AustLit
Latest Issues
Contents
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Novelist of the Sorrowful Countenance,
single work
review
— Review of The Schooldays of Jesus 2016 single work single work novel ; -
Bad Writer,
single work
essay
'Two years ago the British Centre for Literary Translation invited me to Anhui Province in China to participate as a guest author in their annual translation program. I was asked to facilitate a creative writing workshop with the English-speaking participants in the program which would follow on from a workshop run by Vietnamese-Australian author of The Boat, Nam Le. For two hours I watched patiently and quietly as Nam worked with twenty aspirational writers and translators who had come to China from all over the (Western) world, including Australia, the United States, Ireland, Scotland and England. Nam wrote six random words up on a chalkboard, ‘shoes’, ‘man’, ‘mountain’, ‘love’, ‘fear’ and ‘fingers’, and then he told the participants to each write a short story or poem using these six words. I was disappointed to hear the writers in the group read back the stories they wrote, which all followed the same thread: A man wandered a mountain in a pair of shoes, searching for love and afraid he would find it. It did not occur to even one of them that a mountain could be in love with a man or a shoe could be afraid of a finger, or more importantly, that the mountain, the man, the shoes and the finger could all have a specific identity. After all, we were in view of China’s Sacred Yellow Mountain and with so much diversity in the room, participants had dirt on their shoes and under their fingernails from places no one else in the group could have imagined. It was at this point that I realised the universality of bad writing: the bad writing that this international collective of writers produced was no different from the bad writing I had dealt with as a writer, editor, publisher and teacher in Western Sydney for over fifteen years.' (Introduction)
- We Are Here and We Are Significant, single work essay
- Lost Landscapes of Waterloo, single work essay
- The Way Home : Laurie Duggan, single work essay
- James Waites : A Man of the Theatre, single work biography
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The Writers We Deserve,
single work
review
— Review of Their Brilliant Careers : The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers 2016 selected work short story ; Wood Green 2016 single work novel ; - Who Knows Where : Netherspace, single work essay
- 394 Abercrombie Street, single work essay
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The Bleeding Edge : New Short Fiction,
single work
review
— Review of After the Carnage 2016 selected work short story ; Peripheral Vision 2015 selected work short story ; Portable Curiosities 2016 selected work short story ; - Stargazing with Rosa Praed, single work essay
- A Home in Ananda and the World, single work essay
- Nightswimming in Dungog, single work prose