AustLit

'Climate anxiety is understood by psychologists to be a form of ‘practical’ anxiety as it is considered a rational response to the threat of climate change and can lead to constructive behaviours. At a Melbourne Writers Festival panel in 2022, Else Fitzgerald described her debut short story collection, Everything Feels Like the End of the World, as an attempt to work through her own climate grief, a sorrow that has its roots in the successive periods of drought and flooding she experienced growing up in East Gippsland. This, surely – writing a book – is the kind of ‘constructive behaviour’ the psychologists have in mind. But what of climate anxiety that clamps down, that debilitates and immobilises? The anxiety I feel in relation to the climate crisis leaves me swinging wildly between maniacal bouts of information gathering and long periods of psychic paralysis, during which I work equally hard to avoid any mention of climate change and its attendant calamities.' (Introduction)

'I read somewhere that good literature is indifferent to evil. It might have been that good writers are indifferent to evil. I retained none of the context, only the pull quote, and why wouldn’t I? What a seductive proposition – giving readers permission to banish the author, or at least the spectre of their moral character; giving writers permission to write without thinking, first, always, what does this say about me? ' (Introduction)

'Especially since the arrival of the global pandemic, we have had to reconsider what it means to be present for – and to – one another as writerly peers. For mid-career novelists with complex lives like us, this has meant rethinking what a ‘group’ is and what being part of one might mean: must we be physically present? Could we develop asynchronous practices that retained the intimacy of face-to-face interaction? This essay shares our collective experience, from articulating what we wanted from a writing group, to experimenting with different approaches to being together, and finally to adopting audio recordings – a specific type of ‘talk’ giving voice to our novels in progress – as our preferred method and reflecting on possible reasons for that. We developed this way of being together at a moment, post lockdowns, when it was again legal to meet in person. With more than one person. Many writer-reader groups pivoted online during the pandemic; our experience is part of that story, a reaction to it. Talking online using video chat platforms took energy; it was exhausting. The audio recording as ‘talk’ was surprisingly intimate and allowed us to connect collectively as our worlds opened back up. As creatives working on long-form sole-authored books, we are committed to the possibilities of the collective. No solitary geniuses here! We all need someone – or some ones – to wash the sheets, shop for coffee, make the soup, feed the birds. ' (Introduction)

'Andrew Sutherland’s Paradise (point of transmission) is an uncanny journey of estrangement and ‘elation’ focalised around his diagnosis as HIV positive in Singapore, where he had based his life. Unable to continue living there due to the ban on HIV positive foreigners in Singapore (lifted in 2015 to allow tourists with HIV status to enter on a 90-day visa), Sutherland returned to the Western Australia ‘of his childhood’, to undergo treatment and start over again.' (Introduction)   

'When we were asked to write a piece for The Conversation in 2021 about whether audiobook reading is ‘cheating’, we found ourselves deluged with comments from audiobook readers, showing the immense popularity of this medium. Along with a multitude of scholars of reading, we firmly believe that the production and reception of audiobooks support an array of active, participatory and social reading practices. In this essay, we consider audiobook reading as a collective enterprise which augments and invigorates our sensory consciousness of narratives. (Introduction)