To shine a spotlight on local literary magazines, Kill Your Darlings is showcasing the work of exciting publishers across the country. In this latest instalment, meet Splinter, a new publication based in Tarntanya/Adelaide. We chat with managing editor Farrin Foster, who shares an essay from the first issue.
How did the magazine come about?
The journal’s origin story pre-dates me. It was a few key people at Flinders University, Writers SA, UniSA and the University of Adelaide who came up with the idea of a journal that could help close the distance between the Tarntanya literary community and what sometimes feels like an East Coast-centric writing world.
For me personally, I also feel strongly that the literary journal space isn’t finite. We have a lot of amazing journals already, and I think more publications help to bolster the viability of the form. I was excited to add another voice to the conversation—a journal that leans into the strangeness of being alive, which can often feel like both a very silly and a very serious experience.
If you could sum up the magazine in five words, how would you describe it?
Absurd, extreme, fun, frighteningly real.
What kind of writing do you publish?
We publish fiction, poetry, essays, criticism and memoir.
We’re interested in examining the gaps between individual and communal realities, which sounds a bit pretentious (maybe? Probably), but we think this is relevant to basically everything. The difference between how we understand the world and how someone else understands it sits underneath so many important tensions—from intimate relationships to large-scale political movements. So, we publish writing that questions how we engage with both our own and others’ realities. In part, we’ve made this an early focus because we think it is something worth grappling with amid our current moment of chaos (see: the world), but also just because we like writing that conjures the sense of vertigo you get when you remember your perception of the world isn’t an objective reality.
Also, importantly, we publish writing that is fun and inclusive. We think a journal can be funny as well as rigorous, and we want to be welcoming—for both readers and writers.
Any exciting projects that writers should know about?
We’ve just released our first issue, so at this stage the whole thing feels like an exciting project.
At the moment, we also have a great initiative underway where we’re collaborating with a cohort of deaf writers, whose work will be published as an insert in the second issue. And we will be opening the submissions callout for issue two soon, so please keep an eye out for that.
Where can writers and readers find you?
We are a print publication and are available via our website and also stocked in selected bookstores around the country. For sporadic digital updates, we’re on Instagram and Facebook.
Can you tell us a bit about the piece you’re sharing today?
Susie Anderson’s critique of Green Dot feels sort of like a rapid car chase touring through classic writing on desire and Susie’s own experiences of it and then holds those touchpoints up against the often disappointing desire found on the pages of Auslit. It’s sharp, subjective, funny and also intellectually complex—a tone that so perfectly encapsulates all the things Splinter wants to achieve that I still feel slightly suspicious of it.
It is also a great example of how we want to approach criticism. Because of our publication schedule, we’ll never be the first to critique a work, so pieces like this that blend in other forms like memoir and situate a work within a larger canon are exactly what we want to publish.
‘Green Dot and Desire in Contemporary Auslit’ by Susie Anderson
‘Am I in love?—yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.’
—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Green Dot, the 2023 debut by Madeleine Gray, was described by Alex Gerrans in Meanjin as ‘book-as-content’ millennial smugness: ‘a relatability exercise’.
Relatable, sure. For a time in my life, I described myself as ‘having an affair with my much younger colleague’, something that connects me directly with Hera, Gray’s exhausting protagonist, who is having an affair with her older, married colleague.
The choices I made at that time were my membership application to a canon that extended back at least to Jean Rhys. Like her characters in Leaving Mr McKenzie, Good Morning Midnight, Quartet or Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’ life was spent hanging around with the wrong men, drinking Pernod, moving between Paris and London, never having enough money, and occasionally working. She and her characters form templates for the generally upset literary girl, or what was reduced online to the ‘sad girl’ by the slew of novels written in the dying 2010s.
I inhaled Rhys’ novels through my 20s. Plus her descendants: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The New Me, The Idiot, the Rooney ones, Sorrow and Bliss, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, Love and Virtue and Seeing Other People. This was the literature for me. I wanted to feel things and these girls did too.
But despite this connection with Hera and her literary sisters, I found that Green Dot let me down in terms of its depiction of desire. I thought my own affair had been more vital, sexier, made of fewer frustrating decisions. The book—deeply bingeable—is littered with exasperatingly relatable insider jokes for twenty-somethings of the 2010s and it presented a problem. I had to work out the difference between my distaste for the author’s delivery, the character’s choices and my own.
Gray brings the reader as close as possible to the gruelling experience of Hera’s affair. There’s sex. There’s a lot of waiting. She moves to London? I continued to turn each page, distaste mounting, still desperate to see my particular brand of desire (much sexier—I am a Scorpio) on the page.
Unfortunately, Green Dot’s heavy reliance on text exchanges between Hera and Arthur expose their connection as—no better word for it—cheugy. From overuse of ‘darling’ (from a 24 year old?) to conversations on the work chat platform that lead Hera to masturbate in the work toilets, these passages are a massive boner-killer because they give the reader no space in which to project their own desire or experiences of wanting. Writings on eros from thinkers such as Sappho, Barthes, Anne Carson and Esther Perel agree: desire is distance.
