Published 26 February 201026 February 2010 · Main Posts How about radical success? Jennifer Mills Interesting piece by US academic and poet Joshua Corey (spotted via Currajah) on poetry, institutional support, gatekeepers, and the relationship between what we make and how we make it. It has given me a lot to think about in terms of the ongoing strategies of radical writer-reader relationships. If you can synergize with institutions, do so, but don’t sit around waiting for them to recognize or rescue you: they can offer you everything but initiative. This is the best path I’ve found for resisting the otherwise inevitable alienation from one’s own creative labor that comes from permitting oneself and one’s work to be processed by workshops and editors and tenure committees. The possibilities of initiative are exciting at the moment in terms of self-promotion and potentially having so much more control over our means of production, at least in the brief window before Amazoogle takes over our very brains. I’m curious what folks here think about the possibilities of ‘DIY’ (or is that entrepreneurialism?), and whether your work can or should be liberated from institutional gatekeepers? It seems to me that the academics don’t have as much of a stronghold here in Oz, but I don’t spend any time with academics or established poets. (Corey’s post is itself quite academic in tone and I had to read it a few times to get the threads.) How do we avoid conformity and marginalisation? Perhaps I have misunderstood the concept of ‘strategies of failure,’ but I would like to think we have more strategies of resistance up our sleeve than bad writing. It is an old problem of the Left in capitalist societies to embrace failure as a form of resistance. Can we have radical success instead? What do you reckon? Jennifer Mills Jennifer Mills was Overland fiction editor between 2012 and 2018. Her latest novel, The Airways, is out through Picador. More by Jennifer Mills › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.