Cirrus@Austlit

'Who was Iris Webber? For Fiona Kelly McGregor, the search began at an exhibition where Webber’s gaol mugshot first caught McGregor’s eye. In her 2017 creative writing exegesis, McGregor writes about becoming ‘vexed’ by ‘static, tabloid’ portraits of Webber—gun-slinging, sly-grogging, lesbian gangster of the author’s hometown—who earned the epithet ‘the most violent woman in Sydney’. The academic work examines the many biases that accompany representations of Webber, wrestling the historically contentious figure from the clichéd narratives and hackneyed tropes of contemporary reportage that have been repeated through the years. It throws open a window into McGregor’s motivations and ambitions for her novel Iris to ‘be read as both myth and document’. '  (Introduction)

'One of the ironies of Harry Reid’s poetry collection Leave Me Alone—in essence an order, a knee-jerk response, the default state of interacting with co-workers as they try to send you memes from The Office over the group WhatsApp—is the sense of a conversation overheard, trying to resist becoming a monologue. In this, Leave Me Alone might as well have been written by any poet trying to immortalise a specific guy, a specific summer’s day, a specific era, and the language that subsequently interferes. What is the anonymous, deifying ‘You’ of a sonnet but the precursor to an email chain’s placeholding, or the ‘you’ in Reid’s line, from the section ‘Email Signatures’: ‘I’m happy / to do it & when you / get back I have / an SOP im just dying / to show you?’' (Introduction)

'In a recent interview with Alice Allan, James Jiang laments the ‘prize culture’ that permeates Australian literature, arguing that readers who avoid ‘bad’ books may be left with a superficial sense of what’s ‘good’.¹ At present, what’s considered worth reading—by mass audiences, at least—is limited to a select handful of gold-stickered texts, deemed palatable by institutional marketing, with snappy quotes on back covers. A triumph, they say. Dazzling. A fresh new voice! In the age of social media, readers are eager to read the right books and have the right takes, which makes reaching for a prize-winning text a no-brainer. To be sure, many of these texts are well worth reading—take Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear (2021) and Shastra Deo’s The Agonist (2017), for example. The problem isn’t that judges have bad taste. Rather, as Jiang highlights, selecting all your reading material in this manner takes the element of adventure out of reading. For me, reading only prize-winning books is a form of algorithmic reading, which prevents us from thinking critically about literature, and potentially limits the future of #ozlit itself.' (Introduction)