John Kinsella
I speak this in Walyalup on stolen Whadjuk Noongar country. It is said that within Western conceptualisations that Nouvelles de la république des lettres (News from the Republic of Letters), established and edited by Pierre Bayle in 1684, was the first ‘literary journal’. It focussed on book reviews — something that Westerly primarily does now online. But what interests me in this apparent ‘first’ is that though a French-language journal it was published in Amsterdam to evade French government censorship. That a book review journal or literary journal in general is necessarily political is, of course, embodied in the texts by different authors that make up an issue’s pages as much as a specific editorial stance or policy, and the resulting combination (or interference/non-interference) of what is published and how it is presented and discussed in a literary journal is an ethical concern.
That a university-based journal such as Westerly retains such an independent and socially-ethically-focussed politics is admirable. That it lets texts it publishes be the texts they are intended to be in spirit and message. In the main, this is a characteristic of contemporary Australian literary journals, and let’s hope it always remains this way. Different experiences, different genres, cross-genres, intersecting experiences and beliefs, become a narrative of participation and communal overlap. A literary journal is seen to stand for something, and authors participate accordingly. Westerly 69.2 is an exemplar of organicism and respect, of diverse approaches to broader communal concerns, and for a collective creative rigour that opens doors to new creativity, invites future authors to enter the conversation/s.
If in reading a literary journal we expect to experience the unhindered originality and independence of the literary or critical texts, so we also expect that to be affected by how individual pieces are arranged in an issue, and especially by how they have been chosen. The criteria behind inclusion usually demi-locate themselves under ‘writers’ guidelines for submission’, with every writer inevitably consciously or subconsciously baulking at the various meanings of the word ‘submission’. In submitting work for consideration we are entering a world of editorial viewpoint, limited space thus limiting quantity for inclusion, and the general timbre of that literary journal. Westerly has been greatly expanding its submissions scope, and now welcomes on board graphic narratives. Fantastic!
In issue 69.2 there is that synthesis of arrangement of texts we look for as readers of broad-content literary journals — a sense of careful thought behind how one text leads into the next. It’s a connectivity that individual authors necessarily know nothing about and is one of the surprises of publication — how any author’s work associates with other works. 69.2 offers us numerous ‘smooth transitions’ but there are also have wonderful instances of different sensibilities engaging with around a similar theme but in such different ways we question the nature of our own tendency to thematicise.
I am thinking in particular of the different ways of discussing relationship to children and, as editor Daniel Juckes notes in his introduction: ‘many of the works draw lines between mothers and children, children and mothers and grandmothers...’. But they are all such different expressions of the apparently (inter)connected. The sensibility at work behind the wry and deconstructive viewpoint at work in Carrie Chappell’s ‘Motherhood Poem’ times three is far removed from almost all motherhoods and kinships expressed in other works in the issue, but it also strongly overlaps in concern. Concerns expressed in very different ways — different cultural, experiential/bodily and philosophical contexts. This creates fracture lines of sensibility that compel us to consider our own positions vis à vis the material, the issue and ‘life’ experience.
Straight after the Chappell anti-confessional/confessional prose poem triptych, we have Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s intense and complex rendering of voice and reference around her grandmother which distils the epistolary prose poem as a pulsating form with its lament (or challenge): ‘Whoever he was, he believed in the human capacity to cultivate virtue. Virtue! I live in an age where people make fun of virtue’. A different irony, a different sadness, a different conceptualisation.
Founded in 1956 and approaching its seventieth anniversary, Westerly’s history has been firmly anchored in the local while having both a regional and international outlook. Seeking to attune itself to the global/local dynamic, it has, over time, intensified its concerns around the nature of community and its responsibility to communities. And as Daniel maintains in the opening to his introduction, we as a community lost one of our much-loved local writers, thinkers, teachers and friends in Brenda Walker. Back in the mid-90s when Brenda was reviews editor for Westerly, she told me that fairness in editing reviews was a matter of integrity — to the reviewer, of course, but especially to the text. She felt the seriousness of being that interface between reviewer and text as seriously as she took the relationship between author and reader. Communities necessarily overlap, interact, or at least come into contact with each other, and Daniel and the editorial-production team at Westerly maintain this belief with a passion.
I am delighted that there is such a visual focus in this new issue. No art form lives alone, and a text itself is a visual experience. We start our cycle of reading with the richly evocative cover image Emma Phillips’s ‘Untitled #11’, 2023, with more works by this artist-photographer embedded in the vital around-country conversational piece ‘The River as Blood Line’. Richard Read’s immersive essay on the painting of Angela Stewart connects process with how we deal with loss and separation, how we grieve, in ways that subliminally reach out across the issue and, indeed, to Brenda’s passing. This is not to equate different griefs and losses, but to reflect on how the reader of a literary journal will make personal connections to texts they might feel kinship with, or a respectfully attuned interest that then makes them reflect on their own position in the world, how their own experiences affect others. Read writes of Stewart’s superb painting Für Alina (2022): ‘Für Alina was intended as the composer’s consolation for a mother missing her daughter after the breakdown of a marriage in which she lost custody rights’, and, ‘It can generate a feeling expressive of the mourner’s compromised will power and emotional paralysis.’ Grief in its many iterations is a strong presence behind the issue.
I’d like to note the remarkable essay by Aunty Tjalaminu Mia, of which the first part of three (the next two in coming issues), ‘Milebaar wer-moora kadidjiny won-gin wadjella-warr’ follows a relationship with a mother, grandmother, country and communities. The passing down of stories makes stories live in the present. Towards the end of this powerful work we read: ‘The way my mum shared her gran’s stories was so rich in the telling—it was like I was there with her and Granma Farmer, walking Country and enjoying the sense of freedom, connectedness and belonging’.
As Aunty Tj notes earlier in the piece: ‘Gran said this was a crying shame and that the gov mob had a lot to answer for. But what could be done, except live their lives in a way that didn’t draw the government’s attention?’ In telling stories through her relationship to her mother a powerful relationship between cause and effect, between teaching and learning, develops. Empathy and understanding of the racism experienced by migrant Chinese men living and working in Katanning through proximal compassion and identification of patterns of vilification by the white power-holders/community undo some of the binaries established by colonial mechanisms. In order to survive the white assault on country and life, family had to ‘endure’ in order to ‘resist’. We read: Mummy’s gran was not prepared to have her grandchildren taken away by the Welfare Man, having been taken by the Red Coats herself when she was eight years old, so everyone had to do their bit to keep everyone together. // Granma Farmer’s approach to life could be seen as a form of resistance, because the family and children were together and still had an easier life than most Noongar families in the town.’ This is brilliant, devastating and affirming writing. It is why journals such as Westerly must exist and retain their political autonomy.
I will conclude by noting the individual skill, beauty, sharpness, tonal control, satire, and formal qualities of so many of the stories, poems and inter-genre works in this issue, the marvel and revelation of the interview-discussion, and sheer joy of presenting this work that gives a feeling of purpose to this issue. It is an act of liberty and justice, of contesting the ongoing colonial wrongs near and far from here.
