Cirrus@Austlit

'Who really wants to grow out of guessing games? Boring people, that’s who. So, purposefully vague as the themes are, EdComm will often try and anticipate the most popular take. It tends to start with the nonfiction brainstorm for each issue. This lives on the website and (we hope) doubles as an extra nudge for anyone who wants to submit but doesn’t know where to start. Then, since most of us are writers ourselves, we make internal bets on what will be the most in-vogue response.' (Introduction)

'In writing, as in life, the first cut is the deepest. Baby, I know. My first time was online. On a poetry critique forum. Some punk who didn’t even understand my poem thought they could tell me, the author, how to improve it. Hot damn! That first dose of red ink can sting.' (Introduction)

'When I was sixteen, I was one of those students who were constantly kind of ill. I thought I was probably a bit of a subconscious hypochondriac (or lazy), but it turned out it was something a little more serious than that.' (Publication abstract)

 

'I'd been at the boarding school for five years. My family never visited. My dad was always busy, something to do with politics. After school, me and my mates would sit at the communal table, joking, finishing our homework, and when the sun went down and the heat became bearable we'd play footy, all of us running around pretending to be Jonathan Brown, Cameron Bruce, Nick Dal Santo... our favourite footy players. It was only later, in the bunks after lights out, after the showers had stopped running and the boys had stopped giggling, speaking about Jackie and Lisa, the bras they'd started wearing, who they'd rather kiss, that I felt like something was missing. On my birthdays my family would send a card. Usually there was no message, just twenty dollars folded inside...'

 (Publication abstract)

'Marek learned many things from The Sweeny Brothers' Circus. He'd learned that people will believe anything if you advertise it with enough conviction. That if a tent is not completely dry when you fold it up, it will never smell the same. That animals produce astounding amounts of excrement when startled, and that animals on speeding trains are almost constantly startled. That under moonlight and clear water, white hair looks like polished silver...' (Publication abstract)

 

'You would recognise the sound. It clatters up the rollercoaster double helix of ancestral memory. The sound is a clinking, like chess pieces in a bag.' (Publication abstract)

 

'That morning is pure Caravaggio in my mind, all chiaroscuro faces and the air thick with grim revelation. Mother was dead...'

 (Publication abstract)

'In the politics of the playground, children have the capacity to reject their peers based on the most ridiculous factors. Clothing, music taste, the contents of their lunchbox. This is often tolerated to an extent because we assumed that they would grow out of it. However, even now as a university student, I am unfortunately acutely aware that there are still plenty of judgmental people in the world. Because of this, I cringe every time a classmate gets up at the beginning of a lecture to plug whichever organisation they volunteer for. They always pass around a sign-up sheet. I can't help but feel slightly embarrassed as they retrieve it at the end, only to find that not a single student has written down their contact details. You've got to have serious balls to go back and do another presentation after something like that. Once, I saw the same girl give the same spiel three times in three different lectures. This was in a single week. She was engaging enough, and from memory it was a good cause that she was spruiking. Three lectures. Not a single sign-up.' (Publication abstract)

 

'Sometimes you just need a body, any body to lie with you through the night. An occasional necessity - like a cheeky joint or family-size Cadbury block. That's why I first led Jake back to my flat at 2 am...' (Publication abstract)

 

'There once was a frog that could convert its stomach into a uterus. This speckled brown frog appeared quite unremarkable upon first discovery in the seventies, preferring to reside in the hinterland of south-east Queensland than the hustle and bustle of the city, like its more charismatic cousin the green tree frog. But what this frog lacked in appearance it made up for in gross ingenuity. Rather than leaving its offspring to their fate in a pond, the gastric-brooding frog would physiologically convert its stomach into a uterus, swallow its eggs then spit out its young once they had hatched. Now that's dedication.' (Publication abstract)

 

'Nanna's story about being abandoned by her father begins simply. In the late 1930s, great-grandfather left his Glenelg house to buy a packet of cigarettes. He wasn't seen again until 1942 in Sydney Harbour, fresh off a ship from North Africa with a captain's rank and a new name. She then shows me a photograph of him standing alongside a troopship in port, and another on reconnaissance dated a year earlier, both photographs with his alias pencilled on the back. The photographs aren't particularly interesting or even mysterious; he looks just like any other man who went to war - that old-school part in the hair, that Don Draper nonchalance. What's interesting is Nanna's reaction to what these photographs represent.' (Publication abstract)

 

'I spotted the car not long after its death knell had sounded. I was coming home from the Pinnacle where I'd worked a double shift on one side of the bar and then drank away my tips on the other. The reason I drank was Rachel. We might have been on the rocks for a while, but it wasn't until, nearing clock-off, I went into the cellar to replace the Coke post-mix that I suddenly thought I'd lost all passion for her. Just to get through my shift I had to shut the cellar door for a few minutes and scull a warm beer...'

 (Publication abstract)