Details
Release Date: 30th October 2024
59 pages, softcover
Edition Artist
Hayley Megan French
I work with painting, photography and writing to locate myself in places and ideas of home, suburbia and landscape. I live on Dharug land in Western Sydney and believe it is important to engage with the places
we live with a renewed wonder and critical attention to better understand who we are and how we live. Since 2018 I have been developing a body of work which documents the suburbs I live and work in, moving between abstraction and representation. It is a growing archive that engages in a conversation of what suburbia means in the Australian imagination. This work is expanding as I look for patterns and new ways of documenting suburban mythologies and inheritances.
The second edition of Written Off features art curation by Hayley Megan French and ten local authors works. Supporting independent Australian Creatives and Writing.
Excerpt of Works
Emancipated
In the dead of night, the baby emails, in a cool legalese, to say that Donnie Wayward was no longer her father…
Jack Cameron Stanton
Jack Cameron Stanton is a writer from Sydney. He has published fiction, reviews, and personal essays in Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, Overland, The Australian Book Review, Southerly, and The Saturday Paper, among others. He teaches creative writing at UTS, UNSW, University of Wollongong, and Macquarie University.
Binary Nights
COMMENCE NUMERATION LOOP [1] Oxygen Absorber chased the puppy onto Liberty Street. He dropped onto the road to shield it from oncoming traffic...
Bill Dunbar
Bill Dunbar has a PhD from the University of Sydney in English Literature on the influence of Shelley’s style and imagery on English prose up to James Joyce. He also received a university medal in Australian Literature from the University of Sydney. He is the writer of Telemachus (www.telemachus.com.au).
A Brief Yarn on Knowing
Curled-leaf clustered memories form my childhood, though misaligned and contorted, weave knowing. I now recognise this as my own life’s context: here I briefly yarn on my knowing…
Madison Shakespeare
Madison Shakespeare is a multi-disciplinary lawyer, filmmaker, artist and writer who has developed extensive academic and pedagogical experience writing and coordinating the Indigenous Major at Western Sydney University over the past eight years and more generally, as a lecturer and research associate across multiple Australian universities. Identifying proudly as a First Nation Australian, a saltwater woman born on Gadigal Country of Kin from Nations across New South Wales, Madison is a First Nations Indigenist Scholar who proactively engages in decolonised knowledge enquiry and discovery. Aspects of Madison’s contributions that privilege First Nation epistemologies and facilitate Indigenous ontological approaches, were recognised and showcased internationally at the United Nations COP28UAE in 2023.
A Streak of Hallucinogenic Blue
It was a forced re-entry
I feared I was in flames
But no I only came down hard on an old injury
My Achilles’ heel
Catherine Zimdahl
Catherine Zimdahl is a writer and visual artist. Her plays include Gifted, The Halo Effect, The Cold Spell, Deviant Art for the Degenerate, HereNowThenThere, Clark in Sarajevo, Family Running for Mr Whippy, Left Breathless a Question, The Fox, A World into A Child, A Child into the World, Moonfleet and The Family Name. She has had productions at the Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, the Griffin Theatre Company, Windmill National Children’s Theatre and ABC Radio, amongst others. Awards include Griffin Playwriting Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New Dramatists Exchange and AACTA Awards for Best Short Film and Best Screenplay.
A Dancer Dreaming
When Ania left for L.A. I took it hard, but my mate Augustine reckoned he has a cure for the broken-hearted….
Luke Carman‘s
Luke Carman’s debut work of fiction, An Elegant Young Man, won the 2014 NSW Premier’s New Writing Award and was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal, the Steele Rudd Short Story Prize and the Readings New Writing Award. His essay collection, Intimate Antipathies, was published in June 2019. His latest collection of stories, An Ordinary Ecstasy, was published in July 2022.
