Overland literary journal > Articles by: Jennifer Mills

Author archives

Jennifer Mills

http://www.jenjen.com.au

Jennifer Mills was Overland fiction editor between 2012 and 2018. Her latest novel, The Airways, is out through Picador.

Articles by Jennifer Mills:

28 March 202218 May 2022

A Liveable Income Guarantee should support artists—and artists should support a UBI

Jennifer Mills

The proposed Liveable Income Guarantee is a strong step towards eradicating poverty, and artists should support it. Poverty sucks, and besides, the more people that can afford to buy books and art, come to shows, and make work, the better. But we need to be more imaginative, more ambitious. We can and should be calling for a massive and urgent restructuring of our social priorities, the ways we measure value, and the way everybody works.

22 November 202131 January 2022

Precarious words

Jennifer Mills

Eight years ago, I wrote a short piece for Overland called ‘Pay the Writers’. I was fed up with being asked to work for ‘exposure’. It was a time when a lot of writing work was moving online, and this work was often unpaid. Writers were at risk of losing our incomes entirely. If anything needed some exposure, it was the working conditions of freelancers.

15 November 202029 January 2021

Cracks in the glass: living through the second wave

Jennifer Mills

The virus doesn’t have a front window that anyone can break in anger. Instead, it’s we that feel its slow, inexorable, uneven impact. While some can brace themselves against it, others are wondering if this time, they’ll be left to fall.

26 May 202026 June 2020

The melancholic background

Jennifer Mills

There is a second kind of anxiety, as we step out into the world we share with the virus. There is the question of how we have allowed ourselves to be moved by these events: how we will tell the story of what has just happened, how we will mourn.

30 March 202011 May 2020

Agents of care

Jennifer Mills

If there is a better word than war for what we are experiencing, it is care. What matters now is how a society cares for all its members, especially the most vulnerable. How a culture values the workers who are most essential, who do the bulk of that labour of care. As the cracks widen in the world’s economy, we are offered a chance to recalculate these values. There is a possibility that our mutual care, our shared vulnerability, will remain visible in future.

17 May 201911 July 2019

The other side of climate grief is climate fury

Jennifer Mills

The thing is, I’m not really sad any more. I’m angry. And the role of anger is so often missing from these discussions of climate grief. Why is that?

Published in Overland Issue 233 Summer 2018

Against realism

Jennifer Mills

Dystopia ‘cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more.’ So wrote Jill Lepore in the New Yorker last year. The piece was at least partly an expression of impatience, perhaps even boredom, with the imaginative reach of recent novels and with genre fiction in general (she calls it ‘pulp literature’). Lepore names this trend ‘radical pessimism’, but omits any exploration of what that ‘radical’ might mean.

Published in Overland Issue 232 Spring 2018

Judges’ notes | VU Short Story Prize

Michelle Cahill, Tom Clark, Jennifer Mills and Sarah Schmidt

In the 2018 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize, 863 entries were divided between us, the four judges. From a pooled longlist of thirty stories, we selected a very strong shortlist of thirteen. Then came the difficult task of choosing just two runners-up and one winner. We are thrilled to announce the three stories that placed this year.

Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018

Neilma Sidney Prize: Judges’ notes

Nic Low, Jennifer Mills and Ryan O'Neill

We were pleased to see a broad range of entries in the 2018 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, stories diverse in form and voice, and creative in their approach to the theme of travel. We noticed that some writers struggled to think beyond cliché and others struggled to balance experimentation with engaging the reader. In general, though, the quality of entries was very high, and we enjoyed seeing some humour and formal experimentation in the mix.

Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018

Swimming with aliens

Jennifer Mills

I have been writing about the giant Australian cuttlefish, Sepia apama, for years, but this is my first time seeing them in the wild. I have watched countless videos, read numerous books and articles, and repeatedly visited the permanent display in the South Australian Museum’s biodiversity gallery. Sepia apama swims in and out of my novel Dyschronia in various shapes and sizes – even as metaphor, as literary image, they insisted on transforming, slipping out from all my nets of meaning. I have obsessed over these strange creatures until they felt like a part of my inner life. I thought I knew what I was going to be looking at.

21 November 20174 June 2018

What we talk about when we talk about editing

Jennifer Mills and Toby Fitch

This is very resonant with fiction for me, and something I think many writers neglect to consider deeply: what shape is your story, and why is it made this way? I often reread Ursula Le Guin’s essay, ‘The carrier bag theory of fiction’, which talks about the issue of narrative form as a radical project – and the idea of using the story as a container for something.

