Flipping the bird at answers

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been co-judging, along with Stefan Laszczuk, a short-story prize run by the editors of Adelaide University’s student magazine, On Dit.

Of course I put my hand up, because now I am a fusty old ex-Voiceworks editor, desperate to get my hands on the raw content of young, emerging Australian writers. Really, reading submissions – at Voiceworks and in the capacity of a judge – is like tapping into a rare natural resource: it makes me all dizzy wondering about the sort of books that will be published in the next 10 to 20 years.

Hearsay is going to be ‘a glossy and professionally printed literary annual featuring the best emerging Adelaide writers’ that will be ‘distributed around the Adelaide CBD in May’.

Here is the introduction I wrote for the collection:

Props to old people and everything, but so much literature produced by adults, for adults, is characterised by a weird sort of fogginess. I put this down to the fact they have to sound like they know what they’re talking about because … well, because adults are supposed to know what they’re talking about, and when they realise they don’t know what they’re talking about at all, the lesser adult authors deal with this by jacking up the profound-sounding words and the awkwardly constructed sentences.

They talk about the same old shit, in language that makes it seem like they’re talking about something new and incredibly meaningful. They beguile