The first cover of Meanjin

By Sophie Cunningham

It’s a year for significant birthdays for literary journals at the moment. On Saturday night Overland launched its 200th issue, with the help of a couple of hundred people and quite a lot of alcohol. In December Meanjin turns seventy, and also plan to celebrate the time honoured fashion of drinking – as well as hosting a lecture, to be given by former editor Jim Davidson, at the University of Melbourne, on November 23rd.

Here’s a potted history. Meanjin was founded in Brisbane by Clem Christesen in 1940. It moved to Melbourne in 1945. Since Christesen left the journal in 1974 there have been seven editors: Jim Davidson, Judith Brett, Jenny Lee, Christina Thompson, Stephanie Holt, Ian Britain and me. Clem Christesen’s enduring mission was to define what it meant to be Australian and an essay published in Meanjin in 1950,‘The Cultural Cringe’, still impacts on conversations today. As Australia’s second oldest journal (curse you, Southerly), Meanjin has, over the years, helped our nation develop a cultural identity, critiqued that identity, and, more recently, saw globalisation threaten Australia’s newfound sense of self.

A list of the contributors to Meanjin over the years is like a roll call of Australian literature – here are some of the names we plane to republish in the December issue: Vance Palmer, Geoffrey Searle, Gerald Murnane, A A Phillips, Helen Garner, M.J. Hyland, Christos Tsiolkas, Brian Matthews, Catherine Duncan, Elizabeth Jolley, Loene Carmen, Wendy Harmer, Michael Kirby, Graham Little, Fiona McGregor, Meaghan Morris, Gillian Whitlock,Tony Birch, Hilary McPhee, Marcus Westbury, Jane Gleeson-White, Elizabeth Smithers, Lily Brett, McKenzie Wark, Judith Beveridge ,Tim Richards, Beverly Farmer, Alex Miller, Tim Winton, Peter Carey Chris Wallace-Crabbe, A.D. Hope, James McAuley, Dorothy Porter, John Tranter, Lisa Bellear, John Forbes and Antigone Kefala.

Meanjin once had – and, has again, thanks to Stuart Geddes - a strong visual presence and engagement with visual arts. Illustrators and designers over the years have includes Mirka Mora, Louis Kahan, Noel Counihan, Sidney Nolan, Josef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotowski, Juan Davila, Oslo Davis, Josef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotowski, W H Chong, Mandy Ord, Phillip Campbell and Mary Callahan . The current look of the journal is very much intended to pay respect to its history, while being extremely contemporary.

In a tribute to Clem Christesen published in Meanjin in 2004 John Mclaren, a former editor of Overland wrote: ‘If we consider the way successive editors have remade Meanjin we can see how each has contributed a distinctive quality to it. Yet no editor is completely free. Meanjin’s founding editor had to find or make a place for the new journal, and the succeeding editors have had to start from the place they inherited. Their task has been to reimagine that place for new times . . .’ My job, as Meanjin’s current editor – with help from my Deputy Editor Jessica Au – is to effectively reimagine what Meanjin will be in an increasingly digital age .

Over the next three years we will produce content across the widest range of platforms in our seventy-year history. We’ve launched the digitisation of our rich 69-year back-issue content via Informit, and hope to make it available to the public; we’ll be launching a flexible range of online subscriptions and purchases (for example subscriptions to the print journal, purchasing of digital content—both previous and current); our blog Spike will expand to include reviews of books, films, theatre, music, exhibitions and other media. Meanjin has changed a lot over the years, and there have been significant cultural challenges to the environment the literary journal operates in: but our hope is that no matter what form you read it in, Meanjin continues to feel as fresh, as tremulous and experimental as it did when it was a small pamphlet produced in Brisbane in 1940 by four unknown poets.

(Read Jeff Sparrow on Overland’s birthday)

The Fez

In the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight, my mistake was assuming I had any idea what attending a convention would entail.

