AustLit

'There’s a strange elasticity of time at play in the latest issue of Meanjin, which seems fitting, perhaps, for the particular moment in which we find ourselves, unmoored from our regular habits and lives, newly conscious of our place in history. Many of the pieces within its pages were clearly written in the early months of this year – such is the nature of lead times in publishing – and are concerned with the horrors of the past summer: the devastating fires that destroyed massive amounts of bushland and habitat and choked cities with smoke for weeks; our politicians’ failure to properly respond. And then a new crisis emerged, and in many ways eclipsed this, because of the immediacy with which it affected all of our lives, and the profundity of the change. It’s evident that a good number of the pieces have been rapidly updated to reflect this, to begin to grapple with what an event such as the coronavirus might mean, as seen from the vantage point of the early days of the pandemic. Jonathan Green’s opening editorial explicitly speaks to this “moment of such extraordinary and irreversible disruption” where “all that seemed so solidly certain [has been] made tremulous and thin”. So the issue as a whole feels almost like a time capsule, a reminder of what the world was like before we knew precisely how it would change.' (Introduction)

'Imbi Neeme’s The Spill is an engaging novel set in Western Australia that meditates upon the connections between memory, trauma and the imagination. Sweeping across four decades, the novel focuses on the lives of two sisters, Nicole and Samantha: their differing relationships with their estranged parents, the secrets they keep and their conflicting memories in the wake of a childhood car accident. As they try to reconcile their views of the past, particularly their experiences of their mother’s alcoholism and death, the sisters grapple with their own failings, and their ways of mourning and memorialisation.' (Introduction)

'In a white-dominated literary world, writing “the other” becomes a political act. This is, to put it lightly, unfortunate. Regardless, decades of omission have led to a reckoning in which writers of colour have carved out new spaces – those that encourage portrayals of long-ignored experiences, debunk the fallacy that writing should be “universal”, and shun the white gaze.' (Introduction)