AustLit

'We live to the sound of water, quiet water, moving, not much.

'The world was full and noisy and now it is so quiet. We have come here to hide and haven, away from streets of grey and black and steel, whirling colours, particulate vision: the Brownian motion of small various things, from the mosaic world of normal life and an invisible pathogen that dusts it, to this place where I can fill my eye line with only a few things.'  (Introduction)

'Author Charlotte Wood is best known for her multi-awarded Animal People (2011), her Stella Prize-winning novel The Natural Way of Things (2015), her Stella-shortlisted The Weekend (2019), and three other highly praised novels. Much of her work explores the creative process through anthology, mentorship and podcasts, and she’s known for her deep engagement with the literary community. Her new book, The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life, has just been published by Allen & Unwin. Wood was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2019. She’s currently at work on a new novel.' (Introduction)

'Last week, Tasmanian writer Amanda Lohrey won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for her eighth book of fiction, The Labyrinth. It tells the story of Erica Marsden, who moves to a small coastal town near where her mentally disturbed artist son is jailed for homicidal negligence. Two of Lohrey’s previous novels were shortlisted for the prize and she has either won or been shortlisted for the Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the 2012 Patrick White Award.'  (Introduction)

'Last year, author Toni Jordan decided to write fiction full-time, in order to pursue her goal of subverting capitalism by making people feel less miserable. She is editing her sixth book and has started writing the next one.'

'One of the pioneers of Indigenous presence on screen, Rhoda Roberts has spent her life breaking barriers for First Nations artists. But with her new job, she may finally find some time for her own art. By Kate Holden.'

Musician Ben Salter is ensconced in a studio at MONA, making music in front of the museum’s patrons as a kind of performance art. By Kate Holden.

'Games composer, teacher, broadcaster and critic Dan Golding balances his different worlds in a chaos of creativity. By Kate Holden.'

'For Yuwaalaraay singer and writer Nardi Simpson, author of Song of the Crocodile, a sense of place is fundamental to all her work. By Kate Holden.' 

'A woman has a baby and she can’t stop crying. She cries not just on the third day after giving birth with the “baby blues”, but as she feeds him, as she takes congratulatory cards from the letterbox, as she watches television and opens a tin of tomatoes and tries to explain her confusion to a GP. The percussion of new motherhood hits hard, though she finds, to her surprise, that she’s good at the practicalities, and she has no difficulty in loving her child. She panics whenever the baby cries, envisions catastrophe as she strolls with the pram. There are nightmares prowling in her snatches of sleep: her dog drowning, fires, a twilight with two moons and planetary apocalypse impending. The ordinary assault to normality of parenting a first child is bad enough but, she wonders, “was this all that this was? Me acclimatising to reality? I doubted it. I had a history of reality turning irretrievably bad.”'  (Introduction)