Cirrus@Austlit

'ONE FRIDAY NIGHT not too long ago, at the end of a long, stressful week, my boyfriend and I found a perfect deep-winter piece of nothing on TV, a documentary that was mostly footage of sprightly little kittens and ostensibly about the wonders and enigmas of cats’ minds. We set ourselves up to watch it on the couch with our fifteen-year-old cat, Tigger, having lifted him onto the couch and done the rounds of smoothing and scratching that show him it’s appropriate to tuck in and settle down.' (Introduction)            

'A writing exercise got me thinking about the difference between seeing and remembering. External and internal worlds merge when we establish setting, and what is conveyed can have less to do with reality and more to do with the stance of the observer.'(Introduction)

'The daughter of a celebrity must discover who is worthy of her devotion and who is just a fan.

'It's been twenty years since her mother was photographed, blood-soaked, outside the family home. A famous TV food personality, she fled the country. Since that time, the girl has grown up. She's bought an apartment, learned her own cooking style, fallen in love. She lives a quiet life, working as a copywriter for a health insurance company. She's found happiness, finally.

'But strange things are in the air. Her easy-going boyfriend has started sleeping with men. Her mother is selling the infamous family home. And a glamorous, pregnant neighbour has moved into the apartment downstairs, calling into question everything the girl believes about her own desires.

'How are we supposed to understand our past when all we have is our present? Do people still love us if they'd rather be anywhere but with us? And in a world of conspiracies, dubious loyalties, and mercenary impulses, how do we work out who is worthy of our devotion and who is just a fan?

'Equal parts funny and contemplative, Shirley charts a search for meaning in a world where the fracturing of ambitions - work and purpose, real estate and home, family and love - has left us uncertain how to recognise ourselves.' (Publication summary)

'What do people think they’re doing when they’re writing novels? I’ve never found an answer that feels completely satisfying. When writers invoke the value of stories – we’re all storytellers, us humans – I catch the whiff of a strategy to reduce one’s threat level, otherwise the predominance of this idea would be absurd on its face: as if anybody thinks when they’re opening a novel that the story is the main thing happening.' (Introduction)

'The woman’s name is Nora, and she’s getting out of the pool when she goes to look at the guy she’s seeing and sees something better: a sexy stranger, Javo, who radiates a type of bruisy depth. He hangs back near the famous sign, AQUA PROFONDA, while Nora and the guy she’s seeing, Martin, do their thing. He looks like he’ll be trouble, but not the bad kind of trouble; the kind it might be interesting to catch.' (Introduction)

'Graphic storytellers make complex ideas easy to understand. Their technical and interpretive skills help to illustrate abstract concepts and transcend language barriers. So, we’ve commissioned Graphic Storytellers at Work: Cross-industry opportunities for cartoonists, illustrators and comics-makers, a new report which explores how the skills of cartoonists, illustrators and comics-makers are being applied. This happens across a diverse range of industries such as health and education.

'Artists surveyed described using their skills to communicate important health information to culturally diverse communities, translate complex legal documents, or create tools and resources for psychologists and surgeons.

'The report provides a fascinating portrait of the professional lives of Australia’s cartoonists, illustrators and comic-makers and highlights the huge potential for the cross-industry application of their skills. It was led by comics-makers and comics researchers Dr. Pat Grant (Lecturer, School of Design, UTS) and Mr. Gabriel Clark (Lecturer, School of Design, UTS), along with Dr. Elizabeth MacFarlane (University of Melbourne) and Dr. Ronnie Scott (RMIT University). All four are active within the Australian graphic storytelling community and are based in either Melbourne or Sydney.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This research takes as its basis the plurality of time and the plurality of queerness and attempts to locate a hybrid form through a case study approach to practice.'  (Publication abstract)

'How should creative writers, including HIV-negative writers, think through HIV as a livable illness? What is the potential for writing gay fiction in an era of ‘post-crisis’? This creative writing research draws links between literary modernism’s roots in crisis and the roots of contemporary gay realist fiction in the AIDS crisis. It suggests these origins place similar demands on writers to re-conceive elements of fiction. This paper, primarily, outlines challenges of representing HIV in contemporary fiction, and then suggests that contemporary HIV’s history of crisis provides ways to address these challenges, that the challenges may be productive. Because HIV in contemporary life is doubly invisible – viral loads may be undetectable, and the ongoing crisis can be understood as marginal or tactically historicised – aspects of creative writing after antiretrovirals exist in conversation with uncertainty, including elements that are otherwise put to representative use. By looking at some examples of post-crisis writing in contemporary gay realist fiction, the paper establishes the potential for HIV-positive representations to shift fiction-writing practice, bringing aspects of the novel such as time, metaphor and textual representation towards an aesthetics of post-crisis.' (Publication abstract)

