"i prefer stories about squalor"

THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun - or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left - the wet - hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and - it was the fifth or sixth ring - picked up the phone.

~A Perfect Day for Bananafish, JD Salinger

At the risk of being a total cliché hipster doofus*, I hereby proclaim my love and awe and adoration for the short stories of Mr Salinger. He can create atmosphere and character like nobody's business, like in the piece above. He can write dialogue that leaps sprightly from the page, at once being mere banter while also ringing with subtext.


Salinger often wrote about young people, about teenagers and innocence and experience. His story For Esmé - With Love and Squalor breaks my heart every time. Like Sybil in Bananafish Esmé and her small brother Charles** are beautiful foils to the damaged adult to whom they speak and with whom they interact. Perhaps they can't save them, but sometimes they can.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac - with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

I think I prefer his short stories to The Catcher in the Rye (eek! the Catcher cult will be after me!), possibly because there are more of them, and I adore the Glass family. Also because, taken as a whole, they give the reader such a fascinating peek at America in the 50s and the middle and upper classes as they existed post-war. He can make you laugh and break your heart all in the space of twelve or so pages. How's that for inspiration? And emotional squalor.


*See the film (500) Days of Summer - "just because someone likes the same bizarro crap you do doesn't mean you're soulmates." (This line even delivered by the film's own version of Holden Caulfield's kid sister Phoebe)
**The evil sister and I often recite to one another, with great amusement: HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHALES.

review : yellowcake

yellowcake, margo lanagan (allen & unwin)

forgive me.

i read this a long time ago and meant to write about it straight away, but the stories cased within this beautiful cover are not simple tales to read and flippantly comment on. they are convoluted and mysterious, beautiful and twistedly grotesque.

heads remains looming in my mind, the story in which a golden haired boy portrays innocence and busyness and a sense of purpose in a horrible world where something awful has happened and he's not sure why.

also ferryman, which broke my heart with its light and loving banter between father and daughter ("scowling sarah") combined with the grief and "the ragged crying all around us in the hole, that is me; these two are silent in their cleaving. i lean and howl against them and at last they take me in, lock me in with them."

a honest day's work is truly a stand-out as well, in which a townful of labourers working to butcher and make use of a beast washed up in their harbour, as told from the perspective of a young boy with a crippled foot participating in his first day of work. watching for the 'sizable' 'incoming' and the careful work they do, slicing here and oh watch out, a nerve has made the arm jolt. no - the beast awakens. when it stands, tries to put its skull back on - at once revolting and most certainly fascinating. and the guilt and the shame is evident, at the way they carry out their work, hardly considering the life form that once was. "it could be mistaken for a person, this one." fracks. i have shivers, and a sinking feeling in my stomach, even now.

and if i may borrow from my friend clare, whose review in bookseller+publisher was just...just so.

she wrote: each piece in this collection is truly elegant, and each possesses a haunting, often unnerving quality that leaves the innards of the story lingering long after the last page is turned...lanagan's masterful use of language continues to astonish, with turns of phrase so perfect that you want to roll them around in your mouth until all the goodness is sucked from them and her ability to create powerful stories that demand serious contemplation is unrivalled. the often dark subject matter varies greatly, as each story is wildly different, but the skill with which it is handled is never compromised. yellowcake should eked out over time, each story to be savoured.

what is truly impressive - and is evident in all of margo's work - is the way she can create a world, a community in her stories, no matter how short. she breathes life into her characters and her settings, using language in such a wonderful and inventive way. she explores the physical in a way not many writers do and every story will just blow you away. mindfuck, yes. comfortable, not always.

inspiring and overwhelming? yes, always.


read this review by raych of books i done read.

go and read margo's other books: white time, black juice, red spikes, tender morsels and the upcoming "selkie novel" now officially named sea hearts.
you can also read her blog: among amid while.
many thanks to margo for sending me a copy.