Arriving bright and early on the first day, I soon found myself bowed down beneath the weight of not one, but two extra bags – one obtained during registration, the other acquired from the Orbit booth – which made me glad I didn’t also have the laptop to contend with. Trekking throughout the labyrinthine Convention Centre, other Worldcon attendees were easy to spot, thanks not only to our distinctive red lanyards and identical convention bags, but also – frequently – our clothes. Though there were plenty of everyday outfits in evidence, coloured hair, geeky t-shirts, steampunk costumes, corsetry and fantasy/SF paraphernalia abounded. The first day, I myself was sporting a fez, which prompted at least twenty strangers to approach me and declare, in their best Matt-Smith-as-Doctor-Who impersonation, “Fezzes are cool.” (Which, in case you were wondering, they are.)

Despite the fact that Thursday was the lone free day on my program, I only ended up attending one panel that afternoon: Steal the Past, Build the Future, wherein Cat Valente, Jonathan Walker, Amanda Pillar and Kate Elliott discussed the tendency of most fantasy authors to borrow from a particular set of historical periods when building their own imagined worlds, rather than from the full gamut, and the reasons why this might be so. The stereotype of epic fantasy is heavily rooted in a romanticised version of medieval Europe, while the traditional black-and-white morality of Good vs. Evil recalls our cultural recollection of WWII. The mythology of Greece and Rome is often utilised, too, not only for its bearing on our own distant – but none the less Western – origins, but also for the sake of familiarity, the average Australian, UK and American reader being much more likely to comprehend a reference to Zeus or Aphrodite than Quetzalcoatl or Astarte. All these factors combine to create a sense of historical “authority” – a desire to return, over and over, to the periods which resonate most with our own cultural upbringing, creating a sense of narrative depth through a form of borrowed, historically relevant shorthand, but at the expense of wider understanding.

Throughout the entirety of the con, the atmosphere was one of excited congeniality. Costumed strangers were happy to pose for photos; friendships that would have taken weeks or months to flourish under other circumstances were struck up in minutes or hours. Neither was there any sense of elitism or hierarchy. Though more than one person I spoke to confessed to being too nervous to approach a favourite writer, famous names from the local to the international mingled freely with their fans, so that squinting at nametags and shaking hands was sometimes the only way to realise that the person to whom you’d been speaking so amicably for the past fifteen minutes was John Scalzi or Garth Nix.

If there’s one charge that’s most commonly levelled against fantastic narrative, it’s that the presence of magic or improbable technology negates the potential for such stories to deal with real human problems. But if the program at Worldcon was anything to go by, then not only is that assertion mooted by the existence of good fantasy writing, but also in terms of the expectations and motives of its readership. Panels such as The Plight of the Female Superhero, Race in Hollywood Cinema, Motherhood in SF and Fantasy, Queer Representations in Spec Fic and Averting Climate Change with Geoengineering were at least as well attended as their geekier equivalents, with audience questions suggesting a strong passion for equality and diversity among SF/fantasy fans.

Insofar as my ambitions for constant reportage went, it seems to me that conventions are less about attendance and more about community. One thing that surprised me was the number of children and young adults involved in writing and fantasy workshops, not only as a result of the passions of their parents, but due to their own interest. Under tens wielding cardboard lightsabres and talking volubly of their passion for Doctor Who were a constant theme, as were dreadlocked, rainbow-haired mothers and fathers carrying smaller children across their chests. Here is another debunking of the SF/fantasy community: though once seen as the sole province of disaffected youth and misfit adulthood, it is now as much a family institution as anything else, with parents passing on their tastes and beliefs to eager, receptive children. The older generations, too, are healthily represented, as can be attested to by the First Fandom Hall of Fame nominations and Big Heart Award presented annually as the Hugo Awards ceremony – honours dedicated to the recognition of fans who have been making contributions to the SF/fantasy community since even before the Hugos were a reality.

