Island 166
Each issue of Island is a privilege to produce and is a testament to a community of talented creatives who can transform ideas into actions and onto the pages in front of you. In this issue, in addition to our usual complement of great new fiction, nonfiction, poetry and arts features, I’m delighted to see the first fruits emerging from two special projects curated by long-time Island advocates: ‘Island Conversations’ curated by Danielle Wood (see Danielle’s introduction on p 96), and Island’s ‘Graphic Narratives’ project curated by Joshua Santospirito. Both projects will extend across the three print issues of 2023, so you can expect plenty more great writing and art in Island 167, 168 and 169. Consider taking out a subscription so that you can enjoy the journey with us. Sadly, this is Ben Walter’s last issue as our Fiction Editor. Ben has brought so much to the team, also having been our inaugural Online Editor and curating Island’s nature writing project (see islandmag. com/nature-writing-project). We will miss him.
— Vern Field, Managing Editor
As we round the corner to end another year, I find myself with less clarity than ever about What It All Means. It’s a real challenge, as a writer, to witness the weaponisation of words. Safe, beautiful words! The same words that were Ramona and Beezus are Callie’s Castle being flung around to incite violence and division and hate. So, for this issue, I’ve selected pieces that use words for good. Variously, they push back against gender inequity (Lily Chan’s ‘Are You My Mother?’), express dismay about climate change (Meredith Jelbart’s ‘How Do We Write of This?’), rail against institutionalised abuse (Anna Verney’s ‘The Things We Carry’) and, crucially, laugh at and learn from our past selves (Simmone Howell’s ‘Magical Material Objects’). As I load my own words into the trebuchet aimed squarely at 2023, I wish you a safe and energising break.
— Anna Spargo-Ryan, Nonfiction Editor
Recently, I was chatting to a fellow editor about how much of a privilege it is to publish great writing. It’s a privilege I’m going to miss – this will be my last issue editing fiction for Island. I’ve been grateful to have the opportunity, and to learn so much along the way. While it feels like time for me to work on new things, it’s been a hard decision to give up working with all the talented, committed and good-humoured writers who have put up with my endless quibbles and suggestions. The writers appearing in this issue are fabulous examples – here, it’s been a pleasure to find space for new fiction from Alex Cothren, Michael Blake, Jenny Sinclair, Laurie Steed and Catherine Deery, as well as Ruth Armstrong, the winner of the Olga Masters Short Story Award. Short stories can be such a diverse, gripping and exciting form, and I feel fortunate to have had a few years helping to find the pages for so many great ones.
— Ben Walter, Fiction Editor
Poems make conversation with the world, and with the worlds of other writers. Sometimes, as in Esther Ottaway and Andy Jackson’s collaborative call and response, the poems literally come into being through conversation. Sometimes, as in Eileen Chong’s ‘Mountain Songs’ or in Brigid Coleridge’s ‘Pietà’, the originating conversation is with other works of literature and art. Conversation can be initiated or re-initiated through the address of a poem, as when Todd Turner hears the ‘vernacular/ of your telling eyes’, or when Audrey Molloy writes, ‘no one/ can say you died, when you shine on/ in the yellow fruit, like a nascent star’. So too can a poem recall conversation – Alison Flett reflects on a recent conversation via Zoom – or interrogate the chatter that cuts out other news. Aidan Coleman reveals the urgency of what we paper over with less careful words. Attentiveness and the inventory of its rewards are likewise ways in which a poem offers a conversation with the world, transforming attention into language. Isabella Mead watches over nature and her child; Mike Ladd watches the Eucalyptus oreades across a year; Felicity Plunkett moves from fairy tale to reality – ‘me, the pea/ sleepless’ – in conversation with the tales we tell ourselves; and Jill Jones distils an inventory of remains. Each of the poems in this issue brings readers to the moment when, as David Ishaya Osu writes, we must ‘voice it out’.
— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor
Once again, the arts features for this issue have serendipitously aligned. The three features are joined by powerful themes of family and the places or objects that make home. Nadia Refaei’s photography sees the garden and its produce as connective tissue, drawing lines, via photography and language, between gardens of her family roots in remote corners of the Mediterranean and those of her current life in Tasmania. Jill Mundy’s article on ‘taypani milaythina-tu: Return to Country’ reflects on a historic exhibition currently showing at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where objects of palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) material culture have been temporarily returned from museums around the world, allowing local palawa artists opportunities to develop artistic responses to items that should rightly be in their care. Eleri Harris’s wonderful comic work makes a heartfelt introduction to the story of her wonderful grandmother. We are delighted to feature Eleri’s work as the first of four comic features made possible through funding from an Arts Tasmania ‘New Work for New Markets’ grant. Graphic narratives are an area of the arts we have been wanting to present more regularly within the magazine, and this project will support commissioning for four artists and mentoring for a further six. Our guest curator for the project, Joshua Santospirito, gave the artists the prompt of ‘The Nanna’, to explore broad themes of personal growth, wisdom and regression across lifespans (not necessarily only in the form of grandmothers). He said this of the program:
“What do literary magazines look like when they make a conscious decision to give graphic narratives the space to sing? Comics, an entire medium, have largely been excluded from literary spaces in Australia and internationally. I’m pleased to have been offered the opportunity to be guest curator as part of an attempt to rectify this problem”.
You can find out more about the project, and view the introductory webinar here