Cirrus@Austlit

'Booranga Writers’ Centre was one of the first of a network of proposed regional writers’ centres in NSW linking e.g. Sydney, Byron Bay, Armidale, Newcastle, Wollongong, Dubbo & Broken Hill. Opened in 1993, Booranga’s distinctive 1896 cottage, on the Wagga Wagga campus of Charles Sturt University, with relative seclusion and close to wine, olives and infrastructure support was a perfect setting for writing (apart from the occasional possum …) Its restoration and make-over, financed by joint contributions of $50,000 from NSW Arts and CSU, created office space, a readings/workshop area and a separate writer’s flat as well as renovated amenities. For some thirty years, funded largely by Create NSW and its predecessors, Booranga has implemented a successful series of writers’ residencies (three or four a year); published an annual anthology of new writing, fourW; collaborated with local educational and arts groups (especially the English Teachers’ Association, the Wagga Wagga City Council and Art Gallery); and fostered the development of regional writers by monthly writing workshops and downtown readings venues.' (Introduction)

'nguluman ... If the river ever gets going, it's only running a little, and the whole thing is never deep enough to fill the wetland and then trickle into the waterhole. They call that one Poisoned Waterholes Creek.' - Tara June Winch, The Yield.

'FourW thirty-one was made possible by a community arts grant from Riverina Water - brokered by our clever Claire Baker - so, as many of you know, the contents has a (non-exclusive) preoccupation with water in some sense - literally or metaphorically. Water can be a source, an end (life & death), a medium, indicative of intense or attenuated pain, pleasure, leakage, (ful)filment ... Geographically, cosmically, emotionally, politically, mathematically, botanically (I could go on ...) water metaphorises the depths, currents, fluidity, typhoons and tsunamis of the human condition. Certainly this has provided a stimulating prompt for writing workshops and both poetic and prosaic experimentation ... The teacher in me wants to invite readers to see how many water motifs, images, references (direct and implied) they can find in the contents. We thank Riverina Water for its commitment to and support for the creative well-being of our regional (writing) communities.' (David Gilbey, Editorial introduction)

'In a judicious review of two ‘lucid and intelligent books’ on the job of the literary critic* and of a new edition of Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, Edward Mendelsohn argued against the essential nostalgia of criticism in favour of a version of Kant’s ‘universal subjective’: finding ways to cross ‘the disputed border between popular and elite culture … without pretending it doesn’t exist’. One of the recurring negotiations for the critic – and, I would argue, for the poet – is the difficult business of intimacy: how to inscribe the subjective as both ‘confessional’ (and ‘lyrical’) as well as observational, satirical, evaluative.' (Introduction)

David Gilbey discusses the consequences of the loss of funding and the future of FourW New Writing .

This issue contains more than 50 poems and nearly 20 short stories by local, national, and international writers.