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The Overland line

Over on his blog, Emmett Stinson comments on my article on creative writing courses in the university, ‘Liberated Zone or Pure Commodification?’ There is much to agree with in Stinson’s post, though his defence of creative writing courses is rather tendentious.

Still, there were several points that attracted my attention. In particular, Stinson critiques my argument for an engaged literature. He writes:

Davidson’s piece is ultimately interesting and even-handed, although it runs what currently seems to be Overland’s party line on what literature should be, which is ‘a literature that takes us back into the world – that thinks about the issues that surround and affect us – rather than away from it: a culture of engagement rather than escapism, of reflection rather than consolation’. As I’ve noted elsewhere, an extremely problematic set of assumptions underpins this notion of literature (and more on this below).

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Written by Rjurik Davidson on 29-09-2010, 11 user comments

When writing Australia

In Overland 200, Marion Rankine examines originality or lack thereof when writers write Australia, ‘Sometimes it takes a writer’:

Flicking through an old issue of Overland (edition 182) I came across an essay by Malcolm Knox entitled ‘Pushing Against the Real World: The Case for “Original” Australian Fiction’. It sparked my interest – I was grappling with similar ideas at the time – especially by mentioning a paper delivered by Mark Davis in 2005 in which he argued that the ‘Australian literary novel’ is suffering a slow and inevitable demise. Substituting ‘original’ for ‘literary’ (on the grounds that originality is more ubiquitous than concepts of the literary allow), Knox makes a persuasive case for the importance of originality in Australian fiction. After some reflection, I would like to extend his argument to include not just fiction but all writing in Australia and, most particularly, writing about Australia.

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Written by Editorial team on 24-09-2010, No comments

Melbourne getting all poetic

With the closing ceremony of the Overload poetry festival at the Grace Darling Hotel on Sunday, I was disappointed poetry would once again retreat from the limelight. The experience I had this year, participating in the festival as a poet, was far more exciting than my role reviewing it here on Overland last year. Observing from afar is quite a different experience to being part of Melbourne’s poetic voice. Over this year I have gotten to know many of Melbourne’s poets by attending regular poetry readings and it is only recently that I have come to appreciate just how lucky I am here in Melbourne to be a part of such a vibrant poetic and overall artistic community. I didn’t have a chance to attend all of the interesting and diverse readings and events that were part of the festival, but I thought I’d write a few words reflecting on my own personal experience. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 23-09-2010, 3 user comments

Ben Eltham on the Australia Council

In Overland 200, Ben Eltham makes a provocative argument about the future of the Australia Council. Here's a snippet.

The Australia Council has lost its way ...  It has failed to meaningfully engage with the arts practices of everyday Australian artists and no longer enjoys the support of many of those who create art in this country. The time has arrived to seriously re-assess the role of the country’s chief cultural policy body.

I believe it is time for the Australia Council to be abolished.

You can read the full article here.

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Written by Editorial team on 20-09-2010, 14 user comments

Fiction review – What is left over, after

'What is left over, after'Natasha Lester has three children and lives in Western Australia. This is good news for me, otherwise I would want to be her. Her first novel won the 2008 TAG Hungerford award, she’s written for Overland, indigo and Wet Ink, and she just won a Publisher Fellowship from Allen & Unwin.

Her first novel, What is left over, after, benefits from having the kind of title that made me want to read it without knowing anything about it. It sounds like the title of a Romantic-era poem, something from one of Coleridge’s contemporaries swiped for a contemporary take. I love it. The book is also pretty good. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 14-09-2010, 7 user comments

Fiction review – Child of the Twilight

She may have grown up in Tasmania, but I’m claiming Carmel Bird as a Melbourne writer because she lives here now. If you haven’t heard of her, why not? The woman has a prolific publishing history, beginning with her first collection of stories in 1983.

I published my first two books myself. If you decide to publish your own book, do it cheerfully, whole-heartedly, using all the information you can get, and be realistic in your expectations. It is probable that the book will not be reviewed, and it probably won't be a prize-winner or a best-seller – although it might be. You will also be the subject of a certain amount of derision and also, interestingly enough, of envy. Other people can be quite jealous of your guts when you publish your own book.

