HEAT 16

Our issue opens with Dream Geographies, an important essay by Alexis Wright that covers the many aspects of writing her most recent novel Praiseworthy. In her expressive, allegorical style, Wright discusses the importance of writing on a large scale in an imperilled world, the state of Aboriginal self-determination, and the value in thinking off-key to conjure humour. She also describes the collection of notes (many scribbled quickly to catch the flow of thoughts) and treasured objects that helped fire her vision of the book (random gifts from a windfall: a feather from the local birds, or a perfect bird's nest that had floated down from the highest tree in a night storm, and fallen undamaged into the garden).

The pleasures of words and wordplay are threaded throughout the issue. Fleeting sights and sounds are objects of desire in the poetry of Wen-Juenn Lee, who collects scraps of archival information, notes on domestic interiors, and observations on light: Wooden floors / blue kitchen / yellow walls / this is how light encounters me / unadorned.

In a short story by the renowned Hungarian writer Edina Szvoren (translated by Erika Mihlycsa with Peter Sherwood), a neurotic and deadpan narrator incapable of wonderment is resigned to playing the part of one who wonders. In Everything Solid is Vibrating in Place by Chris Ames, a character by the same name is building a house for his family, and also for everyone in the world named Chris.

"I could run a hundred yards and I could swim. That was all," recalls Nicholas Jose as he examines the qualities of monotony through the lens of his boyhood in 1960s Adelaide. Being hopeless at sport, I needed other skills to survive... I learnt the lesson that I now recognise as wuwei in Chinese, the way of least resistance. Jose later observes in his elegant, digressive essay: Beneath the surface flicker of change, monotony can still be a mirror, hard and unchanging, no matter who might be watching from out at sea—a cargo ship, an enemy submarine, a boatload of refugees.

And in The Whole Cannot Be Understood Without Reference to its Holes, by Tom Cho, a young scholar imagines a lover appearing in his studio and, reflecting on the spaces that are created and left behind by his presence, comes up with the term 'hole-ism'.