Sydney Morning Herald: Review of 2007 UTS Writers' Anthology
The Sydney Morning Herald
23 June 2007
Copyright
Reproduced with permission.
Reviewed by Kerryn Goldsworthy
The UTS Writers' Anthology is produced annually by students in the UTS creative writing program to show their work. The standard of writing here is very high; although there are far more short stories than poems or any other form of writing, there's still a great deal of variation in both subject and approach.
The notable short stories include Isabelle Li's A Chinese Affair, a deceptively simple and straightforward story that suggests much more than it tells. Anencephaly by Bonita Mason is an extraordinarily powerful story about a tragic pregnancy and birth. But the three pieces that really stand out are all in some form other than fiction. There's a wonderfully assured and accomplished long poem by Bronwen Morrison called In the Guildhall that takes familiar and domestic family history and transforms it into something distinguished and exceptional, with complex, sonorous rhythms reminiscent of Les Murray in conversational-pastoral mode.
The second is Katherine Keefe's In Thrall: a screenwriter's journey to the theatre, which is a highly imaginative piece, structured and laid out as a screenplay dramatising the distinguished Australian screenwriter Sue Smith's first foray into writing for the stage. In an endnote, Keefe calls her piece a "biographical sketch" and explains that it's put together from "interviews with key subjects, and is a blend of both direct quoted and creative interpretations". She has interspersed the observations about Smith with lines from her debut stage play, Thrall, and the result is a highly original verbal collage of impressions.
Finally, there's a fascinating and slightly sinister essay by Trish FitzSimons called Peats Ridge: fluid memories and the politics of groundwater, a study of the supply and use of ground water in the Hunter Valley, much of it now controlled by Coca-Cola Amatil. This essay, a clever mix of lyrical personal reminiscence and astute commentary, was infused with an eerie irony as I read it while much of that region lay under water from the recent storms.