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Written by Clare Strahan on 13-09-2010, 3 user comments

MWF – Writing Indigenous Australia

I’m writing a PhD on Indigenous Australia and have been travelling the Top End researching for six months or so. The Melbourne Writers Festival began the very day after I arrived home. Given the topic of my PhD, attending the Writing Indigenous Australia seminar seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

The panel was made up of one Indigenous and three non-Indigenous writers. Hannah Rachel Bell opened with a brief talk about Storymen – ‘an excavation of converging world views exposed through personal memoir, letters, paintings and conversations’ – which meditates on her relationship with Ngarinyin lawman Bungal Mowaljarlai, the fiction and philosophies of Tim Winton, and the relationships between land, story, and male rites of passage. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 9-09-2010, No comments

MWF Writing Women – a review

2.30 at Fed Square and there’s a queue fifty people strong cluttering up the paving-stones, waiting to go in to ACMI for the Melbourne Writers Festival. The doors are shut. Chaos reigns. ‘Is this the museum?’ asks a lost tourist. The MWF volunteers are doing a sterling job, blithely ignoring any queue-disgruntlement and pointing the lost tourist in the right direction.

‘May I smoke?’ asks an older man ahead of me. He looks like a writer, to me – dishevelled and blinking in the sunlight. ‘I think you should,’ replies his polite companion. Not what I would’ve said.

At last, the doors are open and the queue begins to move. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, but it’s our first day,’ says a MWF volunteer. As this is the twenty-fourth Melbourne Writers Festival, I find this a remarkable explanation but what the heck, here we go, the well-oiled machine rolls on. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 3-09-2010, 2 user comments

Unfinished Sympathy*

UlyssesSeveral years ago, when I was studying writing at university, a lecturer of mine expressed utter disdain when a student confessed to abandoning James Joyce’s Ulysses mid-way through. The lecturer, who was an author herself (well you’d want to hope so, wouldn’t you?), said that to give up on a book before the end was lazy and disrespectful to the author and Literature itself. This exchange took place in the first week of semester and, like the chap who asked how much a published author can expect to earn in a year, the student concerned did not return the following week. The rest of us sat nodding in agreement with our lecturer in an attempt to demonstrate that we had not only finished Ulysses, but read it several times, along with many fat books by Russian writers. I myself had to put extra effort into appearing smug to cover the fact that, not only had I never finished Ulysses, I had never started it either. (Unlike my grandfather, who started reading it under the false belief it was about motorcycle gangs.) What’s worse, I was guilty of abandoning several books – some of them ‘Classics’ – not two chapters in, but two chapters short of the end. (I tell you what: if you keep reading this post till the end, I’ll reveal what they were.) ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 25-08-2010, 51 user comments

Failed novels

So last month the girlfriend and I went to see Christopher Hitchens talk about his new book of memoirs. I'm not really into memoir so probably missed out on some of what he said, however, did get one real gem out of the evening.

Among other things, he and school friends – and later, other friends, including Salman Rushdie – used to play a game of inventing titles of books that didn't quite make it. The favored example given was Mr Gatsby.

This has of course inspired us to come up with as many failed book titles as we can. I've started with the following:

Alice in an Interesting Place
The Conjuror of Oz
The Moderately Well Known Five
Diary of a Prostitute
Anne of the Green Roof (and the sequel, Anne from a Small Town)
The Manipulative Mr Ripley
The Unconcluded Novel
Older Girls
American Lunatic
A Long While Alone ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 6-08-2010, 16 user comments

Reading like your sanity depends upon it

We at Overland don’t only take pleasure in deleting commas and rearranging words; we are also ardent readers. Things we have been reading lately include:

Rjurik Davidson

TrotskyLast week I finished Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, which brilliantly documents the French Revolution from the point of view (mainly) of Desmoulins, Robespierre and Danton.

Currently I'm reading Deborah Biancotti's Book of Endings, a collection of stories by the under-recognised Australian speculative fiction author. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 30-07-2010, 35 user comments

Vale Laurie Clancy

Laurie ClancyLaurie Clancy’s death this July is a great loss to Australia’s literary community, and a particular cause of sorrow to Overland. Although Laurie was b inclination attached to Overland, a chance combination of circumstances led to his inclusion in the Meanjin team for one of the annual cricket matches that enacted the rivalry between the two magazines. In later years he became not only captain of Meanjin, but one of the main organisers of the match. He celebrated this event in one of the stories he published in Overland. This also appeared, slightly modified, in his novel The Wildlife Reserve. The description of the comic progress and violent end of a cricket match between supporters of rival literary magazines demonstrates the deep knowledge and love of sport that was so much a part of Laurie’s life. In the book it also introduces the hero to the divisions he will find in an English Department tormented by cultural, pedagogical and sexual politics. ... read more

Written by John McLaren on 21-07-2010, 2 user comments

A response to harvest

My curiosity piqued by a question beneath a review on our blog of the latest harvest, I hurried home to read its editorial. And read its editorial I did – with a burgeoning sense of unease.

