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Maria Takolander
Maria Takolander is a Finnish-Australian writer, reviewer, interviewer, and independent scholar. She is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which, Trigger Warning (UQP 2021), won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Maria was also the inaugural winner of the Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Competition and is the author of The Double (and Other Stories) (Text, 2013), which was shortlisted for a Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her website is mariatakolander.com. (photo credit: David McCooey)
Trauma is often said to be unspeakable. There are various reasons for this. Pain and shame are silencing, as are implicit forms of censorship (of the kind scorning trauma literature, for instance) and explicit injunctions against speaking (from perpetrators, enablers, or the law). But it is also the case that trauma doesn’t inhere in language. Trauma lives in the limbic system, which is that of ... (read more)
In an essay for Australian Literary Studies (ALS) exploring the modernist networks of Judith Wright and Frank Scott, Anouk Lang argues that ‘participation in modernist little magazines … was crucial to their development as writers. Publication in these journals validated their tentative efforts and imbued them with confidence to move on to further ventures.’ It is a terrific recommendation f ... (read more)
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Umberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘m ... (read more)
A number of books have been published of late that theorise the function of literature in contemporary society (a trend indicative of an anxiety about literature in public culture, which is itself worth speculating on). In Why We Read Fiction: Theory of the Mind and the Novel (2006), Lisa Zunshine argues that reading provides us with cognitive practice for our lives as social beings, in which we a ... (read more)
I was given to this body as haphazardlyAs the monster of Frankenstein.
Lightning is a man’s metaphor,But like fire it provides
A force alien to question.Perhaps I am only this, this flesh,
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Hold the hearts close to your heart:they’ll feed each other blooms of colour
and the nudity of shapesuntil you are bursting
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Creativity is always an exercise in recycling. Vision comes from revision. In the ancient world, such wisdom was institutionalised; the task of the poet was to powerfully exploit a cultural storehouse of existing plots. Thus the early Greek playwrights reworked the same complex of myths. However, stories are inexhaustible, something that Scheherazade, in another ancient text, teaches us. Certainly ... (read more)
What makes a story compelling? When I was an undergraduate student at Deakin University, I was fortunate enough to be instructed in fiction writing by Gerald Murnane. His key criterion for the worth of a story was its capacity to mark his memory with an enduring image. Over time he used to cull books from his shelves that failed to impress him in this way.
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