Cirrus@Austlit

'The 1,000-year-old Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (Makura-no sōshi) is a definitive example of the genre of Japanese literature known as zuihitsu—literally, ‘as the brush flows’. An autobiographical account of the cloistered world of a lady-in-waiting at the Emperor’s court in tenth-century Japan, this ground-breaking text comprises a fragmented ‘miscellany’ of loosely associated ideas, personal essays and lists. Beyond its singular importance as a historical record of daily life which is almost microscopic in its detail, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon endures to this day as a source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and scholars interested in experimenting with narrative form. This paper offers a creative, scholarly examination of formal aspects of Shōnagon’s landmark zuihitsu in relation to my own creative nonfiction work, currently being undertaken as part of a PhD in creative writing at Griffith University. In particular, the fragmentation that is the Pillow Book’s defining feature, along with the associative linking techniques seen in many of the lists scattered throughout, have informed the structural interplay of the memoir material.'  (Publication abstract)

'A road trip in metallic-finish Tangerine Symphony in which every Torana is customised and the jukebox plays Chisel's Flame Trees, just the way it would. Woodrow's wild journey of grinding collisions and hilarious near-misses propels us along a Pacific Highway of her imagination.Goddess and the Galaxy Boy was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel Award.' (Publication summary)

Mangrove, an online quarterly, was first uploaded in December 1998. The premiere issue went online on 16 March 1999 and the second issue on 16 June 1999.

The title was intended to suggest the environmentally important but less commercially viable side of the Queensland landscape. Many people believe Queensland to be one long surf beach of pure white sand. They don't realise that the coast is dominated by swamps, tangled roots and mud. Also, a metaphor for cyberspace is suggested by the complex aerial root systems that characterise mangroves: a network of interconnected (hyper)links, not grounded anywhere in particular as, say, traditional printed text is 'rooted' to the page.

Mangrove e-zine was envisaged as a platform (boardwalk?) from which UQ's creative writing students could explore the possibilities of cyberspace.