Since the publication of my novel The Making of Martin Sparrow in 2018 I have often been asked the question ‘What made you turn to fiction?’ This has turned out, usually, to be a question with a sub-text: ‘What made you, a long-time historian, cross over to the other side?’ But whatever form the question takes, my answer is always the same: ‘That’s easy,’ I say, ‘you get to make things up.’ It’s a rejoinder that is nowhere near as liberating as it may sound. Just what is meant by ‘make things up’? And is the writer now free, discharged of all responsibility to history, having gone over to the other side?

The year is 1998. For those of us Việt Kiều who entered adulthood in the late ‘90s, our coming-of-age coincides with the coming-of-age of our entire community, growing as it did in foreign soil. This is the world recreated in Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children. It is an intensely evocative and familiar depiction of the Cabramatta from that time, which I can still recall clearly, and traces of which exist to this day.

Science thrives when it is open to anyone who has the talent for it, and the taste for the hard work involved. And society thrives when our institutions are seen to be fair. But my argument is that the case for diversity is epistemic as well as moral. I’ve never heard a scientist say, Yeah, it’s really great that the feminists pointed this out because once we understood the epistemic benefits of diversity, we realized that we could do better science.” My goal is that, in the future, scientists will say that.

Jill Jones’s oeuvre is difficult to place in the landscape of Australian poetry. Her urban settings, her skepticism regarding language’s mimetic function, and her open poetics, sit comfortably with the legacies of the Generation of ’68. But while she shares some of their tastes and concerns, her writing differs markedly from anyone in that group, and her poetry doesn’t seem profoundly influenced by these poets – or by any other Australian writer. Her work rather shows traces of the Objectivists, the New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and European poets such as Tomas Tranströmer and Inger Christensen. Beyond this, are three abiding influences: Sappho, Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, all of whom were prolific experimentalists.

Trapped inside my house, I exist in multiple worlds at once: the shocked writer with the shortlisted first book; the absent academic with the unfinished manuscript; the aunty who reads her latest manuscript to her nieces and nephews every night, and revels in their excitement. I feel trapped in a waved-tossed dinghy: Can I write? No, I can’t! Maybe I can? No wonder I feel nauseous.

Living at the centre of European politics for ten years, on the knife edge between the medieval and early modern, Thomas Cromwell may have been able to envision a better age to come. A reader of this bruising, brilliant sequence of novels might now be a little more sceptical. The arc of the moral universe is long in Mantel’s trilogy, but it bends more towards irony than justice.

Reading and writing are bodies within bodies and rooms within each other. Fitch’s poetry is exemplary in terms of showing us the possibilities – and impossibilities (like reading in a dark room, like being in spaces we aren’t) – of the reading/writing (or pretext/text) relation. But there is no separate room or compartment where we house our reading: writing brings back all kinds of memories of mental and affective experience, including those involving digital forms, and material art.

‘Begin, I tell myself, at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of a marriage of twenty years.’ It is with this line that Hilary McPhee opens the second chapter of her second memoir. It’s telling, both because it reads almost like an editorial intervention – as if the editor is present even as she writes – but also because it indicates that there’s something much more important going on than the ‘adventure’ that forms the main narrative arc of the book.

Did the student say the Outline trilogy was rendered mostly in indirect speech? Perhaps that is why – to quiver between the untruth of getting it all down and the truth of not getting it down in the right words.

Applications are open for the 2020 intake of the JUNCTURE fellowship program for literary critics. Each fellowship recipient will be paid $12,000 over twelve months to write about new works of Australian and international literature for publication on the Sydney Review of Books.
Apply by 10 July 2020.

Ask any queer girl, I have learnt, and every single one of us had that one friend, usually in high school, whom we liked a bit too much, who we were enchanted by. Sometimes a very best friend, sometimes a girl on the periphery of a friendship circle, but always, always someone we adored, regardless of whether or not we understood exactly why.

All the loss, all the longing, all the pain, and with it this time, at least, an understanding of this compulsion to write, this refuge in writing. When I am writing, I am always writing to my mother.

In 2017, I found myself back where I began, in Parramatta. I was excited to make a difference in my community through my new job: as a producer for a local literature organisation. The work felt like it was going to be important, and I felt like it had to be me who did it. All my life I had been a chubby, crooked-toothed, glasses-wearing nerd – not a self-declared nerd, either, and therefore the bad kind. I had been fortunate to discover literature at an early age, and spent most of my formative years at Max Webber Library or the Angus & Robertson in Blacktown Westpoint, accumulating a tiny empire of books which I buried myself into, to make up for my dearth of friends or much else.

These two books are the work of a critic out of temper with the times. They contain some unfashionable opinions argued with undisguised rancour; and for that reason, there’s a conviction to be formed and tested on almost every page.

In the process of writing, clutter accumulates. A writer’s clutter can be physical, like the bundles of papers, notes, and books on my desk. It can be processual: the swarm of edits on the marked-up page of a draft, or the ‘offcuts’ file of this essay which is longer than the essay itself. It can be digital – a cluttered computer desktop, hundreds of browser bookmarks, accumulations of draft files – or mental, in the psychic turbulence of the process, in the ideas never followed through, in digressions and tangents and distractions.

þu eart endelaf    usses cynnes,Wægmundinga.    Ealle wyrd forsweopmine magas    to metodsceafte,eorlas on elne;    ic him æfter sceal. (‘Thou art the…