Overland literary journal

Novel Writers

I have a friend who’s been published everywhere. A few times over, in fact. He’s won awards. Published two or three books of poetry. But he’s got something against blogging and it’s an issue we argue about. I suppose he sees it as irredeemably trivial and as superficial as Facebook. I concede that it can be. No doubt there’s a great deal of mediocre writing in the blogosphere. Then again, most of the writing on the shelves of a bookstore are worse than mediocre. And the point I try to make is that there’s the possibility of screen brilliance. That in fact, I’ve seen it. That I’ve been moved and inspired by writing I’ve found on the blogs of Australian writers.

A medium will always offer a set of potentials. A stage poet has physical presence to embody a poem. There’s the literal voice of the poet defining the voice of the poem, when on the page the same poem can speak in different voices, and reveal nuances of tone and suggestion even the author wasn’t aware of. On the stage a poet brings a personality and presents himself as the author. What they’re wearing on a given day is going to have an effect on what we hear, no matter how superficial that is. It’s hard to enjoy the poem if we don’t like its author. That goes the other way as well. A poet can dress fashionably and present herself with demure calculation and we applaud because we’re taken in by that pantomime. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 19-01-2010, 12 user comments

Reality Whore Manifesto

by Steve Smart

I am a reality whore

I don’t need money

Don’t you know that artists

Eat air, breathe words

The slash of paint on canvas

The lull of a guitar the screech of a trumpet?

Invoke the name ---- ----- to

Locate other reality whores in your vicinity

I’ll sell myself any day of the week

For some small truth

Truth in advertising?

Truth in fiction

Truth in the days you can’t tell

If you’re dreaming or you’re

Actually waiting for a tram

The line becomes blurred

It’s why we crave the visceral ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 7-01-2010, 2 user comments

Reincarnated Revolutionary Rastaman

by A. S. Patric

She has the voice of Nina Simone reincarnated into a Melbourne real-estate shark. She bends down, close to my neck, so that I can feel her words falling over me like a house of cards.

“You look,” she says, in the reggae rhythm of Rasta Man Chant, “like a fellow… in need… of a revolution.”

But she must have read that in someone else’s heart, because these days, all I’m hoping is for a little improvement in the weather, and that the days of singing for a reborn world will come again when I’m reincarnated as a bird or a bomb.

Written by Alec Patric on 23-12-2009, 4 user comments

We of the Synchronized Yawns

by A. S. Patric

what we do for money
things done in good faith
for the love of our fellow man
for a fuck or love, for both
the things we do for them
motherfatherwifesondaughters
the things we do for me
ambition and ego, superego +
id, evolution and development
for the blank page soul
for a blank cheque God
the things I’ll do for you
for the vague interest of your wandering eye
for the vast disinterest of your wondering I
things done in the middle of the night
things done in the cold light of day
all of this for you and for me, and others
the superabundance after survival
the superfluous after-hunt grunts
a swirl of ink in my brain
a splash of black in the heart
a freewheeling delight in cheating fate
printed on the inside of my eyelids
for a chance to meet destiny
the train that leaves 3:13am
in the station of your mind
arriving here tomorrow
in the nowhere of words
everyone else passes us by
like those clowns at carnivals
that take a coin to swivel and turn
for the ball through the mouth
for a lottery laugh of victory
all done on spec or simple glee
for a moment of distraction
for the chance of connection
the easy done, done easy
for the ball down the throat
stifling a coordinated yawn ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 20-12-2009, 7 user comments

The Promise of Minty Fresh Breath Not Included

by Marc Tetlow

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Click here for more great savings. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 18-12-2009, 3 user comments

Questionnaire

by A. S. Patric

Are we more disconnected?

Are we more superficial?

Does the internet cripple the creative life?

Are we more distracted?

Debased and disillusioned?

Do we abandon a spiritual centre for a cyber stratosphere?

Or is it merely two centimetres of distraction?

Are we ourselves filtered through the thoughts of others?

Are we distillations of the failures and successes of our parents, or perhaps, just our social networks?

How much of myself is originated solely from the private recesses of the singularity that is my ego?

How much of me is already historical, global, communal, whether I want it or not?

Where is all this going?

Where is all this happening?

Is there some point of culmination where consciousness experiences itself as a collective phenomenon? ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 16-12-2009, 10 user comments

Waiting for the Shit to Burn

by Mark William Jackson

In Copenhagen our great leaders

stand and scream to learn,

while I’m just kicking back

waiting for the shit to burn.

Economic crisis hits dope deals

costs more than most can earn,

so I’m just smoking crack

waiting for the shit to burn.

Democracy spreads like cancer

just wait till it’s your turn,

freedom lovers drinking Jack

waiting for the shit to burn.

In the days of tribulation

judgment has been adjourned,

God’s just kicking back

waiting for the shit to burn.

Written by Alec Patric on 12-12-2009, No comments

Radical And Progressive

The past few months have been interesting here on the Overland blog. We’ve seen a few flare ups. One of the largest was over the nostalgic racism of the black-face disgrace on Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday. And now we have a controversy regarding misogyny in music. I always find it surprising when we hear so many of the responding voices asking for moderation and counselling for acceptance. Overland is known as the most radical of the literary mags and the banner proclaims a dedication to progressive culture. Apparently many feel that should include tolerance of racial ridicule and disregard for women or their concerns.

