Dear darlings,
I am very excited and a little bit sad to announce that this will be my last week with Kill Your Darlings.
After three years with KYD – nearly two as Online Editor – I feel it’s time for a new editor to come in and shake things up. To this end, I am thrilled to announce that Alan Vaarwerk will be Kill Your Darlings’ new Online Editor. Alan has been our Deputy Online Editor since the beginning of 2016, and his energy, talent and creativity make him a perfect fit for the role. Congratulations Alan, and good luck – you are now obligated to post all your viral memes from KYD’s social media accounts in future.
Working with KYD has been the greatest privilege and gift of my professional life. From this journal, magical opportunities flow. At a time when Australia’s culture is devalued and treated with contempt by our government, I am inspired by the literary community’s tenacity, fire and determined provocation.
I get the sense that, should government funding for the arts entirely dry up in some hellish Orwellian future, we will still be here, making things work somehow – because lit journals are built on love: love for the work and love for art, for the act of creation. The people who make lit journals do so because they want and need to, not because it’s some kind of flawless money-making scheme (which it most definitely is not).
That said, (wo)man cannot live on exposure alone, and the creation of art is also a valuable act of labour. KYD has been very fortunate to regularly receive state and government grants over the years. Through a combination of this funding and income from subscriptions and our writing workshops, we are able to pay all our contributors for their writing.
And they deserve every penny. It has been such a pleasure to have the opportunity to commission and publish writers as smart, engaged and thoughtful as our Killings contributors. I’m proud to have published writing on topics as diverse as queer representation in children’s TV, the Australian class divide, feminism and AFL, the alienating nature of major cities’ writing scenes, the inherent sexism in criticisms of YA writing, and the evolution of Disney’s princess songs.
I am in awe of the skill and passion of every writer I’ve been lucky enough to work with, particularly our superb 2015 and 2014 columnists, and particularly particularly our incomparable 2016 Contributing Editors, Jane Howard and Rebecca Shaw.
The people who make KYD are the kindest, hardest-working people I know, and I want to thank all the members of the team, past and present:
Rebecca Starford, Hannah Kent, Alan Vaarwerk, Hop Dac, Gerard Elson, Meaghan Dew, Ash Hanson, Sam Forge, Josh Allen, Brigid Mullane, and Emily Laidlaw.
Most of all, I am grateful to our Publishing Directors, Bec Starford and Hannah Kent, two brilliant women who gave me all the support and all the freedom I could have asked for, and did so with unerring finesse and sensitivity.
Finally, thank you to all our wonderful readers. Post-KYD, I will be focusing on a few new projects, and I would love to keep in touch via Twitter.
Veronica Sullivan
(former) Online Editor