Published in Overland Issue 228 Spring 2017

Talking ‘Crabs’

Jennifer Mills and Peter Carey

JM: Overland published ‘Crabs’ just before Whitlam was elected – historically a time we remember as full of political hope for the future. But the story is suffused with a punk sentiment of ‘no future’ nihilism. Where did that energy come from? What was it about the Australia of that time that produced such a dark story?

Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017

Nakata Brophy Prize: Judges’ notes

Jennifer Mills, Katherine Firth and Tara June Winch

An extraordinary piece of writing from the first line to the last, this story really stood out for the judges. The hyper-lyrical, dreamy quality is thoroughly immersive, giving a sense of the inner life in a way that’s reminiscent of Eimear McBride. Some of the lines send shivers down the spine: the narrator’s ‘mouth full of ghosts’, the library that is ‘heap and broken image’. It is no surprise to us to learn that the author is also an accomplished poet who was a runner-up in the poetry section of the Nakata Brophy Prize last year.

13 April 201715 June 2017

The beauty regimen of a woman writer

Jennifer Mills

Every morning I wake sometime between 3 and 4am to spend an hour worrying about how I’m going to have enough time to do the work I’m being paid to do and also make the work I want to make. I often follow this up by berating myself for not just getting up to write. Eventually I go back to sleep for at least half an hour so that I can wake again refreshed. I find that chronic insomnia and dwelling on daily anxieties like this helps to prematurely age me, giving my hair the ‘silver fox’ look I am increasingly going for as I hit middle age.

8 November 201623 January 2017

The 400ppm tipping point

Jennifer Mills

Over this past week, I’ve been watching the news roll in from Standing Rock, where protesters are fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline: dramatic images of police brutality woven through news of an election campaign where climate has been glaringly absent. In my newsfeed, a mix of independent and mainstream media, the images of the election and the images of #noDAPL sit side by side but never seem to interact, like an illustration of the chasm between climate policy and climate reality.

Published in Overland Issue 224 Spring 2016

Victoria University Short Story Prize: judges’ report

Jennifer Mills, Alison Whan and Jacinda Woodhead

Submissions for the 2016 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize were assessed blind. Five hundred entries were equally divided between the judges, who arrived at a longlist of thirty stories. This longlist was then reduced to a strong shortlist of fourteen, and finally to two runners-up and a winner.

22 April 20161 May 2019

Erasing LGBTI history

Jennifer Mills

I was surprised to read the news that Daniel Andrews, premier of Victoria, was going to fund Australia’s first Pride Centre to the tune of $15 million. Mostly because I used to work in one in Sydney more than fifteen years ago.

15 February 201618 April 2016

Cursive Letters: the social media menace

Jennifer Mills

Given the public/private crossovers all our lives have become online, it’s hard for people to find the boundaries these days between personality and brand; between what’s appropriate and fun and what’s being a needy whiner.

4 December 201513 January 2016

All the bees are too busy writing submissions

Jennifer Mills

Perhaps instability is exactly what the LNP’s policy is about – a form of disaster capitalism in miniature. The Productivity Commissions and restructures and grant reviews and funding reallocations and snap announcements are all putting pressure on the sector, and that pressure has specific outcomes. Big, confusing blows keep cultural workers scrambling and unable to plan.

8 October 201515 December 2015

Cursive Letters: Imposter Syndrome

Jennifer Mills

I have such a case of ‘Imposter Syndrome’. I find it really hard to believe that my work is any good at all. I thought that it would go away once I was published, but I can always seem to explain that away (got lucky; they didn’t have anyone better; they took pity on me as a friend/emerging writer, etc). I find myself not applying for prizes or submitting to publications because I’m so intimidated by the competition.

Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015

Detroit, I do mind

Jennifer Mills

Many people I know share a common vision of the end of the world. When humans are gone, we imagine, the wilderness will grow over the ruins of our civilisation. Weeds will break through the cement. Tree roots will crack the foundations of buildings. Decay will restore some kind of natural equilibrium. The absence of human beings will allow the planet to find its level. It’s everywhere, this set of images.

19 August 201529 September 2015

Cursive Letters: the prize winner’s guilt

Jennifer Mills

I recently found out that I won a minor literary prize. It’s not much money, but it’ll help, and psychologically it’s enough of a boost to keep me going for some time. A lot of writers are giving their prize money away to people or groups who need it more, and I know there are a lot of worthy causes out there especially with this government’s brutal cuts to the arts, attacks on refugees, etc. So is it rude not to donate some of the money to other artists or to a charity?

