Cirrus@Austlit

'The Way We Live Now is a special issue of Southerly edited by Melissa Hardie and Kate Lilley. In the spirit of Lauren Berlant, this issue tracks “the unfolding activity of the contemporary moment”: “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 4). The diverse work offered here, in Southerly’s first online-only issue, gathers “Australian” writing produced in many different places and circumstances. Heterogenous and singular in its contents, the layered contiguity of digital publication optimistically promotes the lateral and multitemporal formation of the commons, true to the big ambitions and longevity of this venerable “little magazine.” Our contributors dwell in and on the permeability of extreme and ordinary states, temporal confusion and disturbance, bringing genre to bear on forms of technological, linguistic, and psychical mediation, exposing Berlantian “impasse” in myriad ways. We are grateful to Create NSW for a grant to pay contributors at a particularly disastrous time for arts funding. Most of all, we are grateful to the brilliant contributors who have entrusted us with their work. We loved putting this issue together. We hope our readers love it too.' (Publication summary)

'The island continent has created an archipelago of incarceration spanning from South East Asia, Micronesia and Melanesia in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and across mainland Australia. This issue of Southerly, titled Writing Through Fences, is devoted entirely to the work of past and present refugees in these detention centres.

'The records of their experiences are devastating; their creative responses, across genres and media, are astounding. The issue also includes responses from Australian writers, activists, essayists and students, who engage with refugee writing as well as the practices and consequences of refugee incarceration.

'Writing Through Fences is guest edited by the writer-activists Hani Abdile, Behrouz Boochani, Janet Galbraith and Omid Tofighian. Two of these editors have direct experience of Australian refugee detention. Three have been displaced and exiled. All four have worked for years with refugees as translators, enablers and publishers to bring the creative voices of refugees into public view and circulation. This issue presents the greatest range of new refugee writing assembled to date in Australia.' (Publication summary)

'Southerly has turned 80! Founded in 1939, Southerly has been published continuously for fully four score years. This is a cause for great celebration; we salute the many, many writers whose poetry, fiction, essays and reviews Southerly has published, often providing new writers with their first foray into publication. In their submissions of work for this issue, many writers recall the significance of these first works, some dating from 50 and 60 years ago.

'Alongside literary stalwarts, and in keeping with Southerly‘s committed practice, new writers reflect the matrices of contemporary Australia’s peoples and literatures. Juxtapositions of this kind are at the heart of Southerly‘s project and span the spectrum of writing across creative and critical modes.

'Southerly also salutes the generations of readers who have engaged with this enterprise, the many who continue to access Southerly‘s formidable archive from 1939, and our current readership.' (Editorial)

'This issue of Southerly pays tribute to David Brooks, who is retiring as editor after two decades’ stewardship. It includes poetry, fiction, essays and memoir that interweave readings of David’s work with accounts of the various literary communities that David has worked in over four decades from Canberra to North America, Perth, Slovenia, Sydney and now, Katoomba. Together, these pieces create a world of a very specific kind, one populated by words and word people and the currents between them in specific times and places. They also enable us to draw out recurrent themes and practices.

'The issue is a tribute and a celebration of a creative literary life. We are reminded of the etymology of the word text, from weaving. The issue shows one remarkable textual practice that weaves through the literary page and daily life to community and culture, including this journal. The issue also includes unthemed work across all categories including reviews.' (Editorial introduction)

'The theme of this issue, Mixed Messages, relates in the main to a thread running through the essays, all of which engage with texts that challenge the limits of genre. These challenges include the status and influence of what might be termed a secondary genre deployed by writers whose renown is based on another form: Brigitta Olubas considers the short fiction of novelist Shirley Hazzard; and Cheryl Taylor introduces the poetry of novelist Thea Astley. Kate Livett delves into the mixed media, specifically music and photography, at the core of Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, and Peter Kirkpatrick examines the fusion of Gothic and Romance forms in Chloe Hooper’s The Engagement, and David Brooks thinks through the miscenegy of the human and the non-human in relation to the famous scene of Derrida standing naked before his cat. Another strand in the issue is of comedy and errors and includes fiction by Debra Adelaide, John Kinsella, Mark Macrossan, Sara Bucholz, Nasrin Mahoutchi, Niki Tulk and Scott McCulloch. The poetry spans its usual wide range from the lyric to graphic experimentation and the reviews introduce some of the exciting new work published across creative and critical forms.' (Publication abstract)

