'Letter to Pessoa is the first collection of short stories by award-winning Goan-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. It is an imaginative tour de force, portraying the experiences of a whole range of characters, including a scientist, a cat and a young Indian female version of Joseph Conrad, in settings across the world, from Barcelona to Capetown, Boston to Chiang Mai, Kathmandu to Kraków. Like the poet Fernando Pessoa, who gives the collection its title, and who created as many as seventy versions of himself, Cahill displays a remarkable inventiveness, making distant landscapes and situations come alive, in compelling detail, as they express the fear and longing, obsession and outrage, of the people caught up in them.
'Displaying its awareness of the power of writing to create realities, the collection also includes a number of fictions in letter form, to Jacques Derrida, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet and Margaret Atwood – and to JM Coetzee, from his character Melanie Isaacs. ' (Publication summary)
'Whereas much scholarship still associates migrant fiction in Australia with social or documentary realism, this chapter emphasizes its playful, iconoclastic, and experimental qualities. It questions the conventional long form as a closed, stable narration that relies on summation and style. Instead it turns to short fiction, examining writers such as Tom Cho, Nicholas Jose, and Melanie Cheng who operate as transnational, experimental, and decolonial forces in Australian writing.' (Publication abstract)
'The essay charts the history and goals of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators since its beginnings in 2005, noting how the association has evolved to incorporate creative writing pedagogy and, importantly, literary translation. It draws on linguist MAK Halliday’s discussion of the ‘characterology’ of Mandarin Chinese to ask whether a literary community such as APWT might also have a ‘certain cut’ identifiable in the features and effects of the new writing that emerges from the interactions of participating practitioners as they cross boundaries and challenge limits. The essay argues that the mission of APWT is transformative and ongoing and needs greater advocacy. Examples cited include the work of Michelle Cahill and Eliza Vitri Handayani and the Dalit/Indigenous Australia special issue of Cordite.
'The letter, in its conventional form, is essentially non-fiction, though fiction’s been known to mine the epistolary field with great success (think of the classics Frankenstein and The Colour Purple). The draw in using the form as fiction might lie in the immediacy and in the intimacy predicated by the use of second person “you.” as fiction, letters assume an addressee from the story’s opening, thus proving to be (for the most part, anyway) between two people: “I” and “you.” Though aside from the obligatory questions and niceties—how are you?; I hope this letter finds you well—the focus of the letter is always its writer, so given the nature of letters’ musings and related happenings, we should really think of it as being between “I” and “I.” in her debut short story collection, Letters to Pessoa, award winning poet Michelle Cahill takes this theory to new, layered heights as she pens seven letters to philosophers and writers as well as incorporating heteronyms (characters created by a writer specifically allowing for different styles of writing, something the poet Fernando Pessoa mastered) into stories as a complementary way of getting at identity.' (Introduction)
'The letter, in its conventional form, is essentially non-fiction, though fiction’s been known to mine the epistolary field with great success (think of the classics Frankenstein and The Colour Purple). The draw in using the form as fiction might lie in the immediacy and in the intimacy predicated by the use of second person “you.” as fiction, letters assume an addressee from the story’s opening, thus proving to be (for the most part, anyway) between two people: “I” and “you.” Though aside from the obligatory questions and niceties—how are you?; I hope this letter finds you well—the focus of the letter is always its writer, so given the nature of letters’ musings and related happenings, we should really think of it as being between “I” and “I.” in her debut short story collection, Letters to Pessoa, award winning poet Michelle Cahill takes this theory to new, layered heights as she pens seven letters to philosophers and writers as well as incorporating heteronyms (characters created by a writer specifically allowing for different styles of writing, something the poet Fernando Pessoa mastered) into stories as a complementary way of getting at identity.' (Introduction)
