online New Writing from In this Issue Western Australia Tracy Ryan Literature & Ideas Fiction Chiké Frankie Edozien Poetry Timmah Ball Creative Nonfiction Holden Sheppard Omar Sakr ‘Priest of Returning to loneliness can feel like family once you’ve known it Cheesy Fries’ Omar Sakr Long enough once you’ve fought it said you hate it & come To love it Westerly acknowledges all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as First Australians, celebrating their culture, history, diversity and deep connection to the land. We celebrate the continuous living cultures of Indigenous people and their vital contributions within Australian society. Westerly’s office, at the University of Western Australia, is located on Whadjak Noongar land. We would like to recognise the Noongar people as the spiritual and cultural custodians of this land. Westerly Online Special Issue 9, New Writing from Literature & Ideas, 2020 online Western Australia and Notice of Intention Publisher the 2020 Perth Festival Westerly has converted the full backfile of Westerly Centre, The University of Western Australia, Australia Literature & Ideas Literature & Ideas Westerly (1956–) to electronic text, available General Editor to readers and researchers on the Westerly weekend Catherine Noske website, www.westerlymag.com.au. This work has been supported by a grant from Associate Editor the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Josephine Taylor Limited. Editorial Advisors All creative works, articles and reviews Paul Munden (poetry) converted to electronic format will be correctly Rachel Robertson (prose) attributed and will appear as published. Elfie Shiosaki (Indigenous writing) Copyright will remain with the authors, and the Editorial Consultants material cannot be further republished without Delys Bird (The University of Western Australia) authorial permission. Westerly will honour any Barbara Bynder requests to withdraw material from electronic Westerly Caterina Colomba (Università del Salento) publication. If any author does not wish their Tanya Dalziell (The University of Western Australia) work to appear in this format, please contact Paul Genoni (Curtin University) Westerly immediately and your material will Dennis Haskell (The University of Western Australia) be withdrawn. John Kinsella (Curtin University) Contact: [email protected] Ambelin Kwaymullina (The University of Western Australia) Guest edited by Susan Lever (Hon. Associate, The University of Sydney) John Mateer Caitlin Maling and Tracy Ryan (The University of Western Australia) Andrew Taylor (Edith Cowan University) Daniel Juckes Corey Wakeling (Kobe College, Japan) David Whish-Wilson (Curtin University) Terri-ann White (The University of Western Australia Publishing) Administrator Daniel Juckes Commissioning Editors Cassandra Atherton Lucy Dougan Web Editor Chris Arnold Production Design: Chil3 Typesetting: Lasertype Print: UniPrint, The University of Western Australia Front cover: Design: Chil3. Image: Detail from Paige Kenney, Banksia Kaarla, 8' × 6', acrylic and gouche on canvas, 2019. © Paige Kenney. Reproduced with the artist’s permission. All academic work published in Westerly is peer-reviewed. Copyright of each piece belongs to the author; copyright of the collection belongs to the Westerly Centre. Republication is permitted on request to author and editor. Westerly is published biannually with assistance from the State Government of WA by an investment in this project through the Culture and the Arts (WA) division of the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, and from the Australia Council for the Arts. The opinions expressed in Westerly are those of individual contributors and not of the Editors or Editorial Advisors. From the Editors From the Editors 7 Literature Note from Festival Zainab Zahra Syed ‘Love’ is a singularly daunting word. It’s broad and bold and complex, and, & Ideas Director 10 Theatre 39 as curator Sisonke Msimang noted in her speech to launch her Literature Timmah Ball Rafeif Ismail & Ideas programme for this year’s Perth Festival, it is a thing, a substance, Imaginary Conversations Event Horizons 42 in vast deficit within public life. So, how to right that wrong? How to build About the Past and the Ahmed Yussuf Future 13 love back into discourse? These are the unanswerable questions Sisonke ‘A History of Cutting off got us thinking about through her speech. They are questions which can Omar Sakr Its History’ 44 Priest of Cheesy Fries 17 only be approached piecemeal, cautiously, and with hope. But, with that slow Holden Sheppard and measured engagement, they become questions suggesting answers: Tracy Ryan Irreversible 51 In-Laws 18 perhaps love can creep back into prominence by talking boldly of it? By the Ashleigh Angus doing of it, unashamedly? Or by writing of it, and in the spirit of it, and in the Jay Anderson The Flat 57 championing of the connection it implies. For connection is the bedrock of A Private Sermon 20 David Stavanger Chiké Frankie Edozien We’re Going to Get the kind of reassertion Sisonke advocated—not some