Island 162
In this issue, we’re very proud to bring you the winning and shortlisted entries from the inaugural Island Nonfiction Prize. Congratulations to all five authors, and thanks to all who entered, to our excellent judges, and to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for supporting
the competition. We certainly hope to be able to run it again next year. Another very exciting addition to Island’s activities and opportunities is Island Online at islandmag.com, where we are now regularly publishing short-form fiction and non-fiction. Island Online also gives you access to timeless content from our rich 40+ year archive. I’m loving the task of dipping into the archives to select and republish buried treasures. Of course, we remain deeply committed to the print magazine. Long may it continue!
— Vern Field, Managing Editor
There’s a lot of attraction in funding bodies to what is new and innovative, which can be challenging for a literary magazine – the basic format has been around for so long. What this approach can miss is how the format enables such remarkable innovation in the specific; in every new piece that is published and given an audience. In this issue of Island, we have five utterly distinct fictions from Lal Perera, Andrea Macleod, Sean Wilson, Emma Doolan and Murray Middleton. These stories range tremendously in style and tone – they can’t be reduced to a simple formula, and this is how it should be. Their publication makes the best possible case for funding writers and the literary magazines that give them a platform, month after month, year after year.
— Ben Walter, Fiction & Online Editor
As I write this, I find myself, my city, going into lockdown – a once unthinkable, now relatively common, experience. As I come back to the poems I selected for this issue, I think about how poems speak to the moment in which they were written (even when the subject of the poem exists far from its writer’s own time), and to the moment in which they are read. So it is that all these poems bring news of today: today is love poem (John Kinsella, Peter Rose), a pause (Marjon Mossammaparast), a walk (Stuart Cooke), a panic attack (Zenobia Frost), and the contemplation of interspecies relation (Debbie Lim, Judith Bishop, Rae White, Louise Oxley). Today contains the iterations of the ordinary, as captured by Jill Jones in her ‘Fragmenta Nova: 16 Views of a Day’, and a new ‘Suite of Powers’, as codified by Chris Andrews. As the city grinds to a halt, I find that my body feels ‘as temporary as a mood’ (Šime Knežević), and I’m glad to have had this cache of new poems to help put into language the days that stretch before me.
— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor (Acting)
Liberty. A complex word. It is personal, it is political, it per-tains to all things. Not consciously curated, but subject to the serendipity of publications such as Island, the arts features in this issue each connect with this idea. Lucille Cutting’s review of ‘Hobart Current: Liberty’ analyses how ten artists have tussled with the concept, while she also reflects on the per-sonal, writing of the ‘visceral pull’ of freedom and identity on her as a mother and as a Black woman. ‘Disappearing’ speaks of this place, our beautiful island home, and the constraints or costs caused by our apparent yearning to be more than an afterthought on a map. ‘Handkerchiefs, Twice Marked’ looks at how art can sneak across borders and political lines to connect women of different cultures – Afghanistan and Australia – with their wildly differing levels of personal, political and gender freedom. And Sally Rees’s artwork explores the idea of the ‘crone’, suggesting play and wisdom and camaraderie, and, as a result, releasing ‘her’ from restrictive, societal definitions.
— Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor
Plans for the inaugural Island Nonfiction Prize began in the thick gloom of mid-2020. There was only one topic then, wasn’t there? Every-thing else had been lost to the noise. I wholly expected to reject COVID-19 stories out of hand. I thought we had heard all the stories the pandemic had to tell, of lockdowns and cancelled trips, of closed borders separating loved ones, of jobs lost and safety jeopardised and, relentlessly, toilet paper hoarding. In my (limited) imagination, it felt necessary to move away from COVID-19 and think about something else. Anything else. Football. Birds. History. Organic cheese making.
In the almost 300 entries we received were a whole range of experiences, communicated in every kind of nonfiction form. As judges, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to read pieces that were funny, devastating, profound, pithy, lyrical and hard. These entries ran the gamut of nonfiction, from traditional essay form to unapologetically experimental, and pure memoir to absolute universal exploration.
Together with Rae Johnston and Sarah Ayoub, I faced the enormous challenge of choosing a shortlist and winner. I would like first to acknowledge the incredible work of the other judges in their careful reading and consideration of these pieces.
Our shortlistees are Verity Borthwick, Katerina Cosgrove, Nicole Melanson and Naomi Parry. While each of their pieces explored loss, love and humanity, as nonfiction writing so often does, these writers all extended their stories well beyond the personal. In this issue, you will find Borthwick’s search for answers in ‘The Sound of Light’, Cosgrove’s interrogative fury in ‘If You Join the Circle, You Must Dance’, Melanson’s deftly realised grief in ‘Hospitality’, and an investigation into racial injustice in Parry’s ‘A Shadow from Country’.
We were unanimous – and speedy – in choosing our winner. Megan Clement’s piece, ‘In Quarantine’, was exactly the type of story I thought we wouldn’t publish. It’s about COVID-19. It’s about borders and missing family and trying to come home. When I wrote the entry guidelines, I was concerned that a COVID-19 piece might become dated by the time we went to print, but, of course, it hasn’t. ‘In Quarantine’ is a story about family, human connection and the barriers we will try to smash to be close to the people we love. It’s timely, but it’s timeless, too. I know you will love it as much as we did.
Our gratitude to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for supporting this prize.
— Anna Spargo-Ryan, Nonfiction Editor