AustLit

'As a writer, I’m always thinking two or three sentences ahead, two or three pages ahead, two or three chapters ahead, and back again, the process of writing much like thought itself, jumping from one place to another, like a chattering monkey leaping from branch to branch: moments and memories and ideas sparking and flashing and rustling like an erratic breeze through the leaves.' (Introduction)

'Chloe Wilson is the author of two books of poetry, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe. The latter was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2015 and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in 2016. Hold Your Fire is her first collection of short fiction, and it is an assured and original debut. Bringing together a series of flash-fictions with several longer narratives, it showcases a sharp-eyed intelligence and a finely-tuned ear for rhythm and tone.'  (Introduction)

'I was already thinking of ‘stuff’ when I read Emily Maguire’s Love Objects – a novel centred around Nic, a 45-year old hoarder; her uni-age niece, Lena; and her nephew, Will. We recently moved the contents of our garage into storage to prepare for renovations, and found ourselves stacking boxes of things we don’t intend to keep into a large, rented locker. There just wasn’t enough time to go through them. Toys from my childhood, my husband’s, our daughter’s; unused greeting cards; received greeting cards; packing envelopes of all sizes; roach-nibbled books; tubs of pens and markers and pencils; drawings of who knows what; clothes and towels and DVDs and documents from when my in-laws died.' (Introduction)

'Launching Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark’s The History Wars (2003), Paul Keating described history as ‘our most useful tool and guide’, claiming that ‘knowing our past helps us to divine our future’. Disputes about the scale of frontier violence during Britain’s colonisation of Australia have always been about Australia’s present and future as much as our past. Whether we view colonisation as a process of genocide and expropriation or as largely peaceful has significant symbolic and practical stakes, affecting its commemoration and the necessity of compensation or land rights.'  (Introduction)

'On the night of Tuesday 10 August, Australia’s population came under the microscope. The 2021 Census counted the number of engineers, of Buddhists, and single person households. It recorded the number of cars and tabulated our diseases. It even counted past and present ADF personnel.' (Introduction)

'A blank page brims with potential. It may incite a reflux of fear. It may unleash a prolonged bout of procrastination. For poets and storytellers of course, a blank page has immense potential to create new knowledge. As a writer working across genres and media, I think of the creation of new knowledge as involving an exploration of power, desire and change. In my writing practice, such explorations always begin with the intention to complicate my own fixed ideas about language, character and story shape, particularly in relation to identity. One way I do this is by recouping the compositional methodology of interrupting intersectionality, as writers have always done.' (Introduction)

'I closed the pages of Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia with a sigh of satisfaction at its beautiful construction and timeliness. The actions of her protagonist, Emma, seem a pertinent reaction to our zeitgeist: a world in which our flaccid government cannot mount a response to the recent IPCC report, which warns that ‘with further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers’. At the same time, I experienced a spell of disquiet at the way the novel mobilises disability to symbolise something that everyone, whether abled or disabled, should be able to recognise: the impact of our actions on the future.' (Introduction)

'‘A thing from the outside was inside her,’ writes Sarah Walker, conjuring one of her earliest memories. The thing in question is an enormous piece of bark, protruding from her kindergarten teacher’s outstretched hand, ‘under the elegant slip of her skin’. The image is carefully chosen, foreshadowing this essay collection’s interest in the intersections between our bodies and the world, and the breaching of these thresholds. Throughout The First Time I Thought I Was Dying the outside world gets in and insides are turned out. Walker’s lesson from that playground accident is that ‘constant vigilance is required’. Just a handful of paragraphs later, she tells us the revised lesson her adult self is trying to learn: ‘be not afraid’. This movement from fearfulness and control towards trust and acceptance is one that reverberates through the collection.' (Introduction)

'At the Edge of the Solid World (2020) by Daniel Davis Wood is a novel about grief. This in and of itself is not remarkable, literary fiction deals with grief quite frequently, drawing us into sympathetic alignment with grieving characters and narrators, encouraging us to experience their losses as our own. The commonality of grief provides a seemingly easy point of connection. What makes us laugh, the things that spark joy, satisfaction, and contentment, are often highly individual. The things that make us weep appear more universal, they cut across backgrounds and boundaries. Tragedy provides a worthier, more serious subject. We suffer with fictional characters, and – at least according to the old, dubious Aristotelian principle – somehow improve ourselves through the vicarious experience of their suffering. We become more thoughtful, sympathetic, or empathetic. We learn something, even if it is only to know or be reminded of what it is to suffer. At the Edge of the Solid World is a novel about grief that defies these expectations. It focuses on the solipsism of grief, the limits of our capacity to truly understand the traumas of others, and the problematic and exploitative elements of our attempts to do so.' (Introduction)