Cirrus@Austlit

'There's some great graffiti on the walls in the toilet stalls of Loretta Lynn's Dude Ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. Aside from affirmations, and quotes from the scriptures of both the Holy Bible and Lynn's own country songs ('Honky Tonk Girl', 'Coal Miner's Daughter', 'Don't Come Home a Drinkin'), there's a whole literature of slogans that alter the traditional 'X was here, date' to incorporate a celebrity in the value X: i.e. "Loretta Lynn was here 2008", a not unlikely statement that segues effortlessly into more imaginative concatenations such as "Lady Gaga was here" and even "Snookie took a dookie here, 2012.' (Publication abstract)

'What happens on the bus to Canberra stays without you. I never feel good about putting my cello in the undercarriage of a bus, but the driver always tells me that it's a hazard to seat it beside me - if he has to brake quickly it's inevitable that the hard case will sail forward, decapitate someone, and crash through the windscreen. Fortunately, getting the instrument home should be today's greatest, and only, frustration. This morning's trip is a short one: back to Canberra after a gig at Wollongong's indie venue Yours and Owls. Although I didn't drink anything last night, I feel a quease taking soft hold of my insides. The driver steps aside when he sees me approach with my black case in tow. He checks me off his list, gives his bald head a rub and turns the movement into a brief scratch of his neat, tea-stained handlebar moustache. He allows me to wedge the instrument between luggage cases and pat the cello good luck before stepping up into the coach. I sit toward the front of the bus, scoot my overnight bag beneath my feet. As I'm balling up a jumper to place between the window and my forehead, the bus pulls out, and I get my period. There's nothing psychic or transformative about it: for a moment I am unsure, wondering if it's travel sickness, and then realise that it's my uterus stripping itself of its wallpaper. I feel a mucusy residue turning cold on the seat of my underpants. It's uncomfortable to write this, but they are the facts. The painters are in.'  (Publication abstract)

'The two girls arrive at my caravan uninvited and knock. I let them in but worry the whole time what other residents might think. They are much younger than me and I wonder if the girls themselves know this. They've brought a bottle of Blue Vok with them in a hessian knapsack and ask for some glasses, which I fetch from the cupboard above the stove...'  (Publication abstract)

' In 2005 I met Kriss Hades, guitarist for one of the most extreme metal bands in the world, at a Wolf Eyes concert in the Newtown RSL on Enmore Road. Seated in the poker machine area a floor below the Music, he and his girlfriend approached my table and asked for a cigarette. Maybe it was a beer. He seemed very drunk, and his girlfriend seemed annoyed. "You know he lives in a dungeon, right?" she blandly offered at one point. I didn't believe her because I didn't think dungeons existed anymore. After all, what is a dungeon?'  (Publication abstract)

'I'm on a bus headed for the DMZ. demilitarised zone. The Cold-War buffer between North and South Korea. It's four kilometres wide and has two things in abundance: military hardware and unmolested wildlife. Or somewhat unmolested wildlife. I once met a writer named Kim Young-ha who grew up just south of the DMZ. He'd be drifting off to sleep and in the stillness, every now and then, he'd hear this whumpf. A deer hitting a landmine. Actually, three things flourish in the DMZ. Military hardware, wildlife, and tourists. I'm here for work, minding a bunch of touring writers, and it's our day off. On an idle whim we go to a low-ceilinged cubicle in a plush Seoul hotel where we flash our passports and for $75 each are driven to the no-man's land between two warring nations. Wearing visitor's badges. What kind of batshit scheme is this? There are two million soldiers along the border with just a rusty ceasefire keeping them apart. South Korea's proud and stubborn. North Korea is demonstrably unstable, like my best friend in high school who collected knives and lived with his racist foster grandmother and burgled houses on his lunch break. The two Koreas have firefights on a semi-regular basis. Tourist heaven. Bus 'em in.'  (Publication abstract)

'Jean-Luc Godard idly swirled a spoon in his coffee. Baz Luhrmann was very late and Jean-Luc Godard, now on his third Caffe Americano, was starting to get jittery. Around him, the world began to disappear. All he could see were bubbles roiling on the pitch-black liquid's surface, a galaxy of turbulent constellations reflecting back his troubled mind.'  (Publication abstract)

'The pepper tree is an ornamental, invasive tree from South America, but it can sometimes be found lining the sides of Melbourne roads. Transplanted across the Pacific, it's an oddly graceful tree: gnarled, twisted trunks made of splintery, rough grey bark; graceful, dark-green glossy and delicate leaves like fern fronds; fruit like bunches of peppercorns. Some use these pepperberries as substitutes for real peppercorns; the leaves are poisonous. The pepperberries take on hues of pink, green and yellow, literal "vowels" of light: absorbing some wavelengths, releasing others. The wavelengths the pigments reject-what we see as colour-form the language we use to describe the world. But the entire tree is transformed light: light captured, converted to wood, sugar, pepperberry, leaf; light made flesh, light made colour. The tree tells the story of the life of light, from the dawn of the universe to a petrified record of our star, the sun.'  (Publication abstract)

'My first memory of my father takes the form of a film, shot wide and never from my point of view. In this film, I'm standing on the front lawn of Camelot surrounded by my family: Dad, his brothers, their wives, and my newly widowed Nan.' (Publication abstract)

'Now the daylight was easing, and the birds wheeled and called for the last time before going to roost. The shadows that had pooled in the undergrowth began to clamber slowly upwards into the moss-hung trees...'  (Publication abstract)

'So this one time I turn up for a trick, near the university in Berkeley, and the guy, Guy, who's a French Lit. professor there has an apartment in one of those secure blocks, which strangely have the same flimsy aluminium screen doors they do in le 'burbs.'  (Publication abstract)