Overland literary journal > 216 Spring 2014

216 Spring 2014

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Words against power, queer writing in Africa, perspectives on lit mags, overcoming writer's block and much more.

Issue Contents

Regulars

On ghosts

Stephen Wright

On the right to oblivion

Giovanni Tiso

On intimate otherness

Alison Croggon

On length and literary merit

Mel Campbell

Features

Disappeared in Laos

Andrew Nette

Imagined worlds

John Marnell

Stephen’s vector

Jim Davidson

Hope dies last

Shannon Woodcock

Migration, my nation!

Dougal McNeill

The crystal blitz, 1981

Hugo Race

On writer's block

Rjurik Davidson

The future of magazines

Zora Sanders, Roane Carey, James Ley, Jeffrey St Clair and Bhaskar Sunkara

Why I write

Laurie Penny

Fiction

Jellyfish

Jacinda Woodhead

Petals

Christos Tsiolkas

Into the woods

Sarah Klenbort

Afternoon among flowers

Brian Gorman

Fancy cuts: an introduction

Jennifer Mills

Poetry

Wind shadow

Jill Jones

Keri Glastonbury

Ann Vickery

Kate Fagan

Pam Brown

Fading

Pam Brown

A portable crush

Fiona Hile

Art

Keith McDougall, Sam Wallman, Abdul Adbullah, Joanna Anderson, Safdar Ahmed and Kate Parrish

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

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Regulars

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Reading

On ghosts

Stephen Wright

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King appeared trailing clouds of hagiography when published in 2011. References to his suicide were frequent but circumspect, usually alluding to his use of anti-depressant medication, of which Foster Wallace himself was reportedly too ashamed to speak.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Reading

On the right to oblivion

Giovanni Tiso

In English it’s called the right to be forgotten, but the French, who were the first to legislate it, call it le droit à l’oubli – the right to oblivion – evoking not just the state of being forgotten but also forgetting, not merely being overlooked but also ceasing to be.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Culture

On intimate otherness

Alison Croggon

One morning in January, I woke up and thought: ‘Today, I absolutely must get a kitten.’ I don’t know what I’d been dreaming. It was one of those thoughts that comes out of the blue, with no idle trail of kitten-musings to warn me that felinophilia would strike me on that particular day. I rose with purpose and vim and made phone calls.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

On length and literary merit

Mel Campbell

The jocular internet expression ‘Too long; didn’t read’ reflects the demands on our attention from an abundance of information. It’s an impatient dismissal of anyone who clutters up online space by using too many words to express themselves.

Features

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Politics

Disappeared in Laos

Andrew Nette

The last time Ng Shui Meng saw her husband, Sombath Somphone, alive was early in the evening of Saturday, 15 December 2012. Sombath was driving his old jeep home. Shui Meng, who was travelling in her own vehicle in front of his, noticed him being stopped at a police post on Thadeua Road, a main thoroughfare in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

Imagined worlds

John Marnell

A few years back, Chimamanda Adichie warned of the dangers of a single story. In her widely viewed TED Talk, Adichie laments writers’ tendency to fall back on cliché and generalisations, to reduce the richness of real lives to familiar and, in the case of Africa, often racist tropes.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Politics

Stephen’s vector

Jim Davidson

More positively, socialist realism was centrally concerned, as a Soviet ideologue put it, with promoting ‘revolutionary romanticism’, expressing in literature ‘the very soul of the proletariat, its passion and its love’.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Politics

Hope dies last

Shannon Woodcock

Why, then, do Romani victims of the Holocaust remain peripheral to historical memory? Part of the answer is that majority populations in Europe continue to use Roma as a racialised scapegoat. In contemporary Australia, it is rightly considered offensive to refer to Jewish people by the derogatory terms used by the Nazi regime.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

Migration, my nation!

Dougal McNeill

Literature’s magical power has always been in its ability to name. This power – from Les Murray’s ‘This country is my mind’ all the way through to critiques of stereotyping – is a common ground over which conservatives and radicals quarrel, and it’s what has been done with these shared assumptions that I want to explore below.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Culture

The crystal blitz, 1981

Hugo Race

I can see myself lying on the bed. I’ve been awake for days; I’ve lost track of time. I feel like I’m somebody else. I’m busy, busy pretending to forget who I used to be. The music inside my skull backgrounds everything I do, high frequencies standing up the hair on the back of my neck and turning my mouth dry as sandpaper.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

On writer's block

Rjurik Davidson

There was a time in my early twenties when I found it excruciating to sit in front of the computer. As a teenager, I’d been excited to write, and stories had flowed from me freely. Then this, from nowhere.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

The future of magazines

Zora Sanders, Roane Carey, James Ley, Jeffrey St Clair and Bhaskar Sunkara

For Overland’s sixtieth-anniversary issue, editors from other little magazines, both in Australia and overseas, were asked to comment briefly on their project. Why produce a magazine?

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

Why I write

Laurie Penny

A warning, before we begin. Most of the writing you’ll ever read on writing will try to persuade you that there is something about putting strings of words together that is very special indeed. Writing, you will be told, is the most human and enduring of the creative professions.

Fiction

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Jellyfish

Jacinda Woodhead

Kandinski orbited through the kitchen, past the water cooler, past the toilet block, past Yang’s desk on the right – the carefully timed three-minute lap of the office’s gravitational path. He awarded himself another lap, a bonus for four cramped hours at his desk.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Petals

Christos Tsiolkas

I am imprisoned. I am in here for three years. I am having to endure and more two years and three months. I don’t know if I can endure. I don’t speak. This is a curse and there is no reply to make back to a curse.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

Into the woods

Sarah Klenbort

Some kind of pain, Jolene says as they hand her a baby still bloody and wet. Then, Perfect. A bit of blood marks Baby’s chin, or is it a beauty spot? Even that is perfect.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Afternoon among flowers

Brian Gorman

He brushed the dirt from his cheek and sat back on his haunches to relieve the strain on the leg muscles. He dimly realised that the right leg would be numb and tingle when he stood up.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Writing

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.

Poetry

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Wind shadow

Jill Jones

Terra incognita transfers across a plain, a wing blends the graces, tarmacs, macadam, concrete being so concrete, the tar-sick travel.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Goodbye to all that

Keri Glastonbury

Driving over Styx Creek, appropriately laden with heavy metal, the TAFE maintaining a cold shoulder, where transgender trainee librarians from Kurri, meet Penny Wong’s ex-speech writer,

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

poem | Ann Vickery

Ann Vickery

What if Persephone remained a hard woman? An ethics of care turned towards oneself. Love’s harvest, the halves of intimacy in these latitudes.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Thinking with things

Kate Fagan

Our time starts now Here under home skies I’m reflecting on your question ‘why are there things rather than nothing’

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Collected melancholy

Pam Brown

a dead bee on the bus seat, a bipolar daughter

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Fading

Pam Brown

conjecture if I can’t come up with anything I’ll crawl over and tap out one note

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

A portable crush

Fiona Hile

Riding on such instruments as a large aluminium hemisphere, syndicated falconry of gifts and predilections propose dilutions of solemn music played through ploughs

Art

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · CAL

Art

Keith McDougall, Sam Wallman, Abdul Adbullah, Joanna Anderson, Safdar Ahmed and Kate Parrish

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Editorial

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

children roast in the fires of this terrible century and no love is enough no elegy sufficient That’s regular Overland contributor Alison Croggon in her 1997 poem, ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’. Her words circulated on social media recently, at a time when the powerful seemed to have declared war on children.

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216.5: Summer fiction