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HEAT Series 3 Number 26
HEAT 26 is about formation – how our youthful experiences and settings reach through into our later lives and are, or are not, the making of us.
In her essay ‘No Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man’, Evelyn Juers plunges into the past to find the weather, nature, colours and historical events that surrounded Australian modernist painter Ralph Balson’s Dorset childhood. In ‘Liquid Amber’, Luke Beesley allows his mind to drift through present and past as he completes a residency at the Abbotsford Convent – seeing the historical traces of the women who lived there, as he also remembers his own early experiences with his mother. Jing Cramb’s story ‘Weimin’ looks fearlessly at the painful dynamics between a migrant woman and her ageing father who has followed her out to her new life. Luoyang Chen writes in his poems, ‘my agony is not / extra / -ordinary / but a sea / of green and blue fire / -flies that exist only / in childhood memories’.
Emma Sorensen’s essay recalls an extensive interview she did at a young age with writer Gillian Mears, and how that early conversation has echoed through her life as she makes her own way with writing. In their series of poems translated from Kven and Norwegian (by Eirill Alvilde Falck), M. Seppola Simonsen captures the cold magic of the endangered language they learnt in childhood. In her story ‘This is Our School’, Lucy Lehmann follows a mother sitting in on her anxious daughter’s primary school class and observing the many unique personalities taking shape in those hours. And Gabriel Curtin’s poem ‘Snails’ describes the joys of friendship and chosen family, of being real with the ones you love, and finding the ‘source’ of your life.
Contents
Evelyn Juers No Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man prose
Luke Beesley Liquid Amber prose
Luoyang Chen Three Poems poetry
Jing Cramb Weimin prose
M. Seppola Simonsen translated by Eirill Alvilde Falck Heartwood / Hjerteskog / Syđänmetta poetry
Emma Sorensen Gillian Mears and the Lost Art of Letter Writing prose
Lucy Lehmann This is Our School prose
Gabriel Curtin Snails poetry
Frontispiece by Gavin Bell
