Cirrus@Austlit

'Indigo Perry and Dani Netherclift are sisters living and writing in Victoria. Their father and older brother both drowned in an irrigation channel in 1993. Below is a conversation about the ways that this tragedy has shaped their creative practices both singularly and in dialogue with each other’s work. This exchange highlights how the intangibility of grief potently forms an invaluable insight into a how their experiences are forced upon their understanding of writing and poetics. Such an exchange trusts the reader to embrace their account tenderly when considering how to challenge elegiac traditions.' (Introduction)

'Darkfall is a potent and unforgettable work of compelling writing about an adolescence lived in an Australian country town in Victoria in the 1970s: desolate, dusty and bleak. Indigo Perry’s narrative is a journey of grief, arranged around a score of music from alternative and post-punk sources, music unavailable outside cities in an age before the internet. This music, she contends, provides an imagined soundtrack, a ballast, for her isolation.

'Darkfall identifies a legacy of extreme toxic masculinity, containing little in the way of justice, and gendered violence. The author’s deep retrospective unstitching of her reality is presented to us with great poetic strength, uncovering the power that resilience can unleash on an adult body. It is an act of recovery.' (Publication summary) 

'Inside the wire cage are two small rabbits, eating from a pile of picked grass. One blinks. The girl thinks it's at her but can't be sure as its eyes dart around a lot. The eyes are deep black, almost all pupils. Her mother flicks up the latch on the door of the cage and lets her scoop up one of the bunnies and hold it. She feels its heat through the knit of her school jumper. It scratches her hand with its claws, makes it bleed a bit, but she doesn't mind. The cage comes home in the back of the car and they put it at the side of the house, under the apricot tree with its branches widely outstretched around itself, starting to lean closer to the ground with all the new, tight-mouthed green fruit. She gets the tin lid that's lying among the grass left in the bottom of the cage and fills it up with water and picks more grass for them. Her mother says the grocer can give her boxes of cabbage and lettuce leaves to feed them.' (Publication abstract)

'In this paper, I am reflecting on Entwinement, an improvisational live performance by myself, a writer, and my collaborator, musician Andrew Darling, appearing as a performance art act called Illuminous (Darling & Perry 2015). Performances by Illuminous involve live improvised trumpet playing and poetic text created live and projected digitally in the performance space. Entwinement was included in Spectral Harmonies, an umbrella event of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) Annual Conference in 2015. In documenting and reflecting on the performance in terms of practice-led research, I make observations about improvisational writing and the genre of performance writing, and I suggest that this performance became an experience of performative dissonance and embodied vulnerability for myself and my collaborator. This had cascading effects on the event, inadvertently adding elements of artistic and social dissonance to those that were intentional in the work.' (Publication abstract)