And what of the books? Though the excitement of the con left little time for reading, many new volumes were launched throughout, including local author Deborah Kalin’s second novel, Shadow Bound, the sequel to Shadow Queen. Booksellers in the Dealer’s Room did what appeared to be a roaring trade, helped in part by the daily scheduled signings of authors both fledgling and renowned. At least one eager fan that I saw brought along the entire works of Kate Elliott in a wheeled suitcase, to which the author herself cheerfully set pen. The Hugo Awards themselves were well attended, amusingly described by one Melbourne editor as “the least painful awards ceremony” she had ever attended – a comment meant entirely as praise. Seanan McGuire was a gracious recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, while indie SF film Moon was a pleasant surprise as winner of the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, beating out such big budget contenders as Avatar, District 9 and Up. There was a very sweet moment when Will McIntosh, winner of the Best Short Story award for Bridesicle, got up on stage in jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt to sheepishly confess that not only had he been so certain of failure as to not prepare an acceptance speech, but had bet a friend in his running group twenty dollars that he wouldn’t win – and then jokingly thanked the audience for costing him the money. The big surprise at the end of the night, however, was the tie award for Best Novel, which ended up going both to China Mieville for The City and The City and to Paolo Bacigalupi for The Windup Girl. Though neither book is one I’ve yet read, I’m midway through several of Mieville’s other novels, and can vouch for the excellence of his writing. If Bacigalupi has been deemed a worthy contemporary by more knowledgeable members of the community than me, then both are novels well worth reading.

It’s taken me an extra, unplanned day off work to fully recover from Worldcon, and though I feel guilty for the inconvenience to my employers, I can’t say it wasn’t necessary. The voice I lost for a week in late August is crackly again, and more than one attendee has walked away with a cold or illness brought about by exhaustion. But for me, every late night and subsequent moment of exhausted wall-hitting has been worth it a hundred times over. I have discovered new writers, made friends, acquitted myself on a myriad of fascinating panels and spoken with more of my heroes than I ever dared hope. Despite having been a published author for six months now, I can honestly say that until last Thursday, I didn’t fully comprehend the extent of the SF/fantasy community – or, perhaps more pertinently, feel as though I was a legitimate part of it. No matter how many conventions I attend in the future, Aussiecon 4 will remain my first, most formative and, I suspect, dearest adventure into the land of fandom: a truly enjoyable foray into ever-more fabulous worlds.

Meg Rosoff was a guest of this conference. This is her debut YA novel.

Over the past weekend, academics gathered in Cambridge to discuss the neurological effects of current popular young-adult literature on adolescent minds. The Emergent Adult – Adolescent Literature and Culture saw participants coming from as far afield as Malaysia, Finland, Slovenia and South Africa, as well as from all over the United Kingdom to speak on a variety of subjects ranging from representations of gay and lesbian characters in YA fiction to portrayals of footbinding children’s literature.

It was an interdisciplinary conference, with speakers coming from neuroscience, sociological, education, and literary theory and criticism backgrounds. The keynote speakers were linguistic anthropologist Professor Shirley Brice Heath, from Brown University in the United States and British young-adult author Meg Rosoff.

Some of the papers focused on recent trends in young-adult literature, such as Stephenie Meyer’s immensely popular Twilight series (‘What is it about good girls and vampires’ by Anna Birketveit of University College Bergen, in Norway, ‘‘Vampire Craze’: Beyond the confines of the textual saga’ by Ghada Al-Yaqout of the University of Cambridge) and dystopian fiction such as Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy. Conference organiser Professor Maria Nikolajeva argued that the rise in post-apocalyptic fiction for young adults is connected to events such as the September 11th attacks in the US.

‘Now, the situation in the world makes us anxious. We’ve had things like 9/11 and global warming. There is fear and disaster. Since the turn of the millennium this has been a tangible trend which is interesting – and disturbing,’ she said.

It was pleasing to see that the role of new media in shaping and transforming the ways teenagers (and others) read and engage with texts was also addressed at the conference. Several papers focused on the ways authors used the internet as a way to interact with readers and other writers, while one looked at video games as literary texts.

The conference was the first of its kind in Cambridge and was held at The Cambridge/Homerton Research and Teaching Centre for Children’s Literature.

The group discussed their aversion to planning narratives. Opting for a more “organic” approach, they all agreed that they were constantly rewriting to incorporate new ideas to the original narrative. James described the experience as exciting, explaining that during the writing of her novel, Beautiful Malice, she discovered the plot as she wrote it. But don’t think that this lack of planning invokes a painless and easy writing experience, it seems it was far from it.

