A world without stories. What would this world look like? Would we become even greater strangers to each other? How would I know who you are or how you felt, or what you thought, or what it is like to be you in a world that is in desperate need of creating greater world competency in our understanding of each other?

I’d been using the internet a lot. I wondered, was I addicted? Behavioural scientists have linked internet addiction with social isolation. The three subtypes of addiction are: online gaming, sexual preoccupations, and excessive emailing or texting involving a constant compulsion to message or check messages. Did I have any of these? I did check my messages a lot. They were always disappointing. There was no message, ever, that could be big enough to stop up the gap inside me.

In 1857, English journalist and author Frank Fowler visited the colony of NSW and wrote with much excitement that ‘our fictionists have fallen upon the soil of Australia, like so many industrious diggers and though merely scratching and fossicking the surface have turned up much precious and malleable stuff.’ Fowler’s brief nineteenth-century summation of the Australian literary landscape still resonates today.

May I compliment Overland for its decision to publish Nell Butler’s article ‘Everything that is courageous and beautiful’. It was like the proverbial breath of fresh air to read something that confronted the zeitgeist of modern publishing with its morbid obsessions with identity, fantasy and money.

I’ve abandoned the set narrative path. After months of turning over inside my old head, wearing thin a commute between home and work and my ex’s house – a black rubber triangle that tightened with every trip and burnt as summer steamed in – I cut the cord and let go of that man, that lifestyle, that image of my best self.

Overland is seeking fiction submissions for a special online edition themed around ‘future sex’, to be edited by Michalia Arathimos. We are looking for stories that engage with what our changing sexualities look like, both now and in the future.

Australian writer Frederic Manning wrote what many considered to be the best narrative of the Great War. For Ernest Hemingway, The Middle Parts of Fortune was the ‘finest and noblest book of men in war’, period. It’s a bold and arresting claim that calls for a quick look, if not a deeper dive, into Manning’s enigmatic life and work. This is particularly pertinent in light of the centenary of the Armistice this month.

I’m friends with this hot young writer. He’s widely published, prodigious, pretty, too. I was at a massive international convention with him earlier this year, sneaking into parties we hadn’t been invited to, the crush of the hotel suites full of conversation with the biggest names in science fiction and fantasy. Standing in the corner with him, sinking free ciders plucked from a bathtub full of ice, when some publisher or big-name writer or other would come and interrupt our conversation to talk to him.

In a scintillating talk organised by Express Media, the Dharug/Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen speaks of the production of literature as historically being a dangerous place for Aboriginal people. I heard her say this around the time I was reading Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, Penny van Toorn’s Writing Always Arrives Naked and Gomeroi writer Alison Whittaker’s beautiful Lemons in the Chicken Wire.

An initiative of the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Emerging Older Poets’ Mentorship is designed to address a lack of opportunities in the 55+ age bracket.

I’ve just come back from doing a writers’ workshop in Iowa City. In gardens in rich white neighbourhoods, I repeatedly saw signs proclaiming: Women’s Rights are Human Rights; Black Lives Matter; and so on. Another writer, a white guy, was trying to write against racism. His African-American character was the nicest guy you’d ever meet. These things made me mad – though I wasn’t really sure why, or at whom.

In such a short time we have achieved so much, from 2013 to right now 2018. We have established an amazing organisation that represents Us Mob in the literary world. We have put some fantastic strategies in place that have reached out not only nationally but ato the other side of the world.

It is not my intention to question the value of artists’ residencies – there is absolutely no point in arguing against the clear advantage of offering ‘time out’ from the demands of daily life to otherwise time-strapped writers – only to raise the question lingering in Machado’s story: who is ‘cut out’ for the artist’s residency, and what does it say about your artistry if you cannot hack the enforced solitude of such now-commonplace retreats?

I often get told how lovely my skin is, by photographers and painters. It looks lush and warm in the studio, in natural light, in nature, in creating distinct tones in black and white. Most fine-art models are white. Following market logic, if I promote myself as the dark-skinned exotic model, I could generate more attention, get more shoots. Photos of Southeast Asian beaches and mountains. Hashtags I’ve never used like #exotic and #tan, #asianmodel and #asiangirl.

For many writers, especially liberals, thinking and writing about politics isn’t a precursor to changing the world, it is an alternative to doing so. That’s particularly the case since writing and reading are individualistic, middle-class pursuits deeply marked by the cultural logic of capitalism.

Hedva’s book is a pulsing work. It makes you want to delete all your social media, even as it recognises the internet as a potential space of freedom for those who understand its workings. In On Hell, Hedva identifies the effects of control on the brown body, bodies that are routinely subject to the violence of systematic oppression and incarceration.