Non-fiction

We have been aware for centuries that we are responsible for the earth’s denudation: its ‘cold staring spaces’, as English…

Shapes of Native Nonfiction brings together and solidifies a genealogy of what First Nations creative nonfiction could be through documenting a gathering of lyric essays that push and expand the boundaries of nonfiction beyond the auto/biographical and/or the academic. In doing this, Shapes of Native Nonfiction invites and gives shape to an approach to First Nations nonfiction that demonstrates moving beyond ethnographic and academic methods; one that experiments with form and embarks on carefully crafting and re-crafting interventions that both challenge and expand existing genre structures.

I didn’t necessarily like school but I understood what it wanted from me. My year level had 330 students, yet I managed to graduate as dux and received an equity scholarship at the University of Queensland which quite literally changed the material conditions of my life. I didn’t like telling people at university where I went to school or that I came from a single parent family that lived on welfare. I didn’t understand how some students talked so easily with lecturers. Class preparation was googling how to pronounce things like ‘Michel Foucault’. But this was water to tread, for the moral was that you never complained. It would be ungrateful.

Salesses asks what forms of fiction writing, and hence ways of being in the world, are marginalised in conventional understandings of craft? Conversely, how do different ways of being in the world – that is, not being part of the culturally dominant population – express themselves in a writer’s craft?

The direction of indirection, or the discipline of indiscipline (to quote Frank Moorhouse) gives her writing a flow that is beguiling as well as relaxing. It suspends questions of interpretation and replaces them instead with interactions: the meaning of a work of art, whether from the Renaissance or from last week, is not to be written down like the answer to a question posed in an examination; it is found in our relationship to it, what we do or don’t do with or around it.

One of the pleasures of Mother & I is joining Ware in the gradual discovery of his mother’s multitudinous character.

If Low gives up on wilderness as a place where scaling ice capped mountains, camping in freezing conditions and traversing icy rivers is about gaining knowledge or progress he does so to reveal the colonial histories which relied on this sort of mythmaking to fortify their connection to the landscape.

Sometimes she is a well-ordered educator: to tell you B, I must first tell you A. Sometimes she is like a friend telling tall tales at the pub, three pints in. Sometimes she is a preacher. Sometimes she is a contextualist, filling in history’s gaps.

The precocious teenage girl looms large in pop music, a culture that has always been enamoured by stories of youthful ingenuity.

Alone in my apartment in lockdown, water fills my mind. It carries adventures I once had, of stories from my life and other lives, of homes, dreams, memories. Vast and unknowable; endless and opportune.