Travel Snaps
I am hidden in the pine forests of Northern California. The giant redwoods empty their evergreen lings onto black, winding roads…
Augusta Supple
Augusta Supple is an award-winning writer, creative producer and co-Founder of Vitagraph Publishing. Her plays and children’s musicals have been produced in Australia, Canada and the USA and recently her work featured as part of Rant and Rave at Rogue Machine Theater, Los Angeles. Augusta’s arts commentary and reviews are included in the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA Archive and her short stories have been included in various anthologies. She has been a guest artist at the American Playwright’s Center, Guelph Little Theatre and WestWords. In 2023 she was the Rose Scott Women Writers’ Festival Director, winner of the Living Stories competition, and in 2024 she was the guest author for the Romanian Australian Anthology of Poetry and Prose.
A Small Town Proverb
A light jingle from two engraved discs heralded the soft woolly haired nuzzles, summoned Alison from her slumber.
Augusta Supple
Augusta Supple is an award-winning writer, creative producer and co-Founder of Vitagraph Publishing. Her plays and children’s musicals have been produced in Australia, Canada and the USA and recently her work featured as part of Rant and Rave at Rogue Machine Theater, Los Angeles. Augusta’s arts commentary and reviews are included in the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA Archive and her short stories have been included in various anthologies. She has been a guest artist at the American Playwright’s Center, Guelph Little Theatre and WestWords. In 2023 she was the Rose Scott Women Writers’ Festival Director, winner of the Living Stories competition, and in 2024 she was the guest author for the Romanian Australian Anthology of Poetry and Prose.
My Boyfriend Didn’t Laugh
I’d had a suspicion my boyfriend didn’t laugh. I don’t mean that I doubted that he made noises that sounded like laughter.
Chris Flemming
Chris Fleming is an award-winning Australian writer and translator and has recently been shortlisted for the Island Nonfiction Prize, the Calibre ssay Prize, and the Peter Cowan Short Story Prize. His published translations include works by Pierre Hadot, Simone de Beauvoir, René Girard, and Simone Weil, and his work has appeared in both scholarly and popular media, He is the author or editor of ten books, including On Drugs (Giramondo 2019), an Australian Book Review Book of the Year. He is Associate Professor in Humanities at Western Sydney University, Australia.
My Dear Louise
Write me a love letter,” she said, apropos of nothing.
“But I don’t.”
“That doesn’t matter – the words are the thing. They’ll do the work for you,” she said…
Chris Flemming
Chris Fleming is an award-winning Australian writer and translator and has recently been shortlisted for the Island Nonfiction Prize, the Calibre ssay Prize, and the Peter Cowan Short Story Prize. His published translations include works by Pierre Hadot, Simone de Beauvoir, René Girard, and Simone Weil, and his work has appeared in both scholarly and popular media, He is the author or editor of ten books, including On Drugs (Giramondo 2019), an Australian Book Review Book of the Year. He is Associate Professor in Humanities at Western Sydney University, Australia.
The Big Win
You’re woken up by the sound of clatter from the kitchen. More clatter, metal on metal, probably something on the stoke. Cooking, in the middle of the night?…
Anthony Macris
Anthony Macris is an Australian writer and author of the award-winning Capital novels. The Sydney Morning Herald listed him as an Australian Best Young Novelist and called him “one of the most interesting writers of our times”. His best-selling autism memoir, When Horse Became Saw (Viking/Penguin), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Age Book of the Year. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Writing at the University of Technology Sydney.
You are not my Friend
The library where I work is new and vast. Spread over two levels, it has various nooks with tasteful chairs in many shapes and sizes…
Samantha Trayhurn
Samantha Trayhurn lives and writes on Biripi and Worimi country. She has a Doctorate in Creative Writing from Western Sydney University. Her work has been published in Overland, Westerly, eTropic, Hecate, Scum Mag and others. Her first novel, The Curlew, recently placed third in the Hawkeye Publishing manuscript prize. She is the editor of Pink Cover Zine.
Five Poems
I keep having this dream where I’m inside
a grain silo.
I’m comfortably suspended in the grain;
I smell the powdery air
Lily E. Sinclair
Lily E. Sinclair is a writer and visual artist originally from Meanjin, now living and working on Dharug land. Her work is concerned with the intersections of the somatic and physical experience, embodiment, and its interraction with spiritual and noncorporeal being.