Our perma-crisis present

Sydney writer Tracy Ellis is the winner of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. Her name will be very familiar to ABR readers: Tracy won the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. (She is the first person to win both Calibre and the Jolley Prize.)

The judges – Yves Rees (past winner of the Calibre Prize), Peter Rose (Editor of ABR), and Beejay Silcox (critic and artistic director of the Canberra Writers Festival) – chose ‘Flow States’, the winning essay, from a field of 397 entries. They came from twenty-four different countries – a bustling, global field.

Three years into a global pandemic, the resounding preoccupation of our essayists was grief: the recursive grief of intergenerational trauma; the elemental grief of lost (or absent) parents; the quiet grief of endometriosis, infertility, and miscarriage; and the shared, planetary grief of the climate crisis. It has been a privilege to read so many human – and humane – essays; so many portraits of yearning.

Tracy Ellis

Finely wrought and quietly potent, both of our 2023 finalists were anchored in environmental precarity; twin dispatches from the sharp edge of the Anthropocene.

‘Flow States’ begins with a single drop of water – a household tap left running. ‘As any plumber, doctor, or government knows, a little leak is never insignificant,’ writes Tracy Ellis. ‘A dripping hose can fill a swimming pool, a burst artery can drain your life away, a wily hacker can flood the porous, stateless internet with classified information and change the course of history.’ And so, from single dripping tap, Ellis draws out a tale of the obliterative power – real, existential, and metaphorical – of floodwater.

‘Flow States’ impressed the Calibre judges with its elegance, layered richness, and sharp-eyed observation. It is an essay that invites – rewards – rereading. Part memoir, part cultural history, and part solastalgic elegy, ‘Flow States’ behaves like its subject: it ebbs and whorls. The result is something that speaks to our perma-crisis present, but tells a much older story.

Our 2023 runner-up, ‘Child Adjacent’ considers the culturally slippery responsibilities – and possibilities – of aunt-hood. ‘I am not the mother,’ writes Bridget Vincent, a writer originally from Ballarat. ‘I am an aunt instead, if “instead” is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these and all of them at once.’

As wry as it is compassionate, ‘Child Adjacent’ impressed the judges with its conceptual freshness. It is an essay that broadens our understanding of family building, and interrogates the terrors and moral exigencies of parenting in the climate crisis. Vincent’s essay does subtle, private things in reverberative ways, which is the mark of an enduring essay.

‘Child Adjacent’ will appear in a later issue, as will some of the nine other shortlisted essays, which are listed below:

Ben Arogundade: ‘The Dark Side of Paradise’

Ina Skär Beeston: ‘Heimat’

Kevin Brophy: ‘Private Leo, My Imaginary Father’

Martin Edmond: ‘The Genealogies of Mr Senior’

Jaimee Edwards: ‘See it Now’

Madison Godfrey: ‘The Muse of Potential Motherhood’

Dan Hogan: ‘Blade of Grass, Meadow of Knives’

Siobhan Kavanagh: ‘The Morning Belongs to Us’

John Stockfeld: ‘Stone Country’

ABR warmly thanks long-time Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for supporting the Calibre Prize.

We look forward to presenting Calibre for the eighteenth time in 2024.

On the verge  

Recently, Monash University Publishing issued the seventeenth edition of its annual anthology of creative writing, Verge. This year’s editors are Samuel Bernard, Thomas Rock, and Vera Yingzhi Gu. Verge is somewhat unusual among compilations of this kind because of its integration of work by current students and those with established publication records. There are thirty contributors in all.

The theme this year is defiance. In their introduction, the editors note: ‘Defiance is too often associated with rebellion, insurrection or revolution … We challenged writers to ponder this timely and universal concept.’

Launching the anthology at Readings Carlton, Peter Rose spoke of the more private forms of resistance:

Each poem, each donnée, each poetic state surely represents a kind of refusal – a retreat from conventional ways of perceiving life, family, nature, relationships, society, mortality. What are we doing as poets when we succumb to a poem but seeking unique metaphors for reality – ones never shared, never conceived before, too weird for public circulation.

In a quotatious mood, Rose drew on W.H. Auden (‘Alienation from the Collective is always a duty’) and James Baldwin: ‘All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.’ Rose concluded:

Telling the whole story, yes, vomiting it up – not just half of it either, and certainly not the savoury or orthodox bits – is a writers’ responsibility. It’s the promise of such that admirable publications like Verge enable writers and thus readers to explore.

Reader survey

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