12 June 201519 August 2015

Cursive Letters: dead men tell no tales

Jennifer Mills

But if you’re looking for permission to write something, nobody is going to give it to you, ever. Certainly not the deceased. So take the silence of these dead white men you venerate as consent to dig them up and go through their pockets.

4 May 20153 June 2015

Cursive Letters: write drunk, edit sober

Jennifer Mills

As you may know by now, the luxury of the first draft is best indulged completely. Silencing the superego/inner critic allows the story to flow out of you like unruly fans flowing out of a stadium, brimming with the intoxication of victory and mid-strength beer.

Published in Overland Issue 218 Autumn 2015

Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers: Judges’ report

Jennifer Mills, Tony Birch and Sally Dalton-Brown

This year, the second Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers attracted a high calibre of entries. The judges – Jennifer Mills of Overland, Tony Birch, University of Melbourne, and Sally Dalton-Brown, Trinity College – unanimously selected this year’s winner.

Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014

Fancy cuts: introduction

Jennifer Mills

In 2014, Overland has commissioned four contemporary writers to contribute a short story that responds in some way to a piece of fiction from our sixty years of archives. The last of these Fancy Cuts is from Ali Alizadeh, award-winning poet, short story writer, critic and novelist. Alizadeh’s typically unflinching story ‘Samira was a terrorist’ began with James Aldridge’s story ‘Taffy was a pacifist’, first published in Overland 21, August 1961.

Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014

VU Short Story Prize: judges’ report

Jennifer Mills

As usual, the hundreds of entries for this year’s Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize were read blind. The judges – me, Overland editor Jeff Sparrow, deputy editor Jacinda Woodhead, and Victoria University academic and writer Jenny Lee – finally decided on a shortlist of fourteen stories; we later learned that this shortlist was made up of eleven women and three men.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014

Fancy cuts: an introduction

Jennifer Mills

The third of these Fancy Cuts is from Christos Tsiolkas, who needs no introduction to Overland readers. His story ‘Petals’ responds to Brian Gorman’s ‘Afternoon among flowers’, which first appeared in Overland 33 in December 1965.

29 May 20145 June 2014

Transitioning fiction

Jennifer Mills

Every storyteller learns the paradox that formal limitation can unlock creative freedom. One of the internet’s great gifts to the artist is the abundance and variety of opportunities for such formal experiments, be they twitter’s 140-character restraints, pic-a-day tumblrs, or daily gratefulness blogs.

Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014

Fancy cuts: an introduction

Jennifer Mills

There has, in recent years, been a push to rescue various ‘lost’ writers from obscurity. And yet the short story is a literary form deeply embedded in its time. Much of the energy that has sustained Overland throughout the years derives from its contemporaneity – its commitment to the urgent, emerging or marginalised voices of its day.

29 April 20149 May 2014

Images of justice

Jennifer Mills

‘He likes to play games.’ That sentence opens ‘Fields of Vision’, the first story in this new collection from Sydney writer Abbas El-Zein. It leads the reader to anticipate an offering of some trickery: my first assumption was formal diversity. Instead, El-Zein has constructed a set of realist, subtly-moulded short stories which play games with geography and morality.'

Published in Overland Issue 214 Autumn 2014

Fancy cuts: an introduction

Jennifer Mills

There has, in recent years, been a push to rescue various ‘lost’ writers from obscurity. And yet the short story is a literary form deeply embedded in its time.

19 February 201426 February 2014

Double exposure

Jennifer Mills

Taking its title from the Dostoyevsky novella in which the bureaucrat Golyadkin is slowly driven mad by his more talented and charming doppelganger, Takolander’s collection introduces itself as a sort of game, with each story taking the title of a literary classic.

19 December 201313 January 2014

2013 in lit mags

Jennifer Mills

Literary journals are often banging on about how necessary we are, so much so that we sometimes forget how necessary we are to writers. For many writers, a few stories or essays in literary journals will earn as much as an advance on a book. In the year since I started @paythewriters, it’s been the literary journals who’ve been most receptive to the concept of paying writers fairly, and most understanding of the need for transparent practice and trust.

Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013

2013 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers

Jennifer Mills

The winning stories have nerve. They avoid these pitfalls, and do something more: they surprise and delight, and they bring us into the places writers need to go. They take us past the stereotype, past our expectations, and into the blurry vagueness of life, with all its bewildering contradictions.