As they talked it became clear that this group of authors were not going to wax lyrical on the joy of effortless creation. There was no mincing words for James who said when she’s writing, she often would rather be cleaning the toilet. The audience laughed but she remained unfazed. The other writers agreed as well, that while they enjoyed being writers, the literal writing, can be quite a torturous experience. A rather refreshing discussion for a festival that celebrates writers and writing. Toltz explained that his process involved “writing on the move”, unable to write in one place for more than two hours, he spends the day moving from café to library to park. Both he and Loukakis wrote long hand, only to transcribe it to computer later. However, there was no suggestion that each writer did not enjoy their craft. James admitted that writing is ultimately more satisfying than scrubbing with the toilet brush and “no-one says you’re clever for cleaning a toilet”.

The session ended with a question from the audience about the authors reading habits. Toltz explained that he tried to avoid “bad writing” while he was in the middle of a book. All the authors talked about the important role reading had played in finding their own voice and narrative styles. Loukakis discussed the role books play in the shaping of a writer, citing authors’ authors such as James Joyce as invaluable to development of writing. Toltz recalled the great Saul Bellows quote, “writers are just readers moved to emulation”. And as I finish my blogging for the MWF, it seems that that quote is an appropriate note to end on.

Van Niekerk started the session by stressing some positives for mainstream media going digital, citing the capability of consumers to interact with their news source, the ability to deliver breaking news and new media opportunities for the papers to present data through videos.

The interactivity of digital media for the reader was seen as a major value-add for the new technology. Van Niekerk explained that due to monitoring tools they have on the pages, Fairfax is able to garner what consumers want to read. To a point.

The fear that this sort of “traffic chasing” will result in news organisations catering to the lighter stories, hence the popularity of celebrity gossip, while neglecting apparently ‘serious’ journalism. But interestingly, Van Niekerk said it is still the well-written text stories that are the most viewed consistently.

There was much discussion about the way social media can be utilised by mainstream media to disseminate and find stories. Schaffer related a story of a recent case of a small news website gaining maximum attention by deploring their friends to spread the word via social networking sites. Van Niekek discussed a tool that is being developed by Fairfax that gives its journalists quick alerts about topics ‘trending’ on social media sites.
So where does this leave the blur between consumers and producers? Are citizens merely informing the news, or creating it?

It is undeniable that the rise of digital media has seen the decline in paid journalists. Schaffer claims that over the past few years an approximated 40,000 journalists have lost their job in USA alone. In Australia, there has been a comparable impact. Margaret Simons quizzed Van Niekerk on a new round of redundancies that she had heard were about to hit The Age. Van Niekerk denied this and suggested that there would be recruitment of journalists for media to be produced for smart phones in the future. Simons queried whether these new jobs would entail journalists creating new content, or simply editing wire copy for the smartphone format. Van Niekerk conceded that these employees would primarily be involved in technical reformatting.

So what are some other implications of widespread journalist redundancies? Jan describes the effect of the downturn experienced in the USA to be of a “hollowing out” of coverage. World news has become sparse, sports coverage is now more fleshed-out and reportage is done by fewer people over less time, she said. Many members of the audience, and Simons, agreed that journalists are ‘time poor’ in a world where they are forced to file across several media. With the increasing rate of freelance journalists due to lay offs, and the decreasing pay rates for these freelance journalists, surely the quality of reportage is suffering, they argued.

So is the consumer really the winner with free online content? Or are we just paying nothing for a product of little value?

Sophie Cunningham started off the afternoon with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 classic, A Room of One’s Own. Cunningham began by reading from the text, highlighting the unique writing style that Woolf used; the form itself as important as the ideological content, both laden with meaning. It is a rare treat to have Virginia Woolf read to you on a Friday afternoon, and one that must be savoured when presented.

