Cirrus@Austlit

'The contributions in this issue have been gathered together from various sources including a number of events addressing the themes of this issue. Primarily, these were the Turning Point: Creative Arts and Trauma symposium (University of Canberra, 7 June 2017), and the Narratives of Health and Wellbeing Research Conference (CQUniversity, Noosa campus, 26–27 October 2017). In addition, a series of interviews generated from the ARC-funded project, Understanding Creative Excellence: A Case Study in Poetry (DP130100402) sparked the idea of recruiting more conversations between creative practitioners working in a range of art practices: poetry, prose fiction, film and visual art in particular. Together, these contributions comprise a fascinating, revealing and sometimes provocative collection.' (Editorial introduction)

'The emerging writers whose stories grace this collection engage in the play of symbolic action and detail, capturing sadness and imperfection through an apprehended fictional world—an abstracted reality. The stories resonate because they are intensely focused upon very particular forms of enquiry: Why do the characters see what they see? How do they know what they know? Perhaps it is this—the focus upon a very particular form of sensory apprehension—that lies at the heart of short stories that resonate beyond the final lines of text.

'The stories in ACE Anthology. Arresting, Contemporary stories by Emerging writers are authentic, the voices diverse and multilayered, translating longing, deprivation, and the raw senses of lived experience, into an urgency of ideas.' (Publication summary)