AustLit

'There is a story told in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer I’ve never been able to forget. It’s about a cameraman who longed for a medal. This cameraman had read a lot of Hemingway, and he knew from his reading that war makes you real, so he went into the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation to do some filming. This was soon after the explosion, when the place was being ‘cleaned’ and the people were being evacuated. He saw villagers washing the roofs of the buildings and Soviet workers burying the very soil of the place deep in the soil. He saw cattle being shot and the bulldozers that had dug a giant trench to bury the cattle. Everything went deep into the ground.' (Introduction)   

'In Germany they joke that Slavs live in poverty so they can drive home in a Mercedes. I hadn’t heard this stereotype growing up in so-called Australia. From there, we had to fly.' (Introduction)   

'When I contacted Ellen van Neerven in May to see if they would talk with me about Personal Score, I was working in a bookstore. The new release, with its distinctive earth-toned, soccer ball-patterned cover, was piled in different places in the shop: facing out in Australian Studies, propped up in the window-seat, sitting on the counter. It seemed to migrate as well. One week it was in a NAIDOC display, nestled among First Nations new releases and classics, including van Neerven’s debut story collection Heat and Light. At another point it found a home in our queer writing display. As the Women’s FIFA Football World Cup approached, it could well have found a place next to Sam Kerr’s My Journey to the World Cup or the upbeat board book I Can Be a Matilda.' (Introduction)

'You can write about gender – many do. You can also write about the writtenness of gender, about gender as a form of writing. Many do that too, but what does it really mean?' (Introduction)