Cirrus@Austlit

'Many contemporary novels adamantly refuse readers a pleasurable reading experience – with clunky prose and a cloying earnestness. But life’s too short for boring books.' (Introduction)

'A blank page brims with potential. It may incite a reflux of fear. It may unleash a prolonged bout of procrastination. For poets and storytellers of course, a blank page has immense potential to create new knowledge. As a writer working across genres and media, I think of the creation of new knowledge as involving an exploration of power, desire and change. In my writing practice, such explorations always begin with the intention to complicate my own fixed ideas about language, character and story shape, particularly in relation to identity. One way I do this is by recouping the compositional methodology of interrupting intersectionality, as writers have always done.' (Introduction)

'First, establish a routine. The Priests of Productivity say that this will keep you sane. Break down your day into even rows and columns as the wattle spreads its light. Do not check your phone when it pings. But your suburban Sydney flat is in the flight path, next to a train line. The world reels between a row of rubbish bins. Your phone pings repeatedly. It’s either the landlord or the electricity company or the Cinder App. The app is full of men with daughters and vasectomies. You must focus on your son instead. It’s time to wake him. He will begin to count the money in his piggybank, yet again. You want him to save up to go to Harvard. He’s been saving up to buy a present for Father’s Day, a present for his father who hasn’t visited or called for seven years.' (Introduction)

'Imbi Neeme’s The Spill is an engaging novel set in Western Australia that meditates upon the connections between memory, trauma and the imagination. Sweeping across four decades, the novel focuses on the lives of two sisters, Nicole and Samantha: their differing relationships with their estranged parents, the secrets they keep and their conflicting memories in the wake of a childhood car accident. As they try to reconcile their views of the past, particularly their experiences of their mother’s alcoholism and death, the sisters grapple with their own failings, and their ways of mourning and memorialisation.' (Introduction)

'I wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true because it was there in the primary sources. It was there in the journals and the biographies: slaves bought and sold in India, in Arabia. The trans-Indian Ocean slave trade and the slave trade within India that passed by other names. Black men bought and sold them. Brown men bought and sold them. White men were sometimes good to do business with. Governor Lachlan Macquarie bought two of them. He says so himself. All the biographers have tracked this down. Centuries pass. The memory of slavery chooses its own path and changes form with every age. My friend in Kochi says slavery ended when the Dutch period ended. The British freed all the slaves. It’s a factual flaw, he says, in response to my enquiry about the slave trade in 1795. As for Lachlan Macquarie, a man who would be Governor, he knew what he was doing.' (Introduction)

'A woman who can’t swim wades into a suburban pool. An Indian family sits down to an Australian Christmas dinner. A single mother’s offer to coach her son’s soccer team leads to an unexpected encounter. A recent migrant considers taking the fall for a second generation ‘friend’. A wife refuses to let her husband look at her phone. An international student gets off a train at night.

'Roanna Gonsalves’ short stories unearth the aspirations, ambivalence and guilt laced through the lives of 21st century immigrants, steering through clashes of cultures, trials of faith, and squalls of racism. Sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes playful, they cut to the truth of what it means to be a modern outsider.' (Publication summary)