HEAT Series 3 Number 22

HEAT 22 explores ideas of home. Oliver Driscoll’s stories follow two pairs of friends as their bonds strengthen and weaken over the years, finding by turns recognition and estrangement in each other, and in each other’s families. George Mouratidis’s three poems evoke the nostalgia and frolic of childhood backyard games with neighbours, and then the search for community in the activist circles of Melbourne in the eighties. Eila Vinwynn’s essay ‘The Kids’ recalls, through vivid and opaque memories, the early ‘homes’ inhabited by her and her siblings, and passes back and forth between the times her single mother was able to keep them and the times they were obliged to stay at the notorious Fairbridge orphanage. Ceridwen Dovey investigates the tales behind the naming of thousands of new planets being discovered – planets so remote we will never visit them, but which we draw closer to us through the names that include them in our lore and stories. Elvira Navarro’s story ‘The Washing Machine’ sees a couple finding themselves increasingly vilified amongst their tenement neighbours when their washing machine inexplicably starts gushing blood with every cycle. Adam Aitken’s atmospheric sequence of prose poems ‘After Verlaine’ traces the forlorn experience of searching for home in a far-off place. And Lucy Van’s sprawling, proliferating, playful essay on housing auctions in Australia, ‘Gain Management System’, develops the thesis that the auction is Australia’s national poetry.

Contents

Oliver Driscoll  Two More Simple Stories About Friendship  fiction
George Mouratidis  Three Poems  poetry
Eila Vinwynn  The Kids  non-fiction
Ceridwen Dovey  Earth and the Exoplanets  non-fiction
Elvira Navarro (trans by Christina MacSweeney)  The Washing Machine  fiction
Adam Aitken  Four Poems  poetry
Lucy Van  Gain Management System  non-fiction

Frontispiece by Maria Kontis