I recently had the opportunity to talk with writer and academic Luke Johnson about his story ‘Of rivers and blood’, which appears in the most recent issue of Overland.

I’m trying to move on, I really am. Best of intentions. Something current in mind. But then, when it’s time to sit down to write, it is the old material that finds its way to the top of the pile. Perhaps it is the urge to trace some intellectual and historical personal origins. Perhaps I am trying to tell you who I am.

Richard Holmes describes biography as a 'handshake across time', an 'act of human solidarity and in its own way an act of recognition and of love.' The RM books were motivated by a similar sentiment. Re-excavating the physical traces of labour history was, as we said in the introduction, an effort to 'provide a bridge between the struggles of the past and the people of the present'.

The source of the phrase ‘kill your darlings’ is the English writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who actually said more pointedly ‘murder your darlings’ in a lecture he gave at Cambridge University nearly a century ago. Quiller-Couch was the inspiration for the character of Rat in The Wind in the Willows.

Watching a ballet is not like going to see a play, and it’s certainly not like going to the cinema. There’s the obvious extra level of abstraction that occurs whenever a concept or narrative is transformed into dance, and perhaps because of that, ballet demands audience engagement first and foremost on an aesthetic level. This is more striking, I think, for those of us who don’t have a language with which to talk about the dancing itself. We have to process the experience differently, taking our cues not only from the set and the lighting, and of course, the music, but from how the lines and patterns in the dance make us feel.

Kate Lilley prefaces her anticipated second collection of poems, Ladylike, with an epigraph from American feminist academic Lauren Berlant: ‘Everyone knows what the female complaint is.’ It’s taken from Berlant’s book, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, which investigates women’s mass culture in America over the past two hundred years, arguing that it returns again and again to a ‘discourse of disappointment’ that is nourished by its own broken promises.

Can a piece of writing suffer from too much feedback? Writing, it has often been said, is a conversation, so critiques are essential to the process. This is both the lore and the law of writing. But whose notes should we take note of?

We should beware of large tenements where multitudes of people choose or are made to withdraw. Prison, churches, hospitals, parliaments, barracks, ministries, convents. These public architectures are a bad omen: irrefutable signs of a general disease.

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.

I love teaching first-year classes. There’s an expectation sometimes that this won’t be the case, or that more advanced courses offer more exciting situations, which they can do, of course, but the way in which the adjective ‘undergraduate’ can be used as an insult seems to me not so much snobbish as silly. Undergraduate teaching makes you work.

How is it that very long, book-length poems continue to be written and published despite the overwhelming preoccupation with either short closed forms (the sonnet is proving rather popular with some Australian poets) or minimalist wordplays by more experimental writers? Two new books provide very different but equally convincing answers to this question.

It’s not really much of a mind-flip to imagine a sci-fi novel winning the Booker. After all, science-fiction writers have something of a history of craving mainstream literary recognition.

No knocking about with uncertainties here: holes are a good, demanding term with which to visualise emptiness, loss, and lack, suggesting both a certain misogynist way of accounting for women’s bodies (‘getting your hole’, in certain parts of Edinburgh, being a way of describing having sex) and naming what’s left after conflict and destruction.

Poetry is popularly considered to be an art of the self. When the figure of the poet is parodied, it’s most often as an emo in a puffy shirt, a narcissistic creature of absurdly heightened sensibility.

I live on the edge of a temperate rainforest. In the city the daylight hours are filled with noise, and at night things fade into silence. In the rainforest everything is reversed. During the day the forest is as silent as the grave. At night it erupts with noise.

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.