In my twenties – living frugally so that I could write and travel, via a very-part-time day job – buying a literary magazine was a big thing; the early editions of HEAT I have on my bookshelf usually tell a story of writing obsessions at the time.
In her 1999 piece, ‘Sighs Too Deep for Words: On Being Bad At Reading the Bible’, Helen Garner stages more than one exchange with Tim Winton about their shared faith, asking him his thoughts on prayer and God.
This is an essay about the gigantic – women who seem permanently pitched skyward, whose articulations overpower, and have the capacity to rupture and then obliterate. It’s about the enormity and hot terror of self-expression, where words do not formulate slowly in mouths but instead ‘leap from lips’. This isn’t the stuff of sensible ambition – it’s loftiness and extravagance and total grandeur!
In ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’, the space of the page becomes receptive, vibrant, like a ‘sticky decomposition web’ perhaps, where words, images, sounds lodge.
Šalamun’s charming randomness feels contemporary. I can hear the internet comedian’s sense of timing in the translation, the weird dry singsong of the call and response ‘did you have an uncle in the air force / I had an uncle in the air force’.
I’ve arrived late to Gillian Mears. Or exactly when I ought to have: standing in the morning rain at Adelaide Writers Week for a panel on biography, two days after a car wreck, not yet able to fully open my jaw.
