We ask writers what they read online.
I came across The Suburban Review a few years ago, after Laura McPhee Browne featured on their website with her short story, ‘Bathing’. A small Carlton-based publication, TSR has a clean aesthetic and features a range of emerging writers.
Like any experimental journal, expect to love some pieces and not others. But, overall, it’s stayed free from locking itself into one literary niche or another, which is refreshing and exciting.
Collaborating with The Stella Prize, TSR also recently turned the focus to local female writers with their Stellar Edition. With writers such as Emma Marie Jones and Ellena Savage, it’s a good one to have on your coffee table, bed or shelf to read and reread. You can still get a back issue of the Stellar Edition here.
The internet is laced with empty inspirational quotes, but Nitch features simple black-and-white portraits of experts in their fields—from Carl Sagan to Patti Smith—accompanied by their various takes on work and life. For shorter, in-between reads, Nitch is best followed on Instagram—a platform that also unexpectedly introduced me to writers Warsan Shire and Sandra Cisneros.
Overall, Nitch provides readers with powerful snapshots of different perspectives throughout the day. Don’t feel like sitting down to write/work/study? Listen to artist Kikki Smith, as profiled by Nitch: ‘Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn’t, do your work anyway.’
The volunteer-run, not-for-profit online publication, Right Now offers a real breadth of insight into a range of human rights issues in Australia. I first heard about Right Now on RRR and then had my short story on domestic violence, ‘Sediment’, published with them. Their varied content is often the perfect length for a tram or breakfast reading. Their creative responses to themes such as human rights, equality and justice offer a certain kind of insight our news broadcasting, often deliberately, lacks.
Right Now’s coverage of the atrocities of Australia’s Asylum Seeker policy does make your heart fold—though it can’t be shied away from. You can also donate to help keep the human rights conversation going.
Alice Bishop is from Christmas Hills, Victoria. Her first collection of short stories, A Constant Hum, was commended in the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. You can find her @BishopAlice