Cunningham described the extended essay as “painfully relevant” to contemporary society, explaining that despite the advances in the rights and opportunities of women today to those of 1929, women are still at a disadvantage within both creative fields and larger society. She highlights the parallels of Woolf’s despair at the lack of realistic and substantial representation of women in literature to that in modern films using the brilliant Bechdel test (a basic litmus test that serves to judge the presense of women in a movie.) This lack, Woolf opines leads to impoverishing effects on womens imagination of self.

The relevance of Woolf’s thesis within contemporary society is deftly explored by Rachel Cusk in her article in The Guardian, “Shakespeare’s daughter”. Jo Case, the host of the session, explained that Cusk was originally going to be part of today’s panel. Throughout the session both Case and Cunningham reference the article and upon reading

it, I can understand why. Do yourself a favour and check it out.

Monica Dux was next up with a feminist text that has got much media attention this year, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. As Dux explained, the text is now so synonymous with feminism that it has the dubious honour of being a book that is often debated about by people who haven’t read it. Dux suggests that it is Greer’s uncompromising and provocative voice that makes the text so alluring. The Female Eunuch is, among other things, funny.

It is the aftermath of the now infamous Louis Nowra article on Greer, that Dux suggests illuminates the continued relevance of both the woman and her writing. Nowra’s

attack on Greer, published by The Monthly in March earlier this year, which, among other things, attacked her physical appearance, elicited an outpouring of outrage from female commentators from a range of platforms. Rather than destabilise its relevance, Dux notes that Nowra merely highlighted the iconic role the text plays within the collective psyche of Australian society.

Emily Maguire was the final speaker of the afternoon, discussing Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. With wit and honesty, Maguire described the experience of reading the text as a self-loathing teenager, as like “a slap in the face”. Realistically, she explained that while the text did not change her life, it did make her understand it a bit more. And surely, that is all we can ask from any book.

Maguire contended, (like the writers before her had), that the book was still relevant to today’s society. Albeit with some cultural references and statistics updated, the text itself still rings true. In fact, predictions within the book for the progression of the “beauty myth” in the future — the marketing of beauty products to men and boys, and to increasingly younger girls — have indeed seen fruition since it was published in 1991.

The wealth of discussions that came from the floor during the open Q and A, made it clear that the issue of feminism in contemporary society was a popular topic. In fact, due to audience demand, the session was moved from one of the smaller venues to the BMW Edge. A query from one audience member regarding raunch culture was met by a rather overwhelmed Maguire, exclaiming, “Have you got an extra hour?” It surprised me that there was no session within the festival discussing raunch culture. Although it’s been five years since Ariel Levy catapulted raunch culture into the headlines with Female Chauvinist Pigs, the subject has recently been reinvigorated and reimagined with Maguire’s excellent Your Skirt is Too Short and Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls being published this year.

This session has been the highlight of the festival so far for me. Despite such a large chunk of the discussion centring around obstacles women face, as writers, and of course as people, it was hard not to feel the power of the hope and enthusiasm that these iconic texts elicited. The way the writers discussed their texts, in particular, Cunningham’s unbridled admiration for Woolf made me want to dig out my old copy of A Room of One’s Own. I left the theatre feeling excited about the very existence of writing, reading and human beings. And really, what more could you want from a writers festival?

Overland magazine cover, 24 issues ago

On Saturday, Overland launches its two hundred edition. That’s more than fifty years of continuous publication, amounting to (according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations) some 14000000 words of poetry, prose and essays.

So after all that, what’s the state of the literary journal today? How have things changed since Stephen Murray-Smith brought out the first Overland in 1954? The other day, I talked briefly with Rodney Hall, the two-time Miles Franklin winning novelist who is launching Overland 200 at the Melbourne Writers Festival. It was difficult, he said, for writers today to appreciate how much Overland meant to writers in the fifties. Australian literature at that time depended on the whims of two publishing houses. With such limited options for writers, editors wielded extraordinary power. If, for instance, you were a novelist sympathetic to radical ideas, you could kiss publication goodbye, no matter how exquisite your prose.

In that context, Overland, represented a lifeline, an opportunity for writers outside the polite consensus to publish but, perhaps more importantly, to make contact with like-minded thinkers and to develop an alternative community of words and ideas. How does the situation compare today?