21 November 20134 December 2013

Barracuda and middle-class self-hatred

Jennifer Mills

It’s a recipe for a blockbuster summer read. In Barracuda, Christos Tsolkias applies his signature scrutiny of suburban failure and small-mindedness to the very Australian world of competitive swimming. Add the conflicts of a working-class boy subjected to an awful private school, and it makes quite a feast. Is there anything the Australian middle class likes better than wallowing in self-hatred on its holidays?

7 November 201313 November 2013

The lost

Jennifer Mills

In Hobart last week for the Emerging Writers Festival, I went to pay my respects to one of my favourite tape loops: the video of the last thylacine in captivity, which is on permanent display in the new thylacine room. You can watch it on YouTube, courtesy of the Archives Office of Tasmania. The video is shot from the thylacine’s height. It begins with his signature yawn. Forty-three seconds of pacing follow, and a scratch of the belly with a back leg before he gnaws at a bone.

19 September 201325 September 2013

The rarest of birds

Jennifer Mills

One of the less enjoyable things about growing older is that books blow your mind less regularly. Books that explode the possibilities of the novel are rare; when they do appear, however, it is with more lasting power. For the last six years I’ve been grabbing lapels and insisting that Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria was the Great Australian Novel. With The Swan Book, she’s done something new, again.

29 August 20133 September 2013

The age of retail politics

Jennifer Mills

Retail politics used to mean the baby-kissing and town-hall mode of campaign time, which we can still see: witness Abbott’s awkward military boot camp squats in Darwin, or Rudd’s awkward selfies with Muslim voters in Western Sydney. But this performance feels tired and incidental to the game somehow. In politics circa 2013, retail politics also describes what happens behind the scenes as the parties subject themselves to hard analysis, not of policy but of market dynamics.

Published in Overland Issue 211 Winter 2013

Paying the writers

Jennifer Mills and Benjamin Laird

Should freelance writers be organising? If so, how?

30 May 20137 June 2013

National capital

Jennifer Mills

There’s an uncertainty within Australian writing over whether our geography, and each of its component landscapes, has specific stories with particular value. We often criticise our own literary culture for being too rural, by which we mean parochial – stuck in an old view of Australia which doesn’t reflect our overwhelmingly east-coast and suburban population.

18 April 20132 June 2013

We Are Not The Same Anymore

Jennifer Mills

These stories focus on individuals – generally men – who are lost, trapped, or apparently incompetent at their own lives; these stories turn on dialogue, and are riven with inconclusive tension.

13 March 20132 June 2013

Domestic fiction

Jennifer Mills

Domestic fiction is a contentious term, one used disproportionately about women writers. When a man writes about family, it tends to be described in other ways: Chekhovian, epic, national, universal.

6 March 20132 June 2013

Pay the writers

Jennifer Mills

A major newspaper emails me via a literary journal to ask if they can publish one of my stories. I am afraid that in these straitened times all we could offer you in exchange for publication rights to the short story would be a quid pro quo arrangement in terms of publicity. They’re waving ‘exposure’ at me like it’s a cheque.

13 February 2013

Damaged in Transit

Jennifer Mills

There are writers who look outward, observing the world around them, chroniclers of their times. Then there are those who look inward, exploring their own mind, often drawing on the subconscious. Damaged in Transit, with its interplay of public and intimate realms, is a collection that seeks to do both.

31 January 201331 January 2013

Lest we forget: Grindr remembers the Holocaust

Jennifer Mills

An estimated 15 000 gays and lesbians were murdered in the Holocaust. The number is hard to pin down because homosexuality remained criminal in Germany after 1945 and many of the victims went uncounted. The deaths of LGBTQI people in the camps were hardly discussed in Germany until the 1980s.

20 December 201220 December 2012

Best of 2012: Gentle revolutionaries

Jennifer Mills

2012 has been a watershed year in many ways. A triumphant one for feminists, marriage equality activists, K-pop, and people who are sick of reading shitty newspapers. In case you didn’t notice, there has also been a quiet revolution in Australian publishing – a wonderful renaissance of the short story.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012

Judges’ report

Jennifer Mills

From 622 entries, Enza Gandolfo, Jeff Sparrow, Jacinda Woodhead and I selected a short list of nineteen stories. Of the entries we received, 64 per cent were from women. Of the short-listed stories, seventeen are by women and two by men, figures which reflect the ratio of submissions in a blind-judged competition. Each of the stories on the short list has skill, energy and that great asset, a point of difference.