glib, momentary thing, Amebo 24 Nailed 66 but a proper noticing which might result in a true realignment of values. Marie O’Rourke There is plenty of love in the pages to come. And there is plenty of Of Snowballs and noticing too, along with the necessary frankness required for clearheaded Survival 30 conversation. In this sense, the works here enact that most mystic bond: between the interlocutor who dwells on the other side of page or screen, seeking something in order to grow themselves, and the writer, busy trying to make something grow. This relationship is where literature might work to shape public life, for in the intimacy it requires there is evidence of the necessity of connection—a necessity described by Sven Birkerts, in The Submissions 68 Gutenberg Elegies. He says, ‘The reader assumes the possibility of deepened Subscriptions 69 self-understanding, and therefore recognises the self as malleable. Reading is the intimate, perhaps secret, part of a larger project’ (87). The themes of this year’s Literature & Ideas weekend are Land, Money, Power and Sex. These are all, without doubt, words which imply larger projects. This special issue of Westerly gathers festival guests and local writers together, in a chorus which seeks to respond to each theme—and, in doing so, to emphasise the need for closeness and intimacy in the lives we live. 7 | Caitlin Maling and Daniel Juckes Each theme is amply represented. We were pleased by the lack of simple statement that ‘a married couple loving each other doesn’t sound squeamishness with which our writers tackled sex, and by the ways in which extraordinary’, pulls us back to the complexity of Sisonke’s primary concern. sex became a conduit for all kinds of different conversations. For instance, Finally, festival guest Ahmed Yussuf’s journalistic essay on the history of it’s hard to read a memoir piece like local festival guest Jay Anderson’s, soccer in Australia dares to question the hegemonies and power relations which ends on the line ‘I’m a dick hungry catholic, Mrs Hayes’, without structuring all the codes of football across the country. All these works are succumbing to joy. Another local writer and festival guest, Holden Sheppard, enclosed by a cover which features a painting by talented local artist and delivers an equally captivating coming-out short story, which questions how poet Paige Kenney, for whom ‘land’, and Country, are primary concerns. different masculinities offer and withhold power. The aims of this special issue of Westerly are twofold. The first is to Anderson’s piece also introduces questions regarding power and the archive something of the essence of the Literature & Ideas weekend. The Church, a subject local poet Tracy Ryan tackles, with her signature wit and second is to showcase some of the best of Western Australia’s established lyrical dexterity, in ‘In-Laws’. Ryan takes us outside Perth and Western and emerging writers. We hope that we have accomplished both. One more Australia, in keeping with Artistic Director Ian Grandage’s vision for the thing we hoped to capture within this volume is the undiluted generosity festival, to show Perth as an outward-looking city. This vision, we feel, is with which the festival—and the Literature & Ideas weekend—has been present in our selection, particularly on the theme of ‘land’. Festival poets curated. Sisonke and Anna Kosky have been inspirational guides and we Zainab Syed and Rafeif Ismail (now both living in Western Australia), offer are grateful to them—as we are to the team at Westerly: Catherine Noske, compelling poems of warfare, Syed’s moving from the Afghanistan front Josephine Taylor and Chris Arnold. We received spadefuls of generosity, too, to the home of a departed American soldier, while Ismail’s keeps us in the from the authors here represented, and we know that the spirit of sharing bodies of those displaced by conflict, never reaching, as she puts it, the can be sensed in their work. Yes, there are some difficult subjects on show ‘event horizon’. in the following pages; but the bringing together of words from, and about, Conflict, power and land register in different tones in festival writer David difficulty is part of the hope inherent in the endeavour of art. What’s more, Stavanger’s very contemporary bushfire poem, ‘We’re Going to Get Nailed’, you cannot love those you are not honest with. Writing—and publishing that where he asks ‘Have you ever seen a footpath on fire? / No, because there’s writing—is a bizarre type of intimacy. Nowhere is this more apparent than nothing to burn’. Local writer Ashleigh Angus reveals a similar horror in the at writers’ festivals, which bring together the worlds of writer, reader and shifting scales of power—this time those inherent to apartment living—in writing. The themes of this year’s Literature & Ideas weekend, though big her deliciously creepy short story, ‘The Flat’. and bold—like love itself—can all be looked at as intimate concerns when Festival poet Omar Sakr’s poem ‘Priest of Cheesy Fries’ keeps us in the the line between page and eye is drawn.