The editorial responded to Ted Genoways’ article in Mother Jones earlier this year, ‘The death of fiction?’ Genoways argued that many factors contributed to the demise of the literary journal, and literature, but that a major cause was the preponderance of writing courses manufacturing writers who write more than they read and care little for the outside world:

At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm not calling for more pundits—God knows we've got plenty. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read.

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Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-07-2010, 30 user comments

Farewell Jessica Anderson (1916–2010) – and thanks

I can’t let the death last week of Australian writer Jessica Anderson go unremarked. Why? Because although she twice won the Miles Franklin Award (1978 and 1980) and her novel Tirra Lirra by the River has been on high school reading lists, Anderson was for most of her long life marginalised, a misfit, a sensitive and creative woman in 20th century Australia. And she writes about similarly marginalised people. She said: ‘I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society.’

I agree with Clive James when he says that ‘Culture builds itself like a coral reef and like a reef it entails much sacrifice’ – and I think we have writers like Jessica Anderson to thank for whatever Australian literary culture we can claim today. They are the bedrock of our literature and they paid the price – poverty, alcoholism, disappointment, frustration, madness – of creativity in an overwhelmingly philistine nation. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 15-07-2010, 11 user comments

The Muslim voice pushing through

The politically conscious hip-hop group The Brothahood ask ‘Why?’

Five Muslim spoken-word/rap artists born in Australia with Lebanese backgrounds, The Brothahood are smashing stereotypes with their album Lyrics of mass construction, and tracks like ‘Why?’ When I accidentally stumbled across them a few months ago I was asking myself why haven’t I heard of these guys? All of Australia needs to turn off their televisions and listen:

Now if a wake up one morning and grow myself a beard /
people start talkin and getting themselves scared /
but – Mr Goldberg he lives down the block /
when he grows a beard no-one ever gets a shock /
why when my sister walks properly dressed /
she wears a headscarf they think she’s oppressed? /
then you got the nuns dressed in black and white head to toe /
but no-one questions them – why – i dont know

Hesh, Ahmed, Moustafa, Jehad and Timur work full-time jobs, live on opposite sides of the city in suburbia and struggle to find time to come together, but when they do, they produce raw and confronting material that challenges the propagandist mainstream newsfeeds the Australian public sees every day. They may not have flashy video clips but the content is honest and allows the Muslim voice in Australia, commonly silenced by fear, to be heard.

Only recently introduced to their work, by the Nothing rhymes with RRR podcast, my initial reaction was: why aren’t these guys funded by an arts council? Why do these guys have to struggle to create? Governments complain of the racism in Australia but do nothing about it. Why not start by funding people like The Brothahood and other diverse voices from different backgrounds? Only through art can we appreciate the many cultures we have in Australia.

The Brothahood began their career years ago as spoken-word artists performing with a beat boxer and have since incorporated music in their performances. Their track ‘The Silent Truth’, a response to the Cronulla riots, was featured on Triple J’s Unearthed in 2007:

I can feel ya eyes on me but i aint in the wrong /
keepin to yourself scared that my beard hides a bomb /
tensions climbin higher than that ape king kong /
label me a thug coz i'm from Lebanon /
butcha WRONG, im like any other aussie /
try to ride a train but u always gotta stop me /
coz of 9/11 now you all wanna wanna drop me /
little do you know that your thinkins kinda sloppy

But The Brothahood don’t only write about issues faced by Muslims in Australia. My favourite track is ‘Act on It’, which voices anger over the state of Israel and the suffering of Palestinians:

It was born on injustice, theft and murder /
Driving Palestinians out further and further /
Now don't get me wrong Judaism ain't to blame /
But we must understand that Zionism ain't the same /
Now I know you're mad at me, blunt brutality /
The Z ain't got no links to Jewish spirituality /
Huh, now you wanna twist, call me terrorist /
Yes, I'm anti Zionist, Expect me to resist

This Thursday morning, 15 July from 9–9:30, I’ll be interviewing Jehad from The Brothahood on 3CR’s Spoken Word program (855 AM). We’ll be discussing spoken word, lyrics and politics. You can also listen online at www.3cr.org.au

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Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 12-07-2010, 8 user comments