These poems doom me to my chair and table and computer. I knew it was all downhill from here, at this age, but it’s been confirmed. My mind remains town-size, hemmed in by pine plantations and kanite walls and flat swampy land and hills called “mountains”.

The flame of her poetry scorches the states of exceptions that allow individual and state-sponsored violence to continue, unjustified, and unhistoricised. As we engage with her work, we are reminded that "chronic survival" is not merely an act of enduring but a profound declaration of existence.

Our community is one of action and activism, informed by histories and imaginings of Jewish and other resistance. In our anticolonial work, we are explicitly anti-Zionist and work for a free Palestine. We take on this work not to centre or salvage Judaism and Jewishness, but to oppose settler colonialism in all its forms, and to acknowledge the specific and necessary role of Jewish anti-Zionists in opposing violence done in our names. 

We sit in East Point Reserve and look at how the gidjaas, green ants, make globe-like homes out of the leaves — connected edges with fibrous tissue that I later learn is faithful silk. Safe inside. Why isn’t it safe outside? I pick up the plastic around this circular lake cause this is the way […]

Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.

Every Substack page contains a glowing white box just waiting for your email address. This becomes, unavoidably, part of the work being produced. What began as a way to fund work and bring existing ideas into fruition is funnelled by hungry platforms towards an engine of content production that demands we churn out words in structurally-required scripturience. None of this is to denigrate the work of writers, artists and creators supported by such platforms. My point is that we should try and understand the effect these platforms have on the work they claim to enable.

When I moved into a second career in editing and publishing, friends told me that working as an editor might temper my love of books—that a professional eye might spy previously unnoticed flaws. I dismissed this, but they were right. Before, if a book left me restless, dissatisfied, annoyed, I would simply close it and move on. Now, I know what is wrong, why I, the reader, feel short-changed.

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.

What a writing life is that, one might wonder, having to publish one’s own work by oneself, in the case of Pessoa, or consigning one’s own work to obscurity, in the case of Dickinson? But that is exactly what migration—mental, spiritual and creative—is all about.

One Sunday night a few weeks ago, I received an email from Podbean informing me my podcast had been taken down in response to a complaint that the content on the first ever episode, back in 2014, infringed on ‘intellectual property rights worldwide’. The complaint had come from AXG House, an ‘automated DCMA take-down service’.

When walking, things somehow have a way of getting organised. Like Tetris. The oddly shaped blocks that are your thoughts, falling down from the sky. Fitting them into the right space, then ping, the lines form. The more lines you form, the better you feel. Ping ping ping. Soon, the blocks start to fall even faster. Ping ping ping. Lines and lines disappearing before you fully get to grasp them.

On 19 January 1976 a tidal wave was set to wipe out my home city of Adelaide. If that wasn’t enough, an earthquake would follow it. The wave was in all the newspapers, on TV and radio. People began panic-selling their houses along the coast – or so it was said.

It is frustrating to see opportunities for ‘diverse writers’ linked to their willingness to write narrowly about their diversity. This approach disqualifies the many talented writers who have already processed or written about these experiences, and who have bigger visions or better imaginations than to endlessly revisit the same questions – who want to see themselves in Australia’s future as well as its past.

It seems right now, owing to the fatigue of ongoing isolation and the relentless catastrophic news, an act of doing feels more achievable than an act of thinking. We want evidence of connection, of achievement, something solid to show we have done something. If we are fortunate, we make things, we donate money but we struggle to write. Who wants to sit down, alone, with our thoughts right now? Isolated, starved of new experience and of touch – what we require is commune.

The privilege of common sense is not afforded to marginalised writers, who are asked to prove even the most observable phenomenon, such as their underrepresentation in the industry. Even our very marginalisation is discouraged from entering the discussion until we have gone through the lengthy process of proving its validity.

I have a theory that frightens me: probably, the best job a writer can have is one that is as far away from the act of writing as possible – boilermaker, car salesman, exterminator.