On writing

From Vietnam to Gaza, Eda Gunaydin considers the recent and historical convergences of mass politics and anti-war sentiment, examining the role of artists at moments of political mobilisation as well as their vulnerability to state surveillance.

Reading across several decades of Frank Moorhouse’s essays on the writing life, author Gina Ward maps Moorhouse’s changing sense of vocation, and the ruinous effects of rising economic precarity on the writers of his generation.

Introducing the Frank Moorhouse Reading Room project, author and critic Tegan Bennett Daylight reflects on the generational shifts that have shaped Australian writing as well as the creative and industrial legacies of Frank Moorhouse.

In this essay, Anwen Crawford reflects on being a latecomer to the sport that united her family: cricket. From scorebooks and dictionaries to journalism to on-field protest messages, Crawford tallies the many forms that cricket writing can take.

Reading Palestine through South American literary and political history, Yumna Kassab reflects on the potency of symbols during times of repression.

Modern experiments in fiction writing have long convinced us that consciousness flows like a stream, but is it true of animals or AI? Ronnie Scott explores the range of narrative techniques used by writers from Lucy Ellmann to Octavia Butler to approach the ‘humanly inaccessible facts’ of consciousness.

Through a series of vignettes, author and bookseller Laura Woollett exposes the lack of transparency, as well as the tensions between building a business and supporting a community, in the publishing industry.

In her review of Hayley Singer’s collection of essays, Anwen Crawford anatomises the abattoir – from its paradoxes of visibility to its banalisation of life and death – as a subject for literature.

How should researchers acknowledge their selfhood in their writing? Kate Rossmanith addresses this question as both a compositional and philosophical issue, unpicking the assumptions behind the most common strategies for self-examination.

Evelyn Araluen on the pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty.