Review by Tristan Foster It’s summertime in an Australian east-coast country town, school is done for the year and, to three bored friends, a night of riverside drinking sounds like …
Gravely Critique (Richard Bell)
In my tomb of words built by the sentences that didn’t make sense Typing errors line my coffin burying me in out-of-place punctuation Every grammatical mistake on display for people …
Highway One (Caroline Reid)
The husband was half asleep when he felt the car slowing. He opened his eyes to see a tall man in a funny hat rushing towards them, arms hanging loosely …
BE FONZIE: an interview with Sean M Whelan
Poet, performer and DJ, hardly covers it when introducing Sean M Whelan. He is convener of the famous Melbourne open-mic night, Babble, and co-inventor and curator of the popular …
Exercises in the Experimental: Ryan O'Neill's The Weight of a Human Heart
Review by Robert Goodman Ryan O’Neill is a lover of words, and he knows how to use them. The Weight of a Human Heart, his new collection of short stories, …
Evolution of a Kind (Mark William Jackson)
How do we rule? In words derived from Latin? Whispers from a dead tongue? Rolling with the punches, crippled by the lunches, feasts of fat men suffering in …
OUTSIDE THE LINES: an interview with John Clanchy
If you haven’t heard of John Clanchy then Verity La is going to fix that. Clanchy was born in Melbourne in 1943, but has lived in Canberra, working as a …
Cherry Bomb (Cassandra Atherton)
I wished it were a phantom pregnancy. I prayed I was really Christine and had been impregnated by the Angel of Music. Or the ghost of Gaston Leroux. Not you. …
Blurred Impressions
(Callie Doyle-Scott)
I wish I could say that I had a plan. But when I eventually decided to say something… it was as if the awkwardness in my gut dissolved and carried …
Clue Five (Duncan Felton)
I’m hunchbacked over keys, typing faster than electricity, and I’m melting into the couch and the clackettyclackettyclack is the erratic rhythm of everything and everything is about to come …