non/fictionLab
Kin-as-Ethics: experiments in un/authorised queer essay practice
As I begin to write kin and ethics a dear writing friend corresponds with me in messages about writing and love and rallying and the idea of being ‘inside the between’ when we come close how there is a ‘turning there’ how it is ‘the both of us’ and how the work of language of prepositions and prepositional thinking opens derring-do to a means of queering and transing language that becomes possible.
A Conversation, In Speculation
‘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.’
Online Seminar: On Literary Value
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.
On Value and Australian Books and Writing
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?
How Poems Make Things Happen
Can poetry make things happen? Can poetry bring about change? Does it hold that power? In the wake of the heaving 2020 chronicle of civil rights protests, a global pandemic and environmental disasters, what role can poetry play towards a recovering world?