Kristina Olsson

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Australian short story trends Craig Bolland It’s hard to pin down an Australian tradition, stylistic or conceptual, that reliably runs through our short stories. Lawson may have had an early influence, but for as long as Australians have been writing, our short stories have poked at the edges of convention. It’s fair to say that Australian short stories, notably those from the 1970s onwards, have had concerns around our landscape, our culture, our isolation, our singularity. But we lack a national tradition in the same sense that America finds the lingering sounds of writers like Hemingway or Flannery O’Connor whispering through its journal pages. Combine this lack of orthodoxy with the changing ways in which readers are encountering the form, and it’s easy to understand why the Australian short story remains a constantly evolving space to write into. So what’s a short story writer wanting to break into one of the top tier Australian literary journals to do? One of the fundamental things to understand is exactly this – that the Australian short story remains a fluid space whose edges can be tested, a space that can be responsive to contemporary concerns, forms and styles, while still retaining something of an Australianness in setting and in focus. One approach into print is to push back at what is expected from the form. We see this edge-testing not only in the ‘attack magazine’ pages of zeitgeisty journals such as The Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings and Sleepers Almanac, but also more and more commonly in the establishment stalwarts of Overland, Meanjin and Southerly. If a short story is a photograph rather than a film, a glance rather than a gaze, the contemporary Australian short story is a flashbulb that illuminates moments as unique and particular as they are well observed and voiced. It’s interesting, and I think very telling, that this year’s Overland Autumn fiction issue opens with editor Ben Walter writing, ‘I’ve been so bored with realist Australian fiction; sleepy stories that perhaps have one eye open, but aren’t looking at anything worth seeing.’ Walter is calling out here one habit that does perhaps qualify as an Australian tradition – the ongoing popularity of minimalist, realist, frequently pastoral stories. The trope runs something like this – we are in a rural setting, the landscape is pervasive and oh-so-Aussie, and a sense of almost Gothic malaise (and perhaps the spectre of past abuse) hangs over us. The writing is pared back, with the occasional poetic filigree to describe a moment of beauty against the bleak landscape. 6 WQ
Walter might be bored with them, but this sort of story can, in fairness, be breathtaking. Consider Cate Kennedy or Melissa Beit, both of whom at times write within these tropes but whose works combine a sense of place and tone that show the power of Australian realism its very best. This type of story can also be unambitious, however. Toomodest. Too narrow in the scope of its thematic or stylistic ambitions. And it’s this latter kind of story that gluts the submission queues of our best journals. Don’t write Australian realism that isn’t ‘looking at anything worth seeing’ and expect to land in print. The writing is pared back, with the occasional poetic filigree to describe a moment of beauty against the bleak landscape. Innovations in style or idea stand out in those submission queues and will cause an editor to look twice. Consider what Ceridwen Dovey did conceptually in ‘The Bones’ – reinventing Henry Lawson’s ‘The Bush Undertaker’ through the eyes of an immigrant camel. A number of excellent recent pieces break apart the layout of the form in staccato moments of small, discontinuous, scenes. Ryan O’Neill’s Alphabet is an excellent example of this, but there are many others, stories that seek to curate startling moments rather than step us through a traditional narrative. When editing a journal last month, the poet Mandy Beaumont and I couldn’t help but commission a story, ‘The crucible’, by Vivienne Cutbush because as a multimodal piece it commented on the short story form more than it conformed to it. It was like nothing else in the submission pile. This was to its benefit. So be bold. Please. And on this note consider non-traditional lengths of the short story too. Fiction of under a thousand words is doing well and more and more markets are opening up to it. The Chinese idea of the “smoke-long” story that takes about as much time as finishing a cigarette is an intriguing one. There is something compelling about the idea of giving someone a complete artistic experience within one of the lulls modern society affords us, a bus trip, a queue at the bank. The story short enough to be read on a smart phone does itself no harm for that capacity. Looking forward, what can be suggested? In the short story, voice will long remain the king. Australianness, yes. Place and setting, yes. But also content that surprises. Multimodality will no doubt play a greater and greater part of the stories we see – blending in visual and technical elements as the reading platforms to deliver them continue to mature. There is one final contemporary trend that bears mention and that is the trend towards open endings. The twist-in-the-tale ending is decades out of fashion, and even endings that tie everything up neatly may be robbing the reader of one of the great pleasures of the form. The short story is an ideal place for an ending that opens up, that lingers, that lands on a note or feeling or impression rather than a plot point. Give your reader the pleasure of a story that opens outwards and you have given them a lovely gift indeed. Craig Bolland is a lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary studies at the Queensland University of Technology. He is an award winning playwright and short film maker, and the author of the novel I Knit Water (UQP). WWW.WRITINGQUEENSLAND.COM.AU 7
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