AustLit

'I recently woke to clothes and sheets drenched in blood. The sun, squeamish, kept its distance as I stripped off and showered. Outside, a glutinous rain fell disinfecting the streets; the bins begged and pleaded; have mercy on us. My periods have been heavy all my life though, until then, I hadn’t bled so profusely in years.' (Introduction)

'I wasn’t entirely prepared for the Canberran rain and cold. Late November, ostensibly summer, and my last trip to the capital at the same time of year almost a decade earlier had shocked me with a week of perfect blue-skied thirty-degree days. Naively, I’d expected the same this time around. I’d packed a raincoat but no umbrella; still, I preferred to turn my hood up against the showers as I trekked through the centre to the bus stop. I sheltered under the canopy and boarded a bus Google reassured would take me to my destination. My memory of this same journey years ago was sketchy, and this city looked different shrouded in grey. My recall sharpened as I alighted and walked through the University of Canberra’s campus, searching for the lecture theatre that would host the opening keynote of this year’s Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference.' (Introduction)

'I am a working poet. I spend my days in search and celebration of words, a series of sounds I can weld, if I’m lucky, into insights about being human, and I confess it has never been harder to do so. I have a newborn son, I am a newborn father, and despite a decade of practice at crafting language into literature, this child, so small and insistent and terrifying and beautiful and language-less, has in only a few months shown me how useless, how entirely unnecessary words are for that most important and derided endeavour: love. This is a word, an emotion, a foundational way of living, utterly essential for survival, and yet by invoking it, I’ve erred already – there are few things taken less seriously, or more likely to provoke an eye roll, scoff or sneer, particularly in the realm of writing, which for all that it is deemed effeminate, is nonetheless strangled by a masculine manner and aesthetic. There is an unspoken understanding that one shouldn’t ever be sentimental – meaning literally ‘prompted by feelings’ – and that good prose is ‘muscular’, good writing is ‘brutal’, a ‘gut punch’, a violence. I should know. My own work is often praised with these descriptors, and it’s true, I am geared toward pain, toward sorrow, toward a primal force that makes loss bearable, if that is at all possible, though I would never describe my writing as a violence in the same way that I could never plant a sentence about a flower and hope to see a bud in the soil come spring.' (Introduction)

'How on earth to interview Michael Farrell? I once introduced Farrell at a reading as one of my ‘top five dead or alive’ Australian poets. I still believe this to be true. I once watched him eat a falafel during the open mic section of a poetry reading in Sydney. Once, while driving the work van, I saw Farrell on the way to the pool and honked the horn, realising later he’d have no idea it was me. What does this all mean? Farrell’s latest book is Googlecholia (2022) and the one before that was Family Trees (2020). These are the ones we talk about. They are both very, very good. Farrell’s work is expansive. It’s funny and sweet and tough and tender.' (Introduction)

'Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yadhaigana and Wuthuthi/Wuthati peoples of Cape York Peninsula. She is the author of Life B’Long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007) and editor of Pamle: Torres Strait Islanders in Canberra (Kuracca, 2018) as well as the forthcoming nonfiction anthology Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (Black Inc, 2024). Faulkner has represented women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests on local, state, and national boards and is a Director of the ACT Torres Strait Islanders Corporation. She is a current board member of both the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) and Us Mob Writing Group, a Canberra-based First Nations writing collective.' (Introduction)

'Alex Creece’s Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a reckless, glorious, grotty revolution. It’s an insubordinate ‘kissyface of cobwebs’ that sticks it to capitalism, heteronormativity and the patriarchy.' (Introduction)

'Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals opens with a moment of disconnection, as she describes her father’s tendency to retreat into himself when they are together, disappearing into imaginary golf practice. ‘Sometimes when I’m talking to Dad, he’s not there. I look over and see that he’s gone.’ In keeping with the book’s broader interplay of humour and darker concerns, Sadokierski uses it as an excuse for a moment of black comedy. ‘When he’s like this, I could say anything,’ she continues. ‘Dad, I’m really struggling being a working parent. I’m drinking at breakfast.’ But, like the animal skull he later presents her, her father’s distraction prefigures the larger absence that will eventually overtake him, transforming the scene into a sort of memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of loss that shadows all life. And, no less importantly, it suggests a larger kind of extinction, one summoned up by the mute images of feathers and bones sketched alongside the words.' (Introduction)

'I feel a sense of delight at the idea of an artist surreptitiously working in a science lab. There is something mischievous, rambunctious, even anarchistic about it. The idea of intervention. I have always thought that the disciplines that exist under the broad umbrellas of science and art are in some ways artificial necessities for the organisation of various institutions. Of course, science and art embody different ways of knowing, of epistemological knowledge-making, but there are forms of art that bleed together with scientific practice more so than two disciplines thought of as sciences – consider the techniques used in optical microscopy and cinematography (both lens based practices), versus geology and biomedical science (rocks versus the messy stuff of humans and disease).' (Introduction)