AustLit

Gregory Day’s essay collection Words are Eagles is carefully subtitled: “Selected Writings on the Nature and Language of Place”.

 (Publication abstract)

'Jen's voice had that urgent, excited tone she gets sometimes. 'I think you should come over to Aunty Bet's place, guys. I really think you should see this.' It was summer, 2015. Our friend Jen Saunders' aunt had recently moved to an aged care place over in Carlton, entrusting her niece to sort things out at the house on Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne.' (Publication abstract) 

'A dynamic cross-cultural collection of innovative writing from the Asia-Pacific region

'In the outer suburbs of Perth, Australia, a seven-year-old discovers ballroom dancing. In Jakarta, Indonesia, a poet tries to move on with his life after splitting up with his boyfriend. In the Philippines’ Quezon City, a nurse reflects on her late mother while caring for a dying woman. And in the Uva province of Sri Lanka, a 30-panel mural tells the story of a boy who refuses to speak a word.

'This vibrant collection features writers who have forged connections across cultures and generations, with contributors from Australia, Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Vietnam, and China, among others. Through sharing perspectives and ideas in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program, they have created exciting new work that reveals the value of genuine dialogue and mutual respect.

'Spanning fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from the Asia-Pacific’s finest writers — including Christos Tsiolkas, Alice Pung, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Han Yujoo, Ellen van Neerven, and Ali Cobby Eckermann — The Near and The Far, Volume II invites readers on a unique and unforgettable journey.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This essay moves between the performative, the discursive and the ethnographic to compose an argument about how essaying as method, and then collective essaying as method, might contribute to new approaches to world-making. It begins with an essay-within-an-essay that takes as its object of pressure the contemporary context of biophysical crisis that has been called the Anthropocene, which soon becomes entangled with another pair of objects: the image on the front of a vintage jigsaw set and the essayist’s affective response to that image. Thereafter it brings in Latour’s concept of the ‘risky account’ to argue for essaying as a reflexively constructed mode of making accounts of the world. The experimental nature of essaying is extrapolated into a collective context, with a report on a transcultural creative writing workshop conducted as part of a residency program in the Philippines. The essay proposes and teases out the concept of ‘collective essaying’. It circles back to look at world making with Haraway’s invocation of sympoesis as a method for ‘worlding-with, in company’ (Haraway 2015), and asks how collective essaying might be considered in this light. '  (Publication abstract)
 

'Not too long ago, I spent a week at Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, working on a book. One of the many treats Varuna offers writers is access to the nearby bushland. Before dinner one night, I took myself off for a long walk down into the forest near the house. The land in the Blue Mountains drops away from a huge plateau into deep dramatic valleys. Hundred-year-old paths with steps and railings descend into the depths. I couldn’t help feeling, as I followed one, that I was entering quite suddenly another realm of being, a quieter, older place or else the inside of a cut-open brain. A few steps beyond the redbrick cottage kiosk, the bitumen of the tourist road, the cricket field, the picnic tables, the new curved metal safety railings that sweep around the corner, I was into a shady netherworld, trickling here or there with water, like me, drawn irresistibly down, wanting to fall but be caught, splinter but reassemble in pools of glass, faraway, where the land bottoms out.' (Introduction)

'An ex-journalist on a sweltering night in Kuala Lumpur, raging in a city on the edge of meltdown; a young woman in present-day Iowa, reflecting on her two mothers in a Singapore of long ago; in Queensland’s Border Ranges, a boy prone to getting lost having six tiny bells pinned to his chest.

'All of these people are in the midst of change - divided by time and space, but living in a world of shrinking distances and disappearing differences.

'It’s what happens when you take award-winning writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, put them in a room together, and see what they create. This book is the result of the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program: a unique experiment dedicated to collaboration, immersion, and cultural exchange. It’s a document emerging from two years of residencies, workshops, and ongoing dialogues - a map of art and adventure, ideas and heart.

'Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and essays from Cate Kennedy, Melissa Lucashenko, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Musa, and many more, The Near and the Far is a book that bridges the gaps between Asia, Australia, and the world. Every day is a border crossing, and every story is a threshold. This collection invites readers to grab their passports and step beyond.' (Publication summary)

'Sosina Wogayehu learnt to do flips and splits at the age of six, sitting on the floor of her parents’ lounge room in Addis Ababa, watching a German variety show on the only television channel in the land. She sold cigarettes on the streets at the age of eight, and played table soccer with her friends who made money from washing cars, barefoot in the dust. She dreamed of being a circus performer.

'Twenty-five years later, Sosina has conjured herself a new life in a far-off country: Australia. She has rescued one brother and lost another. She has travelled the world as a professional contortionist. She can bounce-juggle eight balls on a block of marble.

'Sosina is able to juggle worlds and stories, too, and by luck — which is something Sosina is not short of — she has a friend, David Carlin, who is a writer.

'Following his acclaimed memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There, David brings us his ‘not-me’ book, travelling to Addis Ababa where he discovers ways of living so different to his own and confronts his Western fantasies and fears. Through Sosina’s story he shows us that, with risk and enough momentum, life — whom we befriend, where we end up, how we come to see ourselves — is never predictable.' (Publication summary)

'This essay seeks to explore the tensions in the paradoxical location of ‘non-fiction’ — orthe de-hyphenated ‘nonfiction’, as we prefer — as a literary/artistic category, one that is built upon a negation. The opposition set up in the term by the operation of the ‘non’ upon the ‘fiction’ suggests a steadfast binary. However the friction between the two sides of this binary, and the inherent resistance embodied in the close proximity and conjoining of the two parts, accounts for much of the energy and interest in contemporary nonfiction writing. Here we bring together etymologies and theoretical topographies to problematize the intriguing situation of ‘nonfiction now’.' (Authors abstract)