Sascha Morrell
Sascha Morrell is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University and was a Visiting Research Scholar at New York University in Fall 2015. She has published widely on American and Australian literatures and literary modernism, with a special interest in how representations of Australia in US literature and culture evolved in relation to representations of the US South and the Caribbean from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Going Down Swinging, Meanjin, The Mays, and Cordite.
Margaret Atwood is fond of repeating the adage that creative writing is ‘10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration’. The same can be said of reading Atwood’s latest story collection, Old Babes in the Wood. When a writer is so venerated, there is a risk of both authorial and editorial complacency. The book’s back cover features this excerpt: ‘My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But ... (read more)
Here is a list of things you won’t see the great American writer Joyce Carol Oates doing in this documentary: looting, detonating a bomb, strangling children, having sex, eating, eating human flesh, sleeping, kissing, cussing, masturbating, masturbating over a corpse, screaming, lobotomising a lover, shedding tears (though she comes close), or being murdered.
In case you don’t know, all these ... (read more)
Our high school art teacher would often look at a student’s work and judge it ‘interesting’. Sometimes this was a written comment, accompanied by a lacklustre mark like 14/20, which led us to suspect – perhaps rightly – that ‘interesting’ was a euphemism for ‘inept’. Now I wonder if it occasionally meant: curious, out of the ordinary, sui generis, hard to grade or categorise, or ... (read more)
Humans cannot imagine avian perspectives, Joshua Lobb admits, but his stories explore what we might learn from the attempt. Some of Lobb’s strategies are familiar from much recent fiction with ecological themes, such as the use of an educated, intellectually curious narrator-protagonist whose wide reading provides a convenient means of introducing diverse facts and anecdotes about birds into lyr ... (read more)