Going Down Swinging

Reading the editorials and listening to editor Lisa Greenaway speak at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, you could have been forgiven for noting a feeling of defeatism in Going Down Swinging’s sense of its own trajectory: a journal that has from the start, and each year since, been ‘destined to fail’.

For once, it’s fine to judge a book by its cover. Stephen Ives’s busy image of Buster Keaton captures, in co-editor Lisa Greenaway’s words, ‘the essence of [Going Down Swinging] the slapstick/serious; the cultural ruckus; the unwavering stare’. Going Down Swinging is an unapologetic miscellany, distinguished by its vibrant eclecticism.