Mainstream media is filled with these porous moral codes. There’s any number of magazines, newspapers and blogging forums where all forms of racism and misogyny are not only accepted, but surreptitiously encouraged. The Australian posted a piece regarding a suspected terrorist a few weeks ago, and there were over a hundred blog comments, suggesting everything from the deportation of entire families and communities to death sentences en masse. As repugnant as these forums are, or destructive this kind of hatemongering journalism, we need that kind of freedom of expression for a healthy culture. A counterbalance to these kinds of extremes is rarely found. Overland being tugged back to the centre does not serve mainstream media any better, nor does it benefit the breadth or health of Australian culture. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 6-12-2009, 10 user comments

Cobain and Kennedy

Gus Hughes smiles when he arrives and says hello, goes to the counter to get something to eat, returns with a roll-up and some chips, sits down and smiles again, saying he was hoping for something else, but it would do.

“So what are you up to?” he asks, indicating the paper and my notes for a story called The Acquired Taste of Poison. I tell him about how I began waking up at about 4am, though I kept myself in bed until after 6. And how I’d just watched a bit of a doco on Kurt Cobain that I've been dipping into over the last few weeks. A strange biography called About a Son. Strange because thus far, in an hour of film, they haven't shown his face, there are no talking-heads, and the images are all impressionistic visuals of life lived in the places Kurt is referencing in a long, meandering audio interview. It's elegiac, because Kurt's suicide acts retroactively all the way through it, but it's also kind of boring and out of focus. I'm enjoying watching ten or fifteen minutes of it every now and again. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 2-12-2009, No comments

Writers and Readers

A good writing group can be crucial to a writer. We might prefer the more heroic image of the writer building an empire with his/her own hands. But the act of writing is one of the most fundamentally communal processes a person can involve themselves in.

If you’ve ever read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol or Chekhov, you’ll know there’s a constant reference to what it means to be Russian, and that there’s a dialogue between all of these writers regarding that idea.

Written by Alec Patric on 23-11-2009, 15 user comments

The Green Light of Page Seventeen

One thing you’re never going to forget is that first green light. Red lights surround most writers like a city in permanent gridlock. That first movement forward feels like a liberation from purgatory and fills our heads with dreams of open roads and freedom ruffling our hair. A few metres down the bitumen later, we know we’ll go on dreaming of those mythic speeds and spaces, but that first green light is still the most glorious release. Page Seventeen is all about illuminating those kinds of lights. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 9-11-2009, 2 user comments

Out in the Field

Grass roots Australian literature lives and dies beyond the interest of most readers, even the many who say they love our local stories and voices. Events that might be supported by hundreds of professed lovers of the word often attract merely a handful of diehards.

But that’s alright as well.

I don’t mind the guerrilla film-making feel of faces and voices, bodies in motion coming into focus, words cutting through the air in muted explosions and the shrapnel of sporadic laughter. Clinking of knives to plates and espresso machines hissing. A dropped glass and that shattering that can create a half second of silence. Local events passed hand to hand by those that make images of us and our communities. Wanting to know where it’s coming from and who it’s being spoken to. Come and listen and you’ll know. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 6-11-2009, 1 user comment

Setting the Alarm

Creativity can be taught. We learn how to do everything from walking to writing books. No-one teaches you how to blink or breathe but we learn pretty much everything else. Imagination is the most basic feature of the human mind so teaching writing or creativity isn’t difficult. It’s more a question of how important it is to you to be creative all the time. To be professionally imaginative. Most people spend too much time just trying to survive.

Toni Morrison says she used to wake at four o’clock every morning, for years, so she could have a few hours before her kids got up and she had to go to work. How many people are going to set their alarm every day to 4:00am, just so they can write for a few hours? That’s hard enough, but this is a world before Toni Morrison writes any of the books that will eventually be rewarded with the Nobel Prize for literature. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 31-10-2009, 12 user comments

The Heart of the Nation?

When did ‘The Australian’ turn into an outright, unabashed, reactionary tabloid? It wasn’t that long ago it prided itself on a balanced view but on Tuesday it ran the standalone headline, “Black Saturday is Allah’s revenge.” I haven’t seen anything as recklessly destructive of social cohesion and cultural respect since the worst years of Howard and his xenophobic election victory over Beazley, where ads were broadcast across the country to dob in anyone that even looked suspicious. We all knew the kind of person we were meant to be calling in. Anyone not white and possibly Muslim. If you thought that particular fire had begun to simmer down, here comes ‘The Australian’ with a barrel of oil. They’ve even brought the human sacrifices to be lynched and set aflame.

Before we talk about the Australians in our communities who are not white and possibly Islamic, the less obvious insult is to the 173 dead of the recent fires, used here as nothing more than fuel to incite rage. All those properties and families destroyed, just kindling for anti-Muslim polemics of the most crude and brutal kind. Those Victorian mothers, fathers and their children just incendiary devices for the journos at ‘The Australian’ to lob into communities and workplaces around the nation. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 29-10-2009, 3 user comments