In a colony where blatant police brutality against Indigenous people is the norm, where we suffer the continued desecration of sacred land, live within a health and mortality gap, and a government that seeks to undermine sovereignty in all its forms, we need poets that can see all this – and still celebrate the joy, resilience and love of our community.

Her vision and writing of the female experience is curious and expansive, conveyed as it is through these short fictions that take in the messiness of life and arbitrariness of death.

Reading Lost Haven in this particular place and time made me reflect on the nature of documentary realism (not for the first time), the intellectual traditions of the early twentieth century, and the way in which the women writers of that time constructed their position as writers, and the aesthetic decisions they made about how they went about processing their ‘material’.

‘A testament to love and joy in the face of ongoing dispossession, continued violence and lack of recognition of the rights of First Nations peoples in Canada and abroad.’

How do writers like Maguire integrate scientific details and ideas into their books so that the reader’s experience is smooth and unimpeded? And why is it important that they do?

The words are imperfect, flawed approximations of the knowledges we seek to share. But on a good day, with the wind blowing in the right direction, those words might nudge someone to listen to their own gut. Those words might be sparks that help fuel other gender insurrections. I await those fires with glee. For each time someone burns their gender script, and writes a new story for themselves, we all taste a little more freedom.

Wordiness, perhaps even more than visual cultural forms, can prolong and extend the suspension of knowledge about gender identity, in ways that makes it possible to glimpse how gender identity of the binary kind is a kind of shortcut, and even a forfeiture in the face of gender’s multiple possibilities.

New knowledge in creative Writing may only be formed by rejecting established silos of identity, by being attuned to that which is embryonic, that which is pre-conscious and permeable, by reaching for floating, fluid entanglement.

In this debate over the present understanding of sovereignty, history can broaden our perspective, revealing that the present and the possible are not coterminous; the past alive with ideas we may never have considered, or dismissed summarily as implausible.

If this pandemic has revealed anything, it’s the fallacy of certainty: what we thought would be now might never be; what we thought could happen tomorrow probably won’t.

Tiffany Tsao will join the SRB team in October as editor of The Circular.

Friday 17 September 2021

Jazz Money, Roanna Gonsalves, Yves Rees and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey in conversation about the role of writing in generating new knowledge and understandings around gender, and how writing can reshape public discourses about gender and culture, especially in its capacity to explore cultural testimony, embodied experience, alternative histories, and future worlds.

We’re thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2021 Juncture Fellowships: Patrick Allington, Louis Klee, May Ngo, Luke Patterson and Oliver Reeson.

These critics will each contribute six review essays to the SRB program over the coming twelve months, work that will enrich and expand the public conversation about literature and literary culture.

That there is no recovery for Blaine as such, that his subsequent path does not offer the pleasures of a neatly resolved narrative, becomes a way of considering broader cultural and political ills.

Tony Birch tells incredibly important stories incredibly well and Dark as Last Night is both an antidote and a lullaby in pandemic times.

The interest around Hall’s new novel gives us the occasion to look again at his poetic oeuvre, which was once thought to be among the most outstanding in Australia but which now is seldom discussed or anthologized, and remains out-of-print. The most striking feature of Hall’s poetry is its emotional intensity, often built upon dramatic and soliloquized speech capturing moments of distress, desire, and decision-making. Hall concentrates pain and longing into memorable phrases and lines that are marked by strangeness. The aesthetic value of pain is thus that it fortifies retention, especially when expressed with intensity and with formal control.

What are essays for? They are for thinking about things that need to be thought about yet don’t get thought about much, or at all, or interestingly, or for long enough. They are for picking up ideas, feelings, forces in the air, still unnamed and amorphous, and giving them a foothold in language. Whatever is in the air and whatever is disappearing – unnoticed, unmourned. They are for resisting choices offered to us that are not true, yet made to seem inescapable.

These books suggest that all writing can be read in the manner that one reads a poem, that is, with an acute sensitivity to the processes through which meaning is configured in a particular textual event.