs
Authors 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.