 'This issue of Southerly captures a snapshot of Australian writing today. Stories from writers just starting out on their long apprenticeship are placed side-by-side work from Australia’s finest essayists, writers and poets. This rich and expansive issue asks what it means to write in a contemporary Australia fraught with inequality, divisiveness, and the unrelenting exploitation of country. In a special collaboration with Sydney Story Factory, which runs workshops for young and marginalised writers, this issue of Southerly includes short stories that demonstrate the vibrancy and the vision of Australia’s up-and-coming writers. Including essays from Caroline Lefevre and John Kinsella, poetry from Kevin Hart, and much, much more, ‘The Long Apprenticeship’, is an issue comprising, as ever, the best in Australian writing.' (Editorial)

'This issue of Southerly was conceived both a general topic that would attract a wide range of submissions and to reflect the return of the'character' to the fore of literary scholarship in the last decade. This return to character is taken up in John Frow's study Character and Person (Oxford : OUP, 2014) which details the fundamental 'problem that fictional characters are made of words, of images, of imaginings, and not real in the way that people are real : but that we endow these sketched- in figures with some semblance of reality which moves' (online Chs 1, 2). Each chapter of Frow's monograph focuses on a figuration - and considers how these strategies work together to affect the reader's sympathy, interest and judgement.' (Editorial)

'Persia is the name of an ancient civilisation, a cultural zone, and an aesthetic imaginary. It has long fascinated Western travellers, scholars of cultural dialogue and mystical poets. This issue of Southerly is an intervention in how Persian culture and poetics are perceived and adopted in today’s Australian and global literary scenes. How do contemporary Australian poets and scholars respond to the Sufi ghazals of Hafez of Shiraz? What has been the understanding of Afghan cameleers according to the discourse of Australian national identity? How are the questions of gender and identity addressed by contemporary Iranian writers? And what are some of the best examples of contemporary Persian- Australian fiction, non-fiction and poetry? This issue of Southerly presents a diverse and provocative range of responses to these questions and shows how our literary cultures are intertwined. There is also a selection of texts to be found in The Long Paddock, and an offering of the best Australian writing on themes not related to the Persian world.' (Editorial introduction)

'This intriguing issue presents essays, memoir and creative work by disabled and non-disabled writers on the subjects of disability and of the interrelation of writing and disability.

'Blind writer and critic Amanda Tink discusses the impact of Henry Lawson’s deafness on his style and created world. Ben Stubbs walks the streets of Adelaide blindfolded to learn more of the sightless city. Deaf author Jessica White discusses the deafness of Maud Praed. Josephine Taylor writes an incisive essay on Vulvodynia. There are discussions of visible and invisible disabilities, of the poetics of disability, of disability and silence, of little known or largely unrecognised disabilities, and of the difficulties confronting discussion of disability in the first place. There is also Southerly’s usual feast of reviews and recent Australian and New Zealand writing, including striking new works by Anthony Mannix, Elizabeth Holdsworth, Peter Boyle, Koraly Dimitriadis and many others.' (Publication summary)

'This issue presents writing by musicians and writers who cross mediums to collaborate and experiment in the spaces between words and music, including Hilary Bell, Phillip Johnston and Jonathan Mills. It includes archivist John Murphy’s reflections on Peter Sculthorpe’s house and Joseph Toltz writes of the experience of researching musical recollections from the Holocaust, and presents some of these memories from survivors. Michael Hooper shows how listening to Elliott Gyger’s operatic adaptation of David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter also re-attunes us to the novel. Dick Hughes speculates on the (jazz) music of heaven while David Brooks keeps an ear to the ground in a meditation on “herd music”. There is also the usual cornucopia of stories, memoir, poems and reviews, both themed and unthemed.' (Publication summary)