Fleshy Husks and Brittle Bones: Visible Ink 24
February 2013
Fleshy Husks and Brittle Bones: Visible Ink 24 is RMIT’s contribution to the array of literary journals being produced every year by students of Australia’s university writing programmes.
Some of the writers in it have never have been published before and, for its student editors, assembling it from the ground up will have been their first real taste of editorial work.
As a proving-ground publication it’s understandable, if not entirely excusable, that the collection should show signs of inexperience. Some of the stories are burdened with long descriptive lists, the kind of writing that’s recognisable from the creative writing workshop prompt; there’s more than one guilty-looking cliché; and some very noticeable editorial clangers (‘prostate’ instead of ‘prostrate’ in one story).
Of the poetry Geraldine Burrows makes good ironic use in ‘Reinventing ourselves’ of appropriated bureaucratic language, and in ‘Child of the manse’ Sophie Curzon-Siggers moves associatively through the language of a child’s religious upbringing.
The prose is mostly microfiction, something that has enabled the editors to squeeze fifteen pieces into a collection that is only just over ninety pages long. The best, Else Fitzgerald’s ‘The appearance of earth’ and Nancy Sugarman’s memoir ‘A little potted history of my mother in five parts (more or less true)’, are those that understand how the things and actions of the worlds performed in writing need mediation through a very precise vocabulary. Christine Priestly’s ‘Copters Field’ couples this awareness with a tense story of escape.
While the quality of the writing is sometimes patchy, and the urge to offer editorial advice is strong, on the whole it’s still a very readable collection.
TAGS david sornigrmit
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