AustLit

'I write on a laptop, at the kitchen table, even though there’s a perfectly functional study at the front of the house. Looking up from the screen, I’m facing north, gazing through the glass doors to the small courtyard, to the fig tree. The fig tree is netted in the late summer as part of our ongoing battle with the local birds and rats over the sweet juicy fruit that I have been addicted to since childhood. In autumn it begins to discard its leaves until it is a bare, grey-brown skeleton and then it grows them again in spring. By December, its thick shadowy canopy is an oasis under which I can sit with a book and a gin and tonic. This fig tree was grown from a cutting that came from my father-in-law’s tree. That tree was grown from a cutting that made the twenty-nine days trip from Calabria on the ship Australia in 1959. Like the bean seeds sewn into my husband’s toy bear, like the passengers on that ship, that fig tree cutting spawned offspring that are now scattered across the city.' (Introduction)

'This special issue of TEXT explores issues related to identity, politics and creative writing from the perspective of creative writers and creative writing academics. The question of who can speak and what stories can be told is central to any discussion of contemporary writing and writers, and to the literary industry including publishing, reviewing, awards and education.'  (Introduction)

'Did the dead exist? Were they watching? Were they ghosts? Not the kind he’d imagined as a child, draped with white sheets, with the ability to walk through walls, but the kind that lodged themselves in your heart, in your memories, the kind that came to you in dreams, that you could see when you closed your eyes and sometimes even when your eyes were opened.

'800 stories were submitted for consideration this year, many exploring the politics of this decade. After six weeks we decided on a shortlist of ten impressive examples of the contemporary short story, which included this years three finalists.' (Introduction)

'On 15 October 1970, in one of the worst industrial accidents in Victoria’s history, a span of the West Gate Bridge collapsed during construction. Thirty-five workers were killed. Very little has been written about the West Gate Bridge collapse, the men who died, the men who survived or the families that were left behind. The Bridge has become a road, too often clogged with traffic, a nuisance, an annoyance. It’s a tragic history, one that the city seems to have forgotten, but more than forty years later, it haunts my imagination and demands to be written.

This is a self-reflexive article that explores the process of writing the West Gate Bridge collapse into a work of fiction. It focuses on the challenges of capturing the voices of the working class who are often marginalised and occasionally mythologised (as working class heroes) but rarely the central focus of literature, and the ethical risks associated with aestheticizing a traumatic historical event. Like Gerry Turcotte, I believe that engaging with our ghosts is the ‘only remedy for the distressing legacies’ (Turcotte 2007: 115) of our history, and argue here that fiction has a role in giving the ghosts of our past a voice in the present.' (Publication abstract)