Edition 70
Generosities of Spirit –
The Novella Project VIII
- Published 3rd November, 2020
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-53-5
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Stories of inner lives, resilience and potential realised, Generosities of Spirit presents Griffith Review‘s annual showcase of the best of Australian new writing.
Showcasing the winners of 2020’s novella competition – Rhianna Boyle, Claire G Coleman, Mikele Prestia and Kate Veitch – it also features compelling new work from Adam Thompson, Thomas Mayor, Linda Neil, Allanah Hunt and Kristina Olsson, as well as a selection of vital Australian poets – including Tony Birch, Eileen Chong & Lisa Gorton, and Mark O’Flynn.
Climate scientist Joelle Gergis also introduces a new series that Griffith Review will be showcasing online from November, The Elemental Summer, focusing on the responses and reactions to the climate emergency.
Griffith Review 70: Generosities of Spirit is supported by the
Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
AUDIO
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Samples of gifts and giving’.
Listen to contributor Adam Thompson read ‘Sonny’.
In this Edition
When the heart speaks
I had in mind what Australia should be as I wrote the book, a gift to the peoples’ movement for legal, political and structural change in this country – the movement to establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament, as proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Invisible histories
IMAGINE YOURSELF A bird, huge, flying out of time through a smoky sky, back, back through millennia. Further than your own memory, deeper than your instinct: about 226 million years. Gondwana floats, massive, around the polar south. Umbilical. The shape of Australia, the place...
The pleasure cure
THE SOUND OF waves just behind me filled my ears. My bare feet on the hot sand made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. I gently lifted them up and down, like a comical kind of marching: left, right, left, right, up and down, up and...
Elemental summer:
A season of change
This is the first essay in a new series to be published online across the 2020-21 summer. Bearing witness to the climate emergency, The Elemental Summer will navigate ideas and experiences of land, fire, water and air, and the science that tracks and explores...
Inheritance
FIVE OR SIX days after the funeral, or perhaps a week, Rory finally ventures out. Her father’s dog, Harpo, has been so patient, but he needs more than an amble round the backyard. And so does she. They head for the big park by...
Blue and black
MY MOTHER WAS a worrier. She speculated endlessly about whether her pie would be considered the best at bake sales or if the ladies at the hairdresser truly liked the way she kept her hair. She worried about whether my manners were good enough...
Sonny
Click here to listen to Adam Thompson read ‘Sonny’. ON SOME WINTER mornings in Launceston, the fog doesn’t lift until midday. Today it’s so dense you can see the water droplets hang in mid-air, like rain in suspended animation. Crossing the car park, I turn the collar...
The half-life of Ant Zaniolo
THIS IS THE one memory of Ant I fully trust. I’m in the backyard, in the veggie patch littered with Nonno’s prized tomatoes – the ones he insisted on planting as a house-warming gift. It’s the day I first took the chair from the kitchen...
Mount Trepidation
THE MOUNTAIN WAS a sheer volcanic core that rose improbably from the lush plain. It had been named Mount Trepidation by the early explorers, those anglophile pessimists, blighting the map with monuments to their leech bites and sunstroke. Some people claimed to see the...
The mists of down below
THERE WAS NOTHING Agent Kayl Green feared more than the kindness of strangers, something that could never really be repaid; kindness had a cost that was unknown until it was owed. Nothing Kayl feared more except the disease, the pandemic – perhaps more than...
Stone. Tongue.
i. Evening falls, and rooms grow dark, then light. Through the open window, a cricket starts up its whirring. Steam rises from the kettle. The tea grows stronger – no words today: a tightness around the throat. A weight like a thrown stone. Sprigged flowers. What has the mind to do with...
Finding you above Kyoto
Finding you above Kyoto stone cats in red knits lined a narrow canal sweetened water swirled in bowls of fallen leaves staining my hands with tannins of a winter soon born in hills above mist and mystery I climbed with you weightless resting in the small of my back sweat trickled blood flowed and on...
The gift
My younger sister’s just now sent me a maxim that our mother used, mostly in regard to others; then, each day as eyesight failed her, more often of herself. First you are a memory; then you are a photograph; then you’re just a name and then you’re nothing. A single, simple four-line stanza, shrinking...
Quince season
our kitchen turns rosaries of light in ginger and lemon outside the fib of things fading down our evergreen seasons hot torn sage and tarragon a basilica of basil the neighbour one over has hitched his jet ski to his ride-on mower tests...
Talon
(I thought it lost like a gate left open or a one-winged parenthesis, the hooked talon my father brought back from India in 1932, and later gave to me when I was eight. I blamed my brother for not taking better care of it, for leaving the gate open, yet five decades later when it...
Weekend in the capital
I’m 65 per cent more likely to be myself here in the capital of same-sex coupledom it’s true I like to button up but every move is motion-censored corridors slicked, bathrooms retro- futured with sci-fi peepholes in galleries where the staff wear ear pieces there’s no signal between concrete walls we visit...
Conversations with the navigator
Walking alone, Roaring Forties buffeting our island, my haphazard heart cast away, I see Matthew’s sloop split the strait. I pick up a fragile paper nautilus, broken, as most of those washed up are, watch his sails billow my way, gulls’ cries, landfall’s geology,...
Eating fire
it’s quite okay to eat fire there are rules a trick to it so long as you don’t inhale or swallow you can ingest all kinds of flammables: billboards hessian sacks dressmaker patterns old birthday cards love letters address books and showbags – just spit out the purified...
Featured Contributors
Adam Thompson
Adam Thompson is a Pakana (Tasmanian Aboriginal) man from Launceston. ‘Sonny’ is part of his debut short-story collection, Born...
Claire G Coleman
Claire G Coleman is a Wirlomin-Noongar woman whose ancestral country is in the South Coast of Western Australia. Her...
Linda Neil
Linda Neil is an Australian writer, songwriter and documentary producer, and the author of two non-fiction books, Learning How...
Tony Birch
Tony Birch has published the short story collections Shadowboxing (Scribe, 2006), Father’s Day (Hunter, 2009), The Promise (UQP, 2011), Common People (UQP, 2017)...
