Cirrus@Austlit

'This article aims to reconstruct features of John Forbes’ compositional process in his first decade of serious practice, through analysing drafts and early versions of his poems. I compare early versions of ‘Here’, ‘The Joyful Mysteries’ and ‘Stalin’s Holidays’ to their final incarnations to show how Forbes was resistant to a fixed, or single, idea when writing a poem. In the context of such openness, Forbes’ poems often moved towards a sense of closure, through the pressure his use of form applied and through its more suggestive qualities. Following a comment Forbes made in an interview, I label this process ‘formal association’. I contend that Forbes sought a balance between closure and openness, while arguing that the dynamic interplay of this openness with formal association, during the composition, was crucial to his achievement.' (Publication abstract)
 

'As a writer, I have no qualms about drawing from my life to fuel my creative practice, though I adhere to some rules: like Brien (2002), I am guided by ‘a sincere desire to tell the truth’. It is in this manner that I have sometimes used myself as a character in works of fiction, as in ‘Letter to my children’ (in Fisher 2013a) and ‘Into the light’ (Fisher 2008). In these works, I refer to the sexual assault and subsequent suicide attempt I experienced in 1973 when I was 18. Some readers have objected to my classification of these works as fiction, arguing that I was writing non-fiction, memoir or biography. My counterpoint, however, is that these stories are not recounts of what actually happened but my imagined narratives using actual events for their framework; they are my sincere attempts to tell a story I still find difficult to comprehend nearly fifty years later. Undoubtedly, some of my unconscious motivation was therapeutic. Like Gandolfo (2014), ‘there were certainly benefits at a personal level from going through the difficult process of turning that experience into fiction’. Nevertheless, consciously I was attempting to write narratives with content and themes relatively uncommon in literature when I was that 18 year old; that is, I was exploring my deviance from the norm, as my sexuality was described to 18 year old me by a well-meaning psychiatrist.' (Introduction)

'1. I could be sitting on an upturned bucket in a former retail space in Shanghai. I could be staring at the ceiling: electrical wires, pipes, brownish-yellow stains from the air conditioning. I could be outside, on the street, face pressed against the window, squinting at a pile of miscellaneous clothing store leftovers: mannequin stands, hooks, coat hangers, metal shelving, empty cardboard boxes, unidentifiable shiny things. The floor is wet, reflecting the ceiling. In one corner: smashed brick, plaster and mirror. Empty plastic bottles of water and energy drinks. Geometrical outlines along the walls left by fixtures now removed. If I showed you a photograph of the space and said nothing you might ask, was there a flood? If you looked a little closer at the same photograph you would probably notice the patterns on the floor left by different boots and wonder, as I did, how long has it been since people walked through here? If you looked – really looked – at the far left edge of the photograph, you would see a sleeping bag hanging from a hook on the wall. Are these the marks, you might ask, left by those who dismantled the store – stripping it back, drinking energy drinks, piling the debris in the centre, and moving on? Did the people who left these boot prints also sleep here at night? Did they finish a long day and get into sleeping bags in the very place they had been laboring? Or, maybe you want to travel further back, before the photograph, before it was decided that this store would be converted into an exhibition space, and ask: when did people stop shopping here? What did people buy here?' (Introduction)

'It was an ongoing nightmare. The writers could not agree. One considered character, plot, and outline, paramount. The other could not have cared less: to hell with constraint; the only thing convention appeared to achieve was discombobulate creativity even as it emerged. At this point the writer allegiant to protocol proffered a solution. He suggested putting their words on the line. To wit, write a story illustrating nuance. That is to say, a tale contrived accordant to their preferred methodology…' (Introduction)   

'The Cartesian dictum ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’, I think, therefore I am, states that the proof of our existence lies in our ability to contemplate our existence, to doubt, to think. Julienne van Loon in The Thinking Woman forces us to confront this notion as part of a six-chapter, part memoir, part study of philosophical thought. With the help of six women prolific in their fields of study, van Loon critically interrogates thought, the importance of the act of thinking, and what it means for our existence. She starts with a chapter titled ‘Love’, followed by ‘Play’, ‘Work’, ‘Fear’, ‘Wonder’, and ‘Friendship’. Each is an amalgam of van Loon’s lived experiences and her intellectual engagement with the ideas of women thinkers including Laura Kipnis, professor of media studies at Northwestern University in Chicago, novelist Siri Hustvedt, socialist feminist Nancy Holmstrom, French feminist and structuralist philosopher Julia Kristeva, psychoanalyst and feminist critic, Marina Warner, and the cultural historian Rosi Braidotti. This polyvocal discourse leaves the reader with a wholesome and new understanding of the dynamics of life.' (Introduction)

'The Flight of Birds by Joshua Lobb, a novel in twelve stories, is accompanied by an exegetical work. As the title indicates, the stories feature birds and their interactions with people. The reader is asked, at least initially, to consider the stories purely as fictional enterprises, isolated from the ‘Field Notes’ which follow at the end of the novel component. Rightly so, as first and foremost the role of a story is to engage the reader; it needs to function as a story before any other purpose, such as exegetical insight, can be attained.' (Introduction)