vis ink...in stores now

it was quite remarkable to see this:

turn into this:


visible ink is a student-run literary anthology out of the RMIT professional writing and editing diploma. last year we received around 200 submissions for this edition. i wish i had a picture of the piles of submissions to show you, very unruly and wonderful. out of that 200 we had to select a tiny sample for the journal (there were only a few heated discussions). and with such a diverse bunch of editors and readers on the selection committee, we ended up with such a delightful mishmash of pieces: 16 stories. 11 poems. 12 images.

the editing process was probably my favourite part of being on the visible ink team. emailing and talking to the authors about their words and stories - perhaps seeing a little something that they could no longer see, knowing their piece as well as they did. learning a little something about inDesign (being thrown in the deep end a little) was horrible and fantastic at the same time. i felt just a touch proud of me when it was all over. i hope all 'our' authors are happy with the finished product - we are so grateful for their talent.

here's the first piece in the anthology (one of my absolute faves):


The Sniper on the State Library Dome
by Michael Crane

The man with madness
in his eye looked down
and aimed his high-powered rifle
at the many people on the street
below and fired and yelled
‘This is because I read Jewel's
a night without armour and she
did not love me.' He put another
bullet in the chamber and fired and said,
'I read Bukowski and I'm tougher
than him.' He moved his position
to the left of the dome, reloaded
and fired and hit a woman
on her way to work at the library
and he said, ‘This is for the Great Gatsby
because I loved Daisy.' He fired a few
more shots and hit a man reading Playboy
in a newsagency. He decided his killing spree
was too slow so he took out a submachine gun
and fired at the pedestrians on the street.
‘This is because of Hemingway,' he said,
'for running with the bulls and this one
is for James Joyce writing books
I could not understand and this
Is because Gertrude Stein was too fat
and this is because Truman Capote
was gay and take that Homer, Shakespeare
and Chaucer for rhyming with obscure words.'
He ran out of bullets and took out knives
and stared to hurl them down
as the policemen snuck up behind him
and wrestled him down to the ground
and a few weeks after his trial
he was led to the execution chamber
and the priest took out the Bible
and the man said, ‘Not another book!’
And he screamed all the way down
to the electric chair until the very end.

you can buy visible ink at readings bookstores, the sun bookshop in yarraville and by snail mail (contact the committee via the website). if you are of a writerly persuasion, submissions will surely open soon for this year's vis ink. keep your pens poised and your eyes peeled.

let me tell you a little tale...

i love short stories.

i haven't always, but i do at the moment. every week i receive one or more photocopied short stories by some writer or other from some time throughout history and then i spend four hours with some lovely people talking about it, and then also sharing our own work with one another. so far we've read guy de maupassant, jd salinger (oh em gee i am in love with for esme, with love and squalor - it shall have its own blog post soon), raymond carver, isabel allende, colette, janette turner hospital, anglea carter, marguerite duras, the indomitable agatha christie (we read POIROT, yes, poirot, he talks about poirot in the third person, aha), anton chekov and edgar allan poe. to name a few.

i love short stories for their brevity and sparseness (though not always sparse, but certainly brief by nature) and how complete they feel within only ten pages or so. fewer, sometimes.

i love kelly link's the wrong grave (especially for 'magic for beginners' and also the titular story) and i am traumatised and completely seduced by margo lanagan's heartbreaking story 'singing my sister down' from the collection black juice. these are scary, magical, beautiful stories.


another great collection, which is just out this week, is wordlines: contemporary australian writing (five mile press) compiled and edited by the brilliant hilary mcphee - author, editor, publisher. (and i helped). there is a slew of top-knotch australian writers represented here but if i had to pick out two to mention they would be abigail ulman for her story 'chagall's wife' which was an electric tale about a young girl and her relationship with an older teacher. it made me feel like they were moving through treacle, slow and kind of sexy. (but also awkward and funny) the other would be the extract from sophie cunningham's not-yet-finished novel about virginia woolf and her husband - the extract here entitled 'pearl' which celebrates the grit of love in a rotting relationship affected by sickness.