17 October 2012

‘A little romance’: The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer

Jennifer Mills

The story is set between the remote mountain village of Canyon and the small city of Pitch, with a cast of characters including whores, contortionists, a downtrodden family of gravediggers, a clumsy yet sensitive policeman, his upright and judgemental sisters Mary and Ann, the circus mute Otto Cirque and his dandyish brother Arcadia, and Ivorie herself, who is, if not quite a heroine, certainly the axis on which the plot turns.

20 September 2012

Fiction: The Memory of Salt

Jennifer Mills

From the first pages of this debut from Melbourne writer Alice Melike Ülgezer, the reader is asked to stand in an unsteady place between two worlds. The novel opens on a ferry in the Bosporus, gazing at the islands between the Eastern and Western sides of Istanbul, and rocking in the waves of an intergenerational conversation in Turkish, English and German.

Published in Overland Issue 208 Spring 2012

Architecture

Jennifer Mills

I have a layover in Shanghai for a night which I mainly spend getting on and off the metro and walking, sweating in crowds, buffeted by warm bodies.

9 August 2012

Fiction: On The Remnants (or How novels are not essays)

Jennifer Mills

Novels are not essays, but this one walks a line between the two forms, calcifying around the bones of an imagined manuscript by a fictional John Hughes, as rediscovered by his son. This ‘translation’ adds layers of interpretation until the annotations cohere into a kind of thesis about translation itself: the translation of reality into language, of metaphor, of fathers and sons, and the loss inherent in translations of literature.

21 June 2012

Fiction: The Forrests

Jennifer Mills

Wilderness is increasingly strange to us. We watch it disappear from our cultivated planet, perhaps ashamed of our role in its destruction. It’s become a word for a quality, rather than a place: something at once earthly and mysterious, to which we only half belong. In Emily Perkins’ fourth novel, wilderness is an emotional terrain.

21 May 2012

Fiction: The Spider King’s Daughter

Jennifer Mills

The Spider King’s Daughter opens with a powerful scene of domestic sadism in which the protagonist’s father runs over her dog. Her one-upmanship in this cruelty is the beginning of a game that she calls Frustration, an unhealthy battle for power with her father, which gets her into all kinds of strife later on.

12 April 2012

Fiction: Blue

Jennifer Mills

Racism isn’t a simple thing to write about. It’s difficult to push readers to acknowledge their own complicity in a racist culture without also pushing the kind of buttons that make us curl up like echidnas. On the other hand, a book might have an anti-racist angle which does nothing but reward the reader for finding themselves morally superior to the characters within it.

15 February 201228 March 2012

A literature that refuses to go missing

Jennifer Mills

Aboriginal people are far more written about than heard, more often the subject of journalistic, medical, sociological, anthropological, and fictional narratives than the author. White society has a way of asking what role Indigenous people might play in ‘our’ narrative, even when that narrative purports to be inclusive and generous. When we look for an Indigenous narrative, all too often it is written by and for whites.

8 November 201128 March 2012

Subscriberthon: Occupy the story

Jennifer Mills

When I ran away from activism to be a writer about ten years ago, I did so with a degree of guilt. I was in need of consolation, and the imagination has always been my strongest fortress, my best escape. I felt exhausted by the anti-globalisation and squatting movements I was intensely involved in, bruised by the mode of pressing bodies against barricades, fighting for inches of territory.

Published in Overland Issue 204 Spring 2011

How to write about Aboriginal Australia

Jennifer Mills

First, be white. If you are Aboriginal, you can certainly speak on behalf of every Aboriginal person in Australia, but it is best to get a white person to write down what they think you should be saying. Non-Aboriginal people of colour will just confuse everybody. Only white people can write objectively about the Aboriginal experience.

25 November 201020 July 2012

These are Fighting Words

Jennifer Mills

Last week the London chapter of the international writing-school revolution began with the opening of the Ministry of Stories. A few months ago, I went to Dublin and paid a visit to the Irish centre, Fighting Words. Set up by author Roddy Doyle and former director of Amnesty International Ireland, Sean Love, the centre had […]

27 May 201027 May 2010

Thanks, newmatilda

Jennifer Mills

Tragedy strikes Australian independent media: newmatilda will cease to publish in a month. As the editorial states, the reasons are financial. Advertising has not risen to meet the losses from subscriptions. The publication has gone from strength to strength in every other way, with readership doubling every year for the last three years. NM has […]

26 February 201026 February 2010

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 […]

26 January 2010

I’m not buying it

Jennifer Mills

I miss John Howard on Australia Day. That’s what I thought this afternoon when I walked out of Eastside shops to see several teenage girls draped in Australian flags, off to some underage-drinking barbeque. Is that nationalism, kids? Do you seriously feel like part of a collective democratic project worth wearing around your neck? Or […]

29 December 2009

zines zines zines

Jennifer Mills

not one but two articles up on new matilda about them. one is by me and t’other by the lovely vanessa berry.