'Much is always made of the facility with which people quote verse in Shirley Hazzard’s worlds. In a 2004 interview for The Believer, Hazzard said, “It’s quite intentional. You see, books were a theme of life, a lifetime, for whole populations who grew up before the 1950s, when television broke on the world.” In her introduction to these collected stories, Zoë Heller identifies the habit of quotation as a sign of a character’s moral worth.' (Introduction)

'A story about sexuality, the ache of friendship and love, and sticky summers at the pool, this exhilarating debut novel captures the heartbeat of one transformative summer where alliances are made and broken.

'‘I was an agent of Dan, a captive of his, really. I went where he wanted me, and did as he wanted, and for a long time, in this way, I was happy.’

'It’s been a long winter in a creaky house in Brunswick, where a young man has devoted himself to recreational showers, staring at his phone, and speculating on the activities of his best friend and housemate, Dan. But now summer is coming, and Dan has found a boyfriend and a job, so the young man is being pushed out into the world, in search of friendship and love.

'The Adversary is a sticky summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and their sociability, where everything smells like sunscreen and tastes like beer, but affections and alliances have consequences. It asks what kinds of stories are possible – or desirable – for which kinds of friendships, and what happens when you follow those stories to their natural conclusions.' (Publication summary)

'This paper examines the Megg, Mogg and Owl stories of Simon Hanselmann, an Australian artist whose serialized comics both depict acts of contemporary roguery committed by a group of friends in an inner city sharehouse and test the generic limits of its own storytelling conventions, thereby becoming contemporary instances of “rogue texts.” The paper positions the adventures of Megg, a witch, Mogg, her familiar, Owl, their housemate, and associated characters including Booger and Werewolf Jones as contemporary variations of both the Australian genre of grunge fiction and the broad international tradition of rogue literature. It shows how Megg, Mogg, Owl and their friends use the structure of the sharehouse to make their own rules, undertake illegal behaviour, and respond to the strictures of mainstream society, which alongside legal restrictions include normative restrictions on gender and behaviour. It shows the sharehouse as a response to their economic, as well as cultural and social conditions. The paper then shows how Megg and particularly Owl come up against the limitations of the permissiveness and apparent security of their “rogue” society, and respond by beginning to “go rogue” from the group. Meanwhile, the text itself, rather than advancing through time, goes over the same chronology and reinscribes it from new angles, becoming revisionist and re-creative, perhaps behaving roguishly against the affordances of episodic, vignette form. The paper argues that Simon Hanselmann’s Megg, Mogg and Owl comics can be understood as contemporary rogue texts, showing characters responding to social and generic limits and expressing them through a restless and innovative comics text.'

Source: Abstract.

'We spend most of our lives doing whatever we can to keep our bodies separate from our minds, but the world doesn’t have to work too hard to remind us they’re inextricable, the implication being that some day we will die. This tension is the rich theme of Amanda Niehaus’s first novel, which follows a straight Brisbane couple in the months following a miscarriage.'  (Publication summary)

'In his second novel, The Pillars, Peter Polites uses Australia’s fixation on home ownership to explore the intersection of race, class and sexuality – as well as a growing conservatism within the queer community. “If you look at the generic images coming out of the queer community, there is a very specific aesthetic going on that’s obviously tied to race and class … You can be a total slut monster but still operate within a hegemonic discursive framework. There’s nothing radical about reinforcing dominant discourse. To me, that’s the opposite of sexual liberation.” By Ronnie Scott.' 

'He lives and yet does not live; he’s flesh and yet not. He’s John Simpson, ill-fated stretcher-bearer of Gallipoli turned national myth, and in this short novel by Wayne Macauley, he’s dredged up from the mists of time along with Murphy the donkey, who accompanies him on his endless quest to find the Inland Sea. “We follow the vast network of fissures and gullies inland,” he says, “leaning on charity where we must, paying our way where we can.” He pauses to read The Lucky Country and perform minor miracles on ordinary Australians. But Simpson and his donkey have never made it across state lines; on their last attempt (the 28th) they were beset by wasps.' (Introduction)

'You’ve gotta love a novel about hardship and destruction that’s also a nicely crafted happiness machine – particularly when the hardship comes in the form of zombies, creatures whose prime motive is the consumption of the public, and whose ideas of happiness differ from yours and mine.' (Introduction)