Overland literary journal

MWF Writing Women – a review

2.30 at Fed Square and there’s a queue fifty people strong cluttering up the paving-stones, waiting to go in to ACMI for the Melbourne Writers Festival. The doors are shut. Chaos reigns. ‘Is this the museum?’ asks a lost tourist. The MWF volunteers are doing a sterling job, blithely ignoring any queue-disgruntlement and pointing the lost tourist in the right direction.

‘May I smoke?’ asks an older man ahead of me. He looks like a writer, to me – dishevelled and blinking in the sunlight. ‘I think you should,’ replies his polite companion. Not what I would’ve said.

At last, the doors are open and the queue begins to move. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, but it’s our first day,’ says a MWF volunteer. As this is the twenty-fourth Melbourne Writers Festival, I find this a remarkable explanation but what the heck, here we go, the well-oiled machine rolls on. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 3-09-2010, 1 user comment

Unfinished Sympathy*

Several years ago, when I was studying writing at university, a lecturer of mine expressed utter disdain when a student confessed to abandoning James Joyce’s Ulysses mid-way through. The lecturer, who was an author herself (well you’d want to hope so, wouldn’t you?), said that to give up on a book before the end was lazy and disrespectful to the author and Literature itself. This exchange took place in the first week of semester and, like the chap who asked how much a published author can expect to earn in a year, the student concerned did not return the following week. The rest of us sat nodding in agreement with our lecturer in an attempt to demonstrate that we had not only finished Ulysses, but read it several times, along with many fat books by Russian writers. I myself had to put extra effort into appearing smug to cover the fact that, not only had I never finished Ulysses, I had never started it either. (Unlike my grandfather, who started reading it under the false belief it was about motorcycle gangs.) What’s worse, I was guilty of abandoning several books – some of them ‘Classics’ – not two chapters in, but two chapters short of the end. (I tell you what: if you keep reading this post till the end, I’ll reveal what they were.) ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 25-08-2010, 51 user comments

Failed novels

So last month the girlfriend and I went to see Christopher Hitchens talk about his new book of memoirs. I'm not really into memoir so probably missed out on some of what he said, however, did get one real gem out of the evening.

Among other things, he and school friends – and later, other friends, including Salman Rushdie – used to play a game of inventing titles of books that didn't quite make it. The favored example given was Mr Gatsby.

This has of course inspired us to come up with as many failed book titles as we can. I've started with the following:

Alice in an Interesting Place
The Conjuror of Oz
The Moderately Well Known Five
Diary of a Prostitute
Anne of the Green Roof (and the sequel, Anne from a Small Town)
The Manipulative Mr Ripley
The Unconcluded Novel
Older Girls
American Lunatic
A Long While Alone ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 6-08-2010, 16 user comments

Reading like your sanity depends upon it

We at Overland don’t only take pleasure in deleting commas and rearranging words; we are also ardent readers. Things we have been reading lately include:

Rjurik Davidson

Last week I finished Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, which brilliantly documents the French Revolution from the point of view (mainly) of Desmoulins, Robespierre and Danton.

Currently I'm reading Deborah Biancotti's Book of Endings, a collection of stories by the under-recognised Australian speculative fiction author. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 30-07-2010, 35 user comments

Vale Laurie Clancy

Laurie Clancy’s death this July is a great loss to Australia’s literary community, and a particular cause of sorrow to Overland. Although Laurie was b inclination attached to Overland, a chance combination of circumstances led to his inclusion in the Meanjin team for one of the annual cricket matches that enacted the rivalry between the two magazines. In later years he became not only captain of Meanjin, but one of the main organisers of the match. He celebrated this event in one of the stories he published in Overland. This also appeared, slightly modified, in his novel The Wildlife Reserve. The description of the comic progress and violent end of a cricket match between supporters of rival literary magazines demonstrates the deep knowledge and love of sport that was so much a part of Laurie’s life. In the book it also introduces the hero to the divisions he will find in an English Department tormented by cultural, pedagogical and sexual politics. ... read more

Written by John McLaren on 21-07-2010, 2 user comments

A response to harvest

My curiosity piqued by a question beneath a review on our blog of the latest harvest, I hurried home to read its editorial. And read its editorial I did – with a burgeoning sense of unease.