In some respects, the world’s totally changed. The only government body that recognised Overland in 1954 was ASIO, which immediately opened a file on the journal. Today, however, there’s a range of institutions and agencies dedicated to supporting emerging writers, from the Australia Council for the Arts to the various state based Writers’ Centres. As for Australian publishing, it’s grown into a substantial industry, connected to a reasonably healthy local bookselling sector and a flourishing array of writers’ festivals. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen the emergence of creative writing in the university sector – now, if you’ve a hankering to write, there’s any number of institutions in which you can enrol.

And, then, of course, there’s the internet and the manifold possibilities it offers for publication and promotion.

Yet, despite all that, much of what Rodney said seemed familiar.

Yes, there are more opportunities for publication today, but the Australian public sphere is still remarkably homogenous. You can hear more voices but most of them seem to be saying the same thing. The recent election provided a striking demonstration of the paucity of political ideas on offer, in a contest so uninspiring that a record number of voters simply spoiled their ballots.

In literature, it’s the same. How often do you attend a writers’ festival and come away thinking that you’ve been exposed to a real clash of aesthetic theories, of differing models of what the novel could or should be? Creative writing classes are expanding almost exponentially but they sometimes seem like writing factories, in which you pay your fees in return for a chance at self-expression.

In 2010, just as in 1954, many writers – especially those committed to radical politics – still feel isolated, and the role of a journal in fostering a community remains just as important.

The real change is that these days that community can manifest in many different ways. Overland is, fundamentally, a print journal, for the printed page is still the format in which most readers prefer to absorb stories and long essays. But Overland is a web-site, too, a lively group blog dedicated to debating politics and culture. It’s also a series of events, whether panels or presentations at writers’ festivals or elsewhere, or the ongoing Meanland collaboration with Meanjin examining the changing nature of publishing.

In other words, a literary journal today is a project as much as a magazine.

But what the different Overland formats share is a commitment to high-quality writing and alternative politics. And, in that sense, the community celebrating Overland 200 in 2010 remains recognisably similar to the community that welcomed Overland 1 in 1954.

Yesterday’s highlight questions included:

“Were you in the army?”

“Uh, no.”

“Navy?”

And this gem:

“Michael, why does Jack keep interrupting you?”

At this point, I’ve stolen so many little soaps and shampoo bottles that they won’t fit in my toiletry bag any more. It’s only a matter of time before one bursts and soaks my clothes. Said clothes currently smell like citrus, because I tried to buy a lemon in an op shop and the owner insisted I take three. I was going to make hot lemon tea, but none of the hotels has had a knife to cut them with, so now they’re just rolling around the bottom of my suitcase looking silly.

Ramona Koval and Kim Stanley Robinson

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was on the Book Show today with Ramona. Listen here.

Book Show Blogger wrote this about his session at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

He is here for Aussiecon 4 World Science Fiction Convention.

Yesterday Penni talked about the dark side of the imagination, what if the what ifs become a downwards spiral? Michael talked about magical thinking and neuroplasticity. How do our imaginations exist, how can we grow them and are they changing all the time? I cannot remember what I talked about.

The zine workshop was, as ever, fun and full of sparks and revelations. One boy’s reductive poem (using Thomas Wolfe) began with the line, ‘These are the evil days’ . Another boy made a comic zine – in eight pages he told a complete story of the boy-goes-into-the-world-returns-home-with-the-treasure variety. It was perfect. This time the hour felt like two minutes.

Luke’s genius taxi driver suggested we visit the Blowhole at Discovery Bay. There’s a huge windfarm there and the landscape is surreal and magical and spooky. I wanted to make a film of Jack’s sci-fi boots stomping over the pocks and craters. (Jack’s boots are legend and almost deserve their own tour.) Three weeks ago I was in Somerset walking the Quantock Hills where Coleridge walked, where he woke up after an opium binge and wrote Kubla Khan and I wonder what he would have written had he woken up at Discovery Bay. Later I went to the pit toilet – and even though I knew I shouldn’t, I looked.