Melanie Myers

Melanie Myers won the Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Award for an Emerging Writer in 2018. Her winning manuscript was published as Meet Me at Lennon’s (UQP), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance and The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Award. Her short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Arena Magazine, TEXT and Hecate, among many others.

Photo credit: Glenn Hunt

Articles

Dominion

My disquiet over the influence of the religious right in Australian politics is entirely a product of my upbringing. My parents, for reasons of circumstance and naivety mostly, found themselves enmeshed in a religio-political group called Logos Foundation in the 1980s. Logos has the dubious honour of trying, but failing, to bring Christian reconstructionism into mainstream politics. The Foundation was ‘the political arm’ of the Covenant Evangelical Church (CEC) – ‘the spiritual arm’ that subsumed the Pentecostal church my parents attended on Sydney’s upper north shore.

Scarlett fever

Non-fictionThe competition was notable for its shift away from being a Vivien Leigh lookalike contest. The bid to find a woman who, instead, ‘most closely’ resembled how Scarlett ‘would act and speak today’ and embodied ‘her spirit and sass’ opened up the search to any woman with a bit of chutzpah, including, in theory, Black and other women of colour.

The empathy machine?

A cursory Google search soon reveals that ‘VR as the ultimate empathy machine’ – as VR filmmaker and proselytiser Chris Milk calls his 2015 TED talk – is not just a niche academic research interest, it’s a movement. And like all movements, it has its prophets and zealots. According to Milk in a 2016 TechCrunch interview, VR promises the ‘democratisation of human experience’.

Fallen apples

EssayFrom the twelfth century in Western Europe, the apple, scientific name malus, became the forerunner for the unidentified forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, probably because its symbolism was already well established in Norse and Greek mythology, and the wordplay was irresistible: malus derives from the Latin word malum, which meant both evil or wrongdoing and fruit plucked from a tree.

Performance enhancement

Reportage IT’S A STINKING hot Saturday morning in December and I’m dressed as an elf at a rundown shopping mall in Sydney’s western suburbs. Four of my fellow graduates from QUT’s acting class of 2003 are also clapped out in...

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