non/fictionLab

Irigaray’s postulation of non-hierarchical sexual difference does not abolish the dominant western model of kinship. It does, however, profoundly modify its structuration so that the exchange of women would no longer be possible.

Adoptees’ curiosity around origins and the past is significant, then, not only because it may lead to unearthing information regarding their personal histories, but also because of the knowledge it generates about a larger, collective experience.

After writing the last three sentences, I find myself at a crossroads. Do I continue or do I pause here to ask the reader, ‘any questions?’ What does the writer do when he comes from the periphery? This question might upset some Singaporeans, who believe that Singapore is an international hub connecting important air lanes and sea routes.

Curiously, I remain me, Sreedhevi Iyer, through all of these kaleidoscopic labels. The way I see it, this need to label me – to categorise and put in a neat box – has more to do with other people’s needs than mine.

‘We are deeply affected by the stories we tell and those we are told. Stories seep into us and shape our actions. The future is not fixed, and if we want to have a hand in shaping it we need to imagine our way into it. What we write matters.’

Incoherence, along with a lack of methodological rigour, is particularly apparent in most writing (not that there is much of it) about how practitioners in the visual arts in Australia and New Zealand have interacted with each other since James Cook sailed over the horizon in 1770.

Just as certain weather conditions must be present for a rainbow to be visible, so the environment has to be right for literary titles from Aotearoa to be seen and noticed in Australia.

Poems speak to us through panic and fences, closed doors, forests, rivers and distanced days. Their atoms lodge somewhere within us and we carry them close, hoping that, in the inferno of loss and uncertainty, the intensity and ambiguity of poetry can salvage something.

Join us on zoom at 11am on Friday 21 May for an online discussion between Eugen Bacon, Tamryn Bennett, David Carlin and Julienne van Loon on literary value, chaired by SRB’s editor, Catriona Menzies-Pike.

This seminar addresses the changing nature of literary value in 2021, against a movable backdrop of post-COVID Australia. It shares diverse findings from a collaborative project between the Sydney Review of Books and the non/fictionLab at RMIT University in Melbourne. The collaboration seeks to elicit experimental, essayistic approaches to questions of ‘value’ in the literary and cultural sectors.

As with many others, I have been thinking about questions of value in relation to Australian books and writing for some years. I have often pondered how to articulate such value, and also where, when, and to whom we might make an argument for it. Does it even make sense for Australian writers, readers, book industry spokespeople and educators to invest our limited time in making carefully calibrated arguments?