The editorial responded to Ted Genoways’ article in Mother Jones earlier this year, ‘The death of fiction?’ Genoways argued that many factors contributed to the demise of the literary journal, and literature, but that a major cause was the preponderance of writing courses manufacturing writers who write more than they read and care little for the outside world: ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-07-2010, 27 user comments

Farewell Jessica Anderson (1916–2010) – and thanks

I can’t let the death last week of Australian writer Jessica Anderson go unremarked. Why? Because although she twice won the Miles Franklin Award (1978 and 1980) and her novel Tirra Lirra by the River has been on high school reading lists, Anderson was for most of her long life marginalised, a misfit, a sensitive and creative woman in 20th century Australia. And she writes about similarly marginalised people. She said: ‘I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society.’

I agree with Clive James when he says that ‘Culture builds itself like a coral reef and like a reef it entails much sacrifice’ – and I think we have writers like Jessica Anderson to thank for whatever Australian literary culture we can claim today. They are the bedrock of our literature and they paid the price – poverty, alcoholism, disappointment, frustration, madness – of creativity in an overwhelmingly philistine nation. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 15-07-2010, 11 user comments

The Muslim voice pushing through

The politically conscious hip-hop group The Brothahood ask ‘Why?’

Five Muslim spoken-word/rap artists born in Australia with Lebanese backgrounds, The Brothahood are smashing stereotypes with their album Lyrics of mass construction, and tracks like ‘Why?’ When I accidentally stumbled across them a few months ago I was asking myself why haven’t I heard of these guys? All of Australia needs to turn off their televisions and listen:

Now if a wake up one morning and grow myself a beard /
people start talkin and getting themselves scared /
but – Mr Goldberg he lives down the block /
when he grows a beard no-one ever gets a shock /
why when my sister walks properly dressed /
she wears a headscarf they think she’s oppressed? /
then you got the nuns dressed in black and white head to toe /
but no-one questions them – why – i dont know

Hesh, Ahmed, Moustafa, Jehad and Timur work full-time jobs, live on opposite sides of the city in suburbia and struggle to find time to come together, but when they do, they produce raw and confronting material that challenges the propagandist mainstream newsfeeds the Australian public sees every day. They may not have flashy video clips but the content is honest and allows the Muslim voice in Australia, commonly silenced by fear, to be heard.

Only recently introduced to their work, by the Nothing rhymes with RRR podcast, my initial reaction was: why aren’t these guys funded by an arts council? Why do these guys have to struggle to create? Governments complain of the racism in Australia but do nothing about it. Why not start by funding people like The Brothahood and other diverse voices from different backgrounds? Only through art can we appreciate the many cultures we have in Australia.

The Brothahood began their career years ago as spoken-word artists performing with a beat boxer and have since incorporated music in their performances. Their track ‘The Silent Truth’, a response to the Cronulla riots, was featured on Triple J’s Unearthed in 2007:

I can feel ya eyes on me but i aint in the wrong /
keepin to yourself scared that my beard hides a bomb /
tensions climbin higher than that ape king kong /
label me a thug coz i'm from Lebanon /
butcha WRONG, im like any other aussie /
try to ride a train but u always gotta stop me /
coz of 9/11 now you all wanna wanna drop me /
little do you know that your thinkins kinda sloppy

But The Brothahood don’t only write about issues faced by Muslims in Australia. My favourite track is ‘Act on It’, which voices anger over the state of Israel and the suffering of Palestinians:

It was born on injustice, theft and murder /
Driving Palestinians out further and further /
Now don't get me wrong Judaism ain't to blame /
But we must understand that Zionism ain't the same /
Now I know you're mad at me, blunt brutality /
The Z ain't got no links to Jewish spirituality /
Huh, now you wanna twist, call me terrorist /
Yes, I'm anti Zionist, Expect me to resist

This Thursday morning, 15 July from 9–9:30, I’ll be interviewing Jehad from The Brothahood on 3CR’s Spoken Word program (855 AM). We’ll be discussing spoken word, lyrics and politics. You can also listen online at www.3cr.org.au

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 12-07-2010, 8 user comments

On Carey’s version of literacy and democracy

I recently watched Peter Carey’s closing address to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. In the video, he lectures earnestly about people once reading in the ‘shearing sheds, lending libraries, mechanics institutes’ and ‘the trenches’ (he even uses Gallipoli, and Burke and Wills to stress his point), imploring everyone to teach children Shakespeare because it will even work in the ‘ghetto’. It doesn’t matter what colour the child is, nor their life experience, because reading is about exploring people other than you. After all, he argues, who would want to be Madame Bovary or Nabokov's Humbert Humbert? ... read more

Written by Benjamin Laird on 7-07-2010, 13 user comments

Fiction review – Come Inside

Come Inside
GL Osborne
Freemantle Press

Come Inside is a beautifully written, evocative novel told from many perspectives and over a long expanse of time. Despite the possibility of the rather slim volume becoming heavied by such a vast and varying platform, it remains light and unburdened in tone. The reader, or at least this reader, feels that GL Osborne knew what she wanted to do with her novel and wasn’t going to be swayed by thinking she had to tie details together or fill in gaps. Strangely however, this may be the very thing that leads some to view the story as too vaguely formed. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 16-06-2010, 4 user comments

Fearful of fear itself –
the short stories of Graham Greene

‘The End of the Party’
Complete Short Stories
Graham Greene
Penguin

Graham Greene described his short stories as ‘scraps’, and ‘escapes from the novelist’s world’. ‘The End of the Party’, however, delves into the serious subjects of death, fear, faith and human relationships – common to many of his novels – woven into a dark, supernatural tale. Written in 1929, ‘The End of the Party’ is one of Greene’s earlier short stories. It originally appeared in Nineteen Stories (1947), and is now included in Twenty-One Stories (1954), and Complete Short Stories (2005). ... read more

Written by Lina Vale on 16-06-2010, 7 user comments

Muttering to ourselves in the dark: on writers and madness

A few weeks ago, following a link posted on a comments board at Overland, I encountered an essay by the US writer Robert Cohen, ostensibly on literary style. As far as I can tell Cohen seems to be trying to get his head around what style is, and particularly ideas of ‘middle’ and ‘late’ style, and what they both might mean in the shadow of the inevitability of ageing and our inevitable deaths. To this end Cohen looks at the work of (mostly white) male writers: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, McCarthy and so on, though Flannery O’Connor does get a look in at one point. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 27-05-2010, 33 user comments

Review – Trouble: Evolution of a Radical/Selected Writings
1970–2010

Trouble: Evolution of a Radical/Selected Writings 1970–2010
Kate Jennings
Black Inc

Kate Jennings suggests that the subtitle of her new book of collected writings could be regarded by some as an overstatement, and that ‘Devolution of a Radical’ may have been a more accurate choice. Jennings’ trajectory as a political activist began in 1970 with a blistering speech on the front lawn of Sydney University in which she

Written by Boris Kelly on 21-05-2010, 4 user comments

Review – Edible stories: Wetink
Issue 18

Someone once said that an artist's job is to hold the attention of an audience for as long as they require it. It may have been Oscar Wilde, but this reviewer suspects it was actually a character in The West Wing. Perhaps it was a character in The West Wing quoting Oscar Wilde – either way, it is a very sharp observation, particularly when applied to short fiction.

Issue 18 of the Australian quarterly Wet Ink is devoted largely to short fiction, with only three works of poetry. Short stories presented in a magazine format are tricky things. The challenge of holding a reader's attention is made greater because of the flicking impulse: the thumb which lurks around the edge of the pages, ready to flick the moment the reader's attention is swayed. Indeed, to borrow the wise words of Sally Field in Forest Gump, a collection of short stories is like a box of chocolates: so many tantalising options.* If one has a taste and finds they have struck a pineapple cream rather than a praline, they are free to abandon the enterprise and choose another treat. (This is less socially acceptable with chocolates.) Which only tempts the question: ‘Is Wet Ink full of pralines or pineapple creams? Com'on missy, stop stuffing your face with chocolates in the name of research, and tell us if we should buy it!’ ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 20-05-2010, No comments