Cirrus@Austlit

'I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts and the different ways we are haunted. A phenomenon often represented in literature as otherworldly, mythical—‘not real’. But in ‘reality’ spirits appear as sensations or experiences that are quite ordinary, generally ignored or misinterpreted when they don’t resemble the ghoulish horrors captured in TV, film, books and religion. I began reading Hoa Pham’s The Other Shore when I started an archiving job at the State Library of Western Australia. While ostensibly a role that requires collecting and analysing photographic materials, cataloguing, provenance, data integrity and preserving history, it’s fundamentally about dead people and what we do with their ghosts. Nations like so-called Australia or Việt Nam—where Pham’s novel takes place—are full of ghosts, yet the governments of both have a sly way of engaging with them.'(Introduction)   

'Reading nonfiction that avoids easy classification has led me to write nonfiction that is difficult to classify, because it frustratingly—and sometimes delightfully—doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. This elusive category could also be described as experimentalism, hybrid essay writing, literary narrative nonfiction, zine-making, autotheory and ficto-criticism, although the last two have been subsumed or at least collapsed into the autofiction genre, which has been experiencing a comeback in contemporary novel writing. As Christian Lorentzen articulates in the article ‘Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ Is ‘Autofiction’?’:

The term ‘autofiction’ has been in vogue for the past decade to describe a wave of very good American novels by the likes of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Jenny Offill, and Tao Lin, among others, as well as the multivolume epic My Struggle by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. These are books that invite readers to imagine they might be reading something like a diary, where the transit from real life to the page has been more or less direct.' (Introduction)

'Early on in Sally Olds’ debut essay collection I’m immersed in a familiar world:

It was a Friday night and I was drunk outside a nightclub in Melbourne called Hugs and Kisses, sometime in early 2018. I wondered aloud about the building – a two storey red brick warehouse that looked industrial, or pre-gentrification industrial, given that ‘industrial’ usually refers to post-industrial buildings retrofitted with industrial chic (open spaces, washed concrete, bare bulbs).

  (Introduction)

'I’m re-reading The Pillars in a small box-like room in a high-density apartment block in Kensington (Bunurong Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung lands of the Eastern Kulin Nations) while preparing a guest lecture for third-year architecture students. The apartments are structurally sound, but friends have occasionally commented that they resemble a prison, where long corridors eerily absent of residents look onto a large communal courtyard that is never used. Double security gates reinforce our safety as I wonder what developers imagined they were protecting us from.' (Introduction)

'Multiple modes and literary disciplines weave through Evelyn Araleun’s first collection Dropbear, shifting between poetry, prose, micro-fiction and essay seamlessly. The taut threads are a reflection of her interdisciplinary work where writing and social justice intersect. There are no metaphors instead resistance is displayed through her piercingly accurate understanding of the flawed settler nation we inhabit. As she describes in the collections notes ‘our resistance, therefore must also be literary’ an acknowledgment that the social, environmental and political change being sought must also engage with the literary culture we inherited such as May Gibbs problematic Australian classic Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. A much loved children’s book series where the bush is represented through terra nullius. As a scholar, poet, teacher, activist, editor, essayist and fiction writer Araleun resists and defies imposed colonialism, which is most fiercely embodied through Dropbear. The collection speaks back to defunct systems and shows that Aboriginal Sovereignty is crystalline.' (Introduction)   

'Guwayu – For All Times is a poetry collection carefully woven by Wiradjuri writer and academic Dr Jeanine Leane. It evolved from a series of commissioning projects undertaken by Red Room Poetry over the course of sixteen years. Guwayu, a Wiradjuri word that that can be interpreted as all times are inseparable, captures the fluidity of the work, a collection that refuses to be fixed or tied down. Leane’s weaving symbolic of other Blak anthologies reverses the white gaze by following community-controlled editorial protocols.' (Introduction)

'There was a Facebook message from Hetti Perkins, which was an odd coincidence. I was working on a poem about her late father Charlie for a collection, which I would later abandon as I grew aware that I lacked the precision for poetry. The early interest I had attracted leading to these opportunities was more about a literary industry driven to uncover diverse new voices than an acknowledgement that with hard work and patience I might become a great writer. Attention that provided motivation but pushed emerging writers in directions at once exhilarating, confusing and premature. At the time I was considering using the title ‘Peeling’ for the poetry chapbook when I noticed her message. The poem was about her father’s role in the Nancy Prasad incident, where a five-year-old Fijian girl was deported to Fiji, symptomatic of Australia’s racist immigration policies of the 1960s.' (Introduction)