Cirrus@Austlit

'I grew up in north-east Victoria, a good three hours’ drive from Melbourne. It was the kind of place with long, burning summers and highways that ate up the horizon. Back then phones were pretty much indestructible and I spent far too much time playing downball and Age of Empires (if either of those things is even possible). After school and on weekends I would whittle away the hours by devouring books and dreaming of one day writing my own. But like most wannabe writers from the country, something was missing.'

 (Introduction)

'Over the course of last year I immersed myself in a particular sub-genre of book: the mental illness memoir. There are some stylistically awesome and accessible titles on the topic. William Styron's Darkness Visible, for instance, or anything by Marya Hornbacher. John Marsden's books, many of which deal with themes of mental illness, were popular at school - even among the more well-adjusted. Still though, the memoirs feel like they were written for me; I read them at a point where I wanted stories I could relate to, something that gave me insight into my own madness. It was at this time in my life I was misdiagnosed with depression, and then later (correctly) with bipolar disorder.' (Publication abstract)

 

'I started hanging out with Mike towards the end of high school. He was one of those guys who would Facebook chat you as soon as he saw you were online. Sometimes even when you weren't. He always had to know what you were doing. It pissed me off, but if I didn't reply to his texts he always brought it up the next day. I sometimes got it in my head that he was lonely...'

 (Publication abstract)

'That's my brother, over there on his couch on the veranda, smoking a tailor. Sitting at his feet, that's his dog, Holiday. She was the runt of the litter. Too small to ever be a hunting dog, but the way he tells it, she chose him, not the other way round. My brother never could take ownership of his decisions...' (Publication abstract)

 

'I look away when actors kiss in movies. I have fewer qualms when it comes to watching them have sex. Whether this makes me a filthy sleazebag pervert or not will be up to you. I much prefer to see myself as what happens when the moral codes of cinema are taken too literally.'

 (Publication abstract)

'The dirt road ends as they approach the prison complex. Brendan parks the car near the prison entrance and Goblin finishes his story...' (Publication abstract)

 

'Under the crimson wash of light and dark sits a boy against a peppercorn tree. He's watching the sun fade and the campervans leave out behind the green wire fence and down the dirt road he wasn't ever allowed to go down. Their curtains are shut, spare tyres rattling as the vehicles kick up tiny stones. The boy wasn't to speak or listen to the outsiders. He'd stare through his cloudy scratched window at the kids playing spotlight at night, torches beaming from the long grass - or, as his mum called it, Addict's Crop. Their squeals rang out across the park while he lay in bed. Sometimes he could hear them sneaking and whispering late at night. He'd listen and smile at the secrecy and would be up hours imagining what they were doing. Tonight, only the gas stove clicked before his mum lit another cigarette and drank from the green bottle he wasn't allowed to touch...' (Publication abstract)

  

'From up high the way the sea curls and then kisses the beach looks like a row of apostrophes, spilling onto the shore. And the colour, the blue of it - like someone shot a hundred tonnes of ink into the ground; like maybe before, once, the ocean was a grey hole in the world, just cornered by all this yellow sand. There's a helicopter up there right now and little else. The sky is nubile and flat, like a really nice placemat...' (Publication abstract)