Overland literary journal > Articles by: Alec Patric

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Alec Patric

AS Patric is the award-winning author of The Rattler & other stories (Spineless Wonders, 2011), Las Vegas for Vegans (Transit Lounge, 2012) and Bruno Kramzer (Finlay Lloyd, 2013).

Articles by Alec Patric:

17 October 201324 October 2013

Growing like weeds: literary magazines today

Alec Patric

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s the phrase that comes to mind when reading Robyn Annear’s piece for The Monthly, ‘Puzzling the Purpose of Australian Literary Magazines – Unripe Fruit’. The death knell rings for literature every day and has been ringing for the last hundred years.

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 199 Winter 2010

Beckett & Son

Alec Patric

Devon was at home with his father when it happened, his father’s heart attack. They were having breakfast and then Roland’s eyes blinked and blinked as his mouth opened wide. He tumbled as he tried to find a hold on the kitchen bench. He hit the ground but he still looked as if he were falling on down through the floor.

25 January 2010

Buskers and Hawkers

Alec Patric

If a musician plays music at home, he does it for his own pleasure. If he’s invited to a party, to play with friends, he does that to entertain his buddies and himself. He wouldn’t expect to be paid for it. He might go out onto the street and busk. Perhaps for some exposure or […]

19 January 2010

Novel Writers

Alec Patric

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 […]

7 January 20108 January 2010

Reality Whore Manifesto

Alec Patric

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 […]

23 December 2009

Reincarnated Revolutionary Rastaman

Alec Patric

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 […]

20 December 2009

We of the Synchronized Yawns

Alec Patric

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 […]

18 December 2009

The Promise of Minty Fresh Breath Not Included

Alec Patric

by Marc Tetlow Dear valued customer, We hope that you enjoy your purchase. We appreciate your loyal custom Thank you for shopping with us again. Please keep in mind that we are always Happy to provide an ongoing Support free of charge as part of the Package for this astounding item Once again, thank you […]

16 December 2009

Questionnaire

Alec Patric

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 […]

12 December 2009

Waiting for the Shit to Burn

Alec Patric

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 […]

6 December 2009

Radical And Progressive

Alec Patric

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 […]

2 December 2009

Cobain and Kennedy

Alec Patric

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 […]

23 November 200923 November 2009

Writers and Readers

Alec Patric

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, […]

9 November 2009

The Green Light of Page Seventeen

Alec Patric

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 […]

6 November 2009

Out in the Field

Alec Patric

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 […]

31 October 2009

Setting the Alarm

Alec Patric

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 […]

29 October 2009

The Heart of the Nation?

Alec Patric

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 […]

27 October 2009

Talking Politics

Alec Patric

I travelled Europe a long time ago. Landed in London but my time in England was brief. I went to France, Spain and Germany. Only really felt like spending a lot of time in Italy. I met a man in Naples who took me to a pizzeria. He asked me how long Australia had been […]

24 October 2009

Beautiful Losers

Alec Patric

Watch this film —> Beautiful Losers (DVD) Reasons: interviews & art. Some good; occasionally brilliant. One epiphany. What else do you want? If you like art, you’ll pick it up at your next opportunity.

19 October 2009

Learning to Walk

Alec Patric

The usual line is that you can’t teach writing. That there’s no use in writing courses. Salman Rushdie was recently the editor of The Best American Short Stories series. In his intro to the anthology he wrote: “Old-fashioned naturalism was the dominant manner this year, and creative writingese, I have to say, was often in […]

12 October 2009

Thoughts on Fragmentalism

Alec Patric

We all know that we might not see the forest for the trees, but there’s also the possibility of not seeing a leaf for the tree. In visual arts, a far more pretentious field of artistic endeavour than the workman-like crafters of sentences using the every day commerce of communication, words like Pointillism and Cubism […]

8 October 2009

Wells Tower might not be the Jesus of Short Stories though

Alec Patric

At the Melbourne Writer’s Festival recently, Wells Tower told a lie. He was talking about how he loved transformative stories but didn’t for a moment think his work possessed such potential. Really? Well, but what about the Lazarus effect he, along with writers like Cate Kennedy and Nam Le, are having on the short form? […]

7 October 2009

Fame has a Crooked Smile

Alec Patric

There’s a number of short story writers who’d be famous except for the fact that they’re short story writers. Number one on that list is Wells Tower, who recently wrote the best short story collection of the year. You might need to go all the way back to ‘Jesus’ Son’ by Denis Johnson or ‘Rock […]

2 October 20092 October 2009

Infinitely Superficial

Alec Patric

Blogging, and the internet in general, is infinitely superficial and trivial. Literature is deep, drill-like; the private and personal versus the public and anonymous. So said Wells Tower recently at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. He elaborated on the idea, creating an image of a computer screen that went on as far as the eye could […]

30 September 2009

Literary John Wayne – Raymond Carver

Alec Patric

If you love short stories you can’t ignore Raymond Carver, even if like me, you’ve rarely been impressed by him. There’s the possibility with these kinds of seminal influences that those who have followed in his footsteps are far more sprightly and sure of foot than this dreary and dour ‘American Chekhov.’ Few writers have […]

28 September 2009

The Little Disturbances of Grace Paley

Alec Patric

Short stories are not rock, punk or pop. Stories are the Blues. Most of its heroes are secret discoveries made from whispers and backyard myths. Occasionally there’s a Muddy Waters or an Eric Clapton to wake the world up again to these short outbursts of prose, but there’s no doubt that for the story specialist […]

25 September 2009

Get Drunk on Blue Dog

Alec Patric

How many people went out and bought the latest Blue Dog? How many people even know what it is? Sounds like a good name for a beer, and if it was, they’d be selling them by the dozen. Not many looking to get drunk on poetry these days. The blur of words and easy slur […]

22 September 200922 September 2009

Alec Patric reviews The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret

Alec Patric

Sometimes you pick up a book and after a few pages think what the fuck. You keep reading and have this persistent thought — how the fuck have I not heard about this motherfucking genius before today? (Even I don’t know why my internal enthusiasm expresses itself with so much inner profanity. Are others also […]