Cirrus@Austlit

'Cinema is full of representations of the landscape that inspire terror. The land is a scary place - it is to be feared or conquered. Mount Everest is that most perilous and conquerable landform, inspiring its own canon of mountaineering films. Jennifer Peedom's Sherpa is the most recent of that canon: it is a climbing film, an Australian film, and a documentary about the deadliest day in Everest's history.' (Publication abstract)

'This is how one becomes, through dreams, the perfect autodidactic. The dream itself might not be much chop, but then my fiction is so short that I can dine out on even the briefest, vaguest visions for an entire book. It might not be a particularly interesting dream either - but then the audience for Australian short fiction is so slim that getting to know the desires of readers is, for me at any rate, something of a waste of time. Besides, what kind of writer concerns themselves with what the reader wants? Not a very interesting one. For interesting writers, the relationship between reader and writer is pure sub and dom. The writer commands, the reader obeys. William S. Burroughs once said that teaching "writing" was like "trying to teach someone how to dream." I suspect he had it right in a sense: if you cannot dream, in one form or another, then don't bother writing at all. Perhaps those with pretensions of teaching fiction to the young and the restless should be more concerned with the ethereal realms than they seem to be at present. Politics and imagination are overlapping magisteria - the two realms need not be addressed in the absence of the other - but it appears to me that the literature most in production in this troubled country is a little too beholden to its own seriousness, and far too down to earth. The rabid effacement that commercialisation demands of our higher education institutions is one exterminator - a 'community arts' culture which seeks to trade on the commodification of every aspect of the 'writer life' and reduces literature to an economy of gossip is another. But there is plenty of blame to go around.' (Publication abstract)

'Every time I go for a walk in Turkey I see a dead thing: a blob of a baby mouse, its entrails rusting to the steel railing; a waterrat with wet fur in spikey clumps, tail rotted; a ginger cat in the grass, one of its legs chewed off. I could take these as signs and hurry back to the pristine apartment I'm staying in where my two daughters are watching The Disney Channel. But signs of what?' (Publication abstract)

'When I held the finished copy of my novel Relativity for the first time, I didn't feel emotional for the reasons I'd expected I would. I felt no pure euphoria because I had a published book. What I did have in my hands was a physical representation of eight years of my life. I could see them, hold them; they'd been given a shape, encapsulated within an object.' (Publication abstract)

'It's the year 921 and Ibn Fadlan, a theologian in the court of Abbasid Caliphate al-Muqtadir, is making a 4,000-kilometre journey from Baghdad to the encampment of the semi-nomadic Bulghar khan on the Volga River. He is serving as secretary to the caliph's envoy.' (Publication abstract)

'Jenny: My answer is, if you're paying for your own braces, you should be bloody proud of yourself! And if your parents are paying for them, you should count yourself lucky and appreciate them. Dentistry is expensive. My niece's child had to get molars taken out and it cost her $3,000. If I had crooked teeth, I would get braces. Whenever I look at people with them, I think, "Oooh, they've got money." So why are you feeling shameful about your braces?! Some people might find them a turn-on; you never know! There are so many weird people out there. This world is filled with them. And in the end, you'll have the perfect smile and perfect bite. Okay: it's not attractive necessarily, but it's not ugly to me either.' (Publication abstract)