Cirrus@Austlit

'The project represented by this collection of work was conceived in 2009, by Moya Costello who pushed the other editors to act on our previous discussions, as a 'landmark anthology' of Australian women's experimental writing in the vein of the maps made by collections of the 1970s and 1980s: Mother, I'm rooted (edited by Kate Jennings, 1975) which was the first collection of poetry by Australian women, and F(r)ictions (edited by Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson, 1982)1 . To our dismay, the current state of print publishing in Australia made such an enterprise impossible, as our proposal was rejected everywhere we sent it, mostly it seems because such collections have gone out of favour, at least with publishers. In the face of these refusals, we decided to opt for a journal publication, and this journal, TEXT, the journal of the Association of Australasian Writing Programs, was an obvious choice, since it has a wide - and growing - readership both in (and outside) universities, and, when it comes to experimental writing, teachers are always seeking examples for use in class. Publishing in a journal, however, meant we had to cull all the work which had been previously published, and this means that many writers whose work would otherwise have been part of this collection are not represented here, including some of the major figures in Australian experimental writing (Alexis Wright and Marion May Campbell, to name just two). This collection also has a strong bias towards work from Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, mostly by virtue of the locations and histories of its editors, but also because we had almost no response to our call from elsewhere in Australia. Nor is there the avowedly Aboriginal work we had hoped for: again, our own connections were perhaps one limitation, but it is also likely that these writers have other priorities than experimentation (sovereignty and justice, for example) or anthology projects such as this one. The work included here is not blind refereed, but every piece was read and discussed by all four editors, and editorial work of one sort or another was performed on most of the contributions.' (Author's introduction)