Publishing

The archive shows that Anderson enjoyed both very limited editorial intervention into Tirra Lirra by the River and suffered from the over-reach of her publisher. In each case the manuscripts and letters reveal comments made by reviewers and critics emphasising the significance of Anderson’s archival record. The archives speak loudly about the power of editing and publishing practices both as a spark and a wet blanket.

Poetry, I had surmised, could do so many amazing things for nonfiction – technically, stylistically, spatially. Why couldn’t it be recognised as a valuable mode to challenge and expand nonfiction?

Why does the publishing industry elevate white writers over #ownvoices writers when it comes to the experiences of communities of colour? It happens because books like American Dirt and Act of Grace fit comfortably with mainstream stereotypes, they don’t challenge white and Western readers to think and see First Nations people and people of colour in their depth and complexity. It happens because the sensationalist depiction of brutal violence and trauma in the Great White Novel sells. Both American Dirt and Act of Grace have plenty of stomach-turning scenes of gratuitous violence, rapes, and beatings. At a time when there is global concern about the plight facing refugees, migrant children being caged and separated from parents, the horrors of offshore detention and border walls, the publishing industry has peddled us these exploitative and cartoonish depictions that produce an easy empathy rather than forcing readers to reckon with their own positionality in structures of power, and the deeper problems that require action.

Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project – an initiative funded by the Works Project Administration under the New Deal – provided employment for some 6000 jobless writers. Today, as stunned authors in Australia and around the world come to terms with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, that experiment deserves reconsideration.

In the context of the now more-or-less complete collapse of the New Left, the pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties deserve reconsideration, since, in some ways, contemporary pop culture today occupies a similar space, in that it’s produced almost entirely by commercial businesses with no relationship to any real social struggle.

It is easy to think of writers pursuing their aims with a noble persistence, despite the fact that they will only have a few readers, and little support along the way – but it would be truer to see the experience of isolation as constitutive of their writing, as a formative influence, rather than as an impediment to it.

Middle Eastern writers occupy a particularly jeopardised position on the peripheries of this imaginary, where to exist as a writer presupposes inventing palatable difference in ways that make readers feel special and accepting.

What some might call selling out may actually be art listening, responding, and adapting to dynamic changes in the environment in which it is produced.

‘I think it is important for women of colour to know that we are not objects or tokens to be used and dispensed.’

What I do know is that, while once simply writing the west was a threat to the status quo now the real political imperative is to stand in the dark with our eyes wide open, welcoming the uncertain. It is an invitation to undo the ways ‘things are done’ and invite alternatives into the equation. Bad writing has always been about having the last word and leaving others in silence. Good writing opens up a conversation about who we are that may never end.