AustLit

'My friendship with Susan Hawthorne, writer and publisher at Spinifex Press – the author being celebrated here tonight at Muse – stretches back over decades now. I can assure you that we have done a great deal of hilarious laughing over those years, and I am emphasizing that humour at the outset because the subject matter of Susan’s novel isn’t funny, it’s confronting, which is a little tough on the person doing the launch. Susan’s novel is deeply involved in the dark matters of torture, but I remind you at the start that this is creative writing, this is the creation of a textual art space, this is the business of the artist, to take the reader to hard places and bring them out again. This is not torture, this is art practice, a novel of exploration of dark matter.'(Introduction)

'This chapbook, Unsettling the Land, is a celebration of a marvellous thirty-year friendship between Suzanne Bellamy and Susan Hawthorne. They have produced many combined performance works in Australia and overseas, combining image, music, circus and text. The Drought Project curated by Lella Cariddi, opened up a new way of joint production with Susan's poem taking visual form in Suzanne's art which in turn created additional poetic text.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.