14 December 2009

goolwa or bust

Jennifer Mills

The Australian Poetry Centre has a callout up for proposals for the Salt on the Tongue festival in Goolwa in April 2010. I heard great things about their 2008 festival in Castlemaine, so i’m definitely programming myself in for this one. Get your ideas in ASAP! Lurking philanthropists, take note: there’s also a polite request […]

27 November 2009

Steve Fielding is confused

Jennifer Mills

no news there, but this is hilarious:Fielding likens same sex marriage to incest

19 November 2009

Archive closures – letter to Senator Ludwig

Jennifer Mills

Dear Senator, I am very disappointed to hear that the National Archives will be closing their offices in Darwin, Adelaide, and Hobart over the next two years due to budget cuts. As an author I find this objectionable. The planned closures will make it harder for regional authors to research primary material. Will we have […]

28 October 2009

critical gratitude

Jennifer Mills

i have just posted my piece from the EWF reader over at walking and falling for your edification and amusement. received said reader in the mail yesterday and have already laughed out loud, nodded serious assent, shaken my fist, copied a quote into my notebook, and read a paragraph aloud to the other person in […]

9 October 2009

postcard party

Jennifer Mills

I have plugged this over at my blog already, but here’s a reminder to Melbourne people to get down to Sticky tomorrow between 12-4pm for the launch of from sometimes love beth: an adventure in postcards, published by Affirm Press. There will be a mass postcard-sending, so take your address book! more info here.

6 October 2009

double-duh

Jennifer Mills

just listening to the book show on RN – on the poetics of hiphop. i love it when the academics catch on. ‘wait up, you guys! i’m coming too, i just have to get my pencil case!’ what do people think of the rhyming=populist theory?

11 September 200911 September 2009

i’m sorry to interrupt…

Jennifer Mills

…the whirlwind of poetry joy, but i just had to crosspost this item. in the murder capital of australia, it’s still safe to be a racist: NATIONAL, September 10, 2009: An Alice Springs resident has responded to the alleged bashing death of an Aboriginal man by five young white men by selling “Alice Springs White […]

20 August 2009

knit poem

Jennifer Mills

i want one.

31 July 200931 July 2009

A quick word on the Alice Springs town camps

Jennifer Mills

before i rush headlong back into my friday afternoon pile o’ deadlines. Macklin’s office sent out a gleeful announcement of ALP success on Wednesday, saying they had agreement from 16 town camps to the houses-for-rights swap. The “win” was reported enthusiastically in the oz (sorry, that’s ‘the squalid, violent, overcrowded newspaper The Australian’) and elsewhere. […]

1 July 20091 July 2009

pullback

Jennifer Mills

what makes the green grass grow ‘Soldiers, what makes the green grass grow?’ ‘Blood, blood, blood, Drill Sergeant!’ – popular US Army training chant before deployment to Iraq cut grass, cut the sentiment. but bug-eyed faces poke glaring from between upended earth dolls left buried by the kids that used to live here but have […]

28 April 2009

US border control

Jennifer Mills

Democracy Now is running a story on No More Deaths’ Dan Millis, who was convicted of littering last year for leaving water out for Mexicans crossing illegally into the USA. I spent a week with No More Deaths last year and wrote a piece about it for New Matilda. Good to see the issue’s alive […]

8 April 20098 April 2009

small press alive in the centre

Jennifer Mills

This is the second offering from Ptilotus, following the success of 2007’s The milk in the sky, and also edited by the wonderful Janet Hutchinson. The launch will be part of the NT writers festival, Eye of the Storm.

23 February 200923 February 2009

Whaledreamers

Jennifer Mills

cross-posted at walking and falling I had the misfortune of seeing Whaledreamers on Friday, part of the Sydney Travelling Film Festival that made its way through Alice Springs. We are a hardened audience for the sort of vacuous worship that filmmaker Kim Kindersley profuses for the Mirning people. In the whitefellas-talking-about-blackfellas stakes, we are territorial […]