That evening, as a bleak cold overtook Collingwood, we took refuge in an empty Thai restaurant. The stark emptiness inside made me indecisive over where to sit. I glanced at Jana to steer us to a table. She pointed to the one closest to the wall. I was glad—I never liked sitting in the middle like someone on display. We ordered beers while flicking through the food menu. Jana is a fellow writer and current editor of Assemble Papers. We both studied creative writing at the University of Melbourne nine years ago and hadn’t seen each other since a chance… [Read more]
When Capitalism Saves Us from Ourselves
Roseanne Conner remains a unique and groundbreaking character decades on from her inception. Working class and toiling in unglamourous—thoroughly unHollywood—jobs like serving loose meat at a down-market diner, Roseanne was the physical embodiment of a stiff middle-finger to noose-like expectations that leading women be thin, sweet, polite and temperate. And she was a feminist! There in hell her prime-time sitcom glory was a ballsy, brash woman talking about menstruation. A woman who not only contributed to her family but oftentimes kept it afloat. Roseanne was a show revolutionary when it first aired and in 2018 old episodes still look fresh…. [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Leesa Cross-Smith writes about love like no-one else. Cross-Smith is the co-editor of WhiskeyPaper, a leading online flash fiction journal in the US. Her first book, a collection of flash fiction and short stories, Every Kiss a War, is bliss and made me swoon, over and over. Her debut novel, Whiskey & Ribbons, shows Cross-Smith is a master. Whiskey & Ribbons is the story of a young black woman, Evangeline (Evi), in present day Louisville, United States, following the death of her husband, Eamon. Evi was widowed just prior to the birth of their baby, Noah. The story is told… [Read more]
On Running Slowly
Three or four times a week, since I was around 18, wherever I’ve been, I’ve woken, dressed, and jogged an easy route that loops back to its beginning. I’m now 29 and following what I imagine were those first few months of building endurance (I don’t remember them in any detail), I’ve not improved. I run no further and no faster; I just keep running. Usually, I run around 5 kilometres in under 30 minutes. If the weather is right and I have the time and inclination, I can run a little over 10 kilometres, but this doesn’t happen more… [Read more]
Island Life: Working the Field
‘I am constantly resisting other people’s attempts to reduce the Pacific to one thing—I want to disturb all of that.’ —Teresia Teaiwa, E-Tangata, October 2015 ‘Professional sports have constituted an alternative work arena for many black men. In that world the black male body once used and abused in a world of labor based on brute force could be transformed; elegance and grace could become the identifying signifiers of one’s labor.’ —bell hooks, ‘Gangsta Culture’, We Real Cool, 2003, p.21 I am the first person in my family to attend university. On my first day, Dad dropped me off… [Read more]
The Longing to Move Away
I have longed to move away but am afraid; Some life, yet unspent, might explode Out of the old lie burning on the ground, And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind. – Dylan Thomas, I have longed to move away I read Thomas’ poem when I was twenty-one, squandering a life in my comfortable childhood home in Sydney. As the youngest of four in a traditional, severely conservative migrant family, I felt for the first time reading this line as though the poet had grabbed my ribs and bent it to expose my throbbing, nervous heart. The yearning… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I must admit, I usually avoid answering queries about what I’m reading. It seems a question so embroiled in judgement. Is what I read a judgment of what I do not? Will my taste as a writer be judged by my choice—is it too populist, too literary, too genre? Part of me knows that this is absurd, a fear brought on by imposter syndrome or some other unnamed paranoid condition that infects those who write. Even so, the self-consciousness is there and hard to shake. The reality is that I rarely choose my own list anymore—especially where fiction is concerned…. [Read more]
Goldfish
Every day after the final school bell rang, I sat on the paved brick of a stranger’s front yard under an old tree. My schoolmates and I wrote our names in the dirt, picked flowers and played handball until our parents arrived, one by one. Every day our big white Tarago would arrive, my mother at the wheel. One afternoon, the car didn’t come. The company dwindled until only I was left. Finally, the teacher on duty took me to after-school care to sit inside and wait. While other children drew and read, I sat quietly at a desk. I… [Read more]
My Junot Díaz Problem
At the time Zinzi Clemmons was confronting Junot Díaz at the Sydney Writers’ Festival about his past mistreatment of her, I was elsewhere in the same building attending a writing workshop on literary nonfiction. At that exact moment we were engaged in a vigorous discussion of one of the chief concerns of writing in any genre: ethics. Writing literary nonfiction involves high stakes, said our workshop facilitator Maria Tumarkin. Otherwise, it’s probably not worth writing about. Prior to the workshop she’d asked us to send in our burning questions for her to address. One of mine was how to write… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I’ve been reading the face of the woman on her knees on Platform Four with her shopping bags spilled around her like a sandcastle ruined by the tide. I’ve been reading the uncertain angle of her head as she gazes into space, blonde hair spilling loose, mouth slack and smeared red. I’ve been reading her enormously vacant eyes: some small madness at the gates. Or perhaps she can see some larger madness approaching that we can’t. Perhaps it’s the rising sea. I’ve been reading a draft of a musical novel by Kirsten Krauth which pulses and roars with the sound… [Read more]
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