First time I left her home, I looked up and a stiff fruit-bat was dangling from the electrical wire. Next time I left her home, the bat was in the …
Wit and Challenge and Play: Suniti Namjoshi’s The Fabulous Feminist
Review by Robyn Cadwallader A blue donkey, a lesbian cow, a saint who meets Grendel and his mother, a one-eyed monkey, an oyster child — they all tell their arresting …
THE SYSTEMIC AND THE INSIDIOUS: gender (in)equality at Verity La
If there is one part of human life that is completely and utterly unfathomable it’s gender. You would have thought that a 44-year-old resolutely gay man with three degrees under …
Incoherence (Gemma White)
Tonight, I’m having you over for dinner. I’ll be licking the storms from your mind like chocolate. (You can thank me later). I’ll be exactly where I always am, dripping …
Sound bites (John Clanchy)
Three words. Three tiny, banal words that had somehow – among the tens of thousands of others spilt in the cafe that morning – made their way through the clashing …
Poems Coming in Fast: Jill Jones’ Ash is Here, So are Stars
Review by Lucy Alexander Jill Jones once confessed that there was a time when she wanted to be a rock-star[1], and there is something of this in the flavor of …
Friendship (Gemma White)
At Meredith we stayed up all night listening to doof doof cyberpunk music and I saw you cry for the first time, at four in the morning bottle of ice …
BEHIND THE FESTIVAL LINES: an interview with Michaela Bolzan, founder and director of the Southern Highland Writers’ Festival
As a new feature of Verity La we’ll be going behind the scenes and interviewing the lesser-known, unheralded movers and shakers in Australia’s literary world. The first cab off the …
Watch Every Drop: a community service announcement composed for those who survived the Fall (Kirk Marshall)
There’d never come a newly-minted, indignant crimson-kissed day in this place which didn’t evoke some dark, frost-sorry memories to that time when we still had water. I can’t speak for …
Getting Caught in the Fundamentalist Machine: Timothy Mo’s Pure
Review by Robert Goodman Timothy Mo had a brilliant early career: three books in a row shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982, 1986 and 1991 showed a prodigious range. …