There could have been an opportunity to use the holding-space between Arthur and Hera to write something truly erotic. Barthes again:
A (classic) word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: ‘to sigh for the bodily presence’: the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels.
Where geographical distance dividing love’s subject and object could invite longing, per the Barthes passage above, Green Dot as a text is claustrophobic and grasping. Yet Hera is reaching for nothing, as her occasional, knowing missives from the future remind us. Though it’s marketed as the thematic core of this novel, the affair annoyingly becomes a device, offering a platform that dares the reader to judge Hera’s moral choices when it could prompt us to wonder about her single-minded desire for self-abandonment and obliteration.
Madelaine Lucas’ debut novel Thirst for Salt is blurbed as a poetic take on longing, love, and desire. Yet it too falls short of its ambitions to evoke the eroticism of a love affair. Thirst for Salt’s couple spends more time together—unlike Hera, its protagonist falls into the everyday groove with her older man. The domesticity is disappointing, given the marketing. It feels as if there’s another force at play, perhaps from publishers desperate to discover Australia’s answer to Ottessa Moshfegh, Dolly Alderton or Sally Rooney et al. The latter, unlike Gray and Lucas, skillfully uses the tension of distance to edge us towards ecstasy. Remember how Marianne and Connell are never properly together in Normal People? Hot. Now might be a good time to confess that I gave this novel to my lover.
If, instead of seeking to explore desire, Gray and Lucas set out to write what the Australian millennial woman—now typically an ethically non-monogamous bisexual—seeks as she shrugs off the pernicious trappings of the Disney Princess narrative, it is unclear on reading. Apparently, this was indeed the case for Gray, who explained at this year’s All About Women festival that Hera basically had no choice. If she wants power, she must try to get as close to it as she can through the white man in a higher pay bracket and all the stability, institutions and privileges that come along with him.
At the same event Jessie Tu, author of A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, chimed in on the sad girl trope. Her destructive heroine is a recovering childhood musical prodigy, whose sexual appetite is now used to funnel this energy as she reconsiders her relationship to classical music. Unlike Lucas and Gray, Tu draws a vivid picture of Sydney, New York and their classical music scenes as the stage for her character’s behaviour. Along with the cultural framework of the character’s Asian Australian heritage, the world of this novel is grounded in a social and racial reality.
The whiteness of the sad girl trope and its novelists was also considered by the All About Women panel, where broadly ‘the market’ was blamed for its prevalence. Yet contrast Lonely Girl and Green Dot or Thirst for Salt against one another and a neat conclusion appears: whiteness is a free pass to write a mere outline of a girl, hovering over a Sydney-shaped environment. Then again, it could also be suggested it’s this sense of cultural lack and complicity in invasion, existing on stolen land as they do, that leads these white characters to their self-destruction. Nonetheless, in the case of Hera, who hates work and doesn’t know the Gadigal word Killara (not saying I did), she is free to have hazy socialist quibbles about work because she doesn’t have a community to fight for.
Furthermore, Green Dot and Thirst for Salt offer only passing remarks to familial concerns, giving little to no air to the most interesting relationships in the texts. There’s some chance that this could be a technique—rather than offering up a straight line between cause and effect, the writers may be choosing to ask why we have to pathologise every little thing a woman does? A vague backdrop of trauma is expected in this genre, as Ursula Robinson-Shaw wrote in Sydney Review of Books: ‘When a therapeutic narrative’s symbolic associations don’t cinch to produce a new or coherent idea, it still gives the impression of having done so, even as it reveals nothing, relying on narrative patterns we already recognise.’
The vagueness does offer space for the reader to wonder if, in fact, just about anybody feeling ‘the hunger’ is capable of seeking obliteration.
And, indeed, when I saw the girl on the cover of Green Dot, staring at her phone in front of a burning building, I thought: ‘Shit. I know her.’ Like me, Hera saw the burning building and walked in anyway. In 2018, my benign obsession with a colleague—who had a girlfriend abroad on exchange—bloomed from incessant messaging across four platforms (Slack, work IM, Instagram DM, SMS) into long walks up Pitt Street together from our Circular Quay office. And then some.
Though the close reading for this essay gave me a new appreciation for Gray’s approach to exploring the void the sad girl is trying to fill (honestly, same), I still feel betrayed that an affair became just a tepid device to market the book. The novel was definitely a mirror of my fallibility in that time of my life. But I can’t shake my dissatisfaction with the delivery, what Liz Evans called ‘one-trick plot and skinny characterisation’ in her excellent analysis in The Conversation. While I related to Hera’s quest for self-abandonment through her affair, I can’t forgive it for being packaged in such gratuitously vague and unsexy clothing.
A green dot itself is now synonymous with online availability. One thinks of Gatsby’s light at the end of his dock. It takes two green dots to converse. One is useless without contact from the other. Hera’s dot is faulty, flickering wildly, honing in on the equally busted light of her man. The final scenes of the novel feature a confrontation at the beach, Hera’s gaze on this reality becoming fuzzy, hazy. Finally, she sees what we endured for approximately 400 pages: that he was merely a blur, a forgettable chapter in her still TBD life.
Splinter: Issue 1 is out now. Find more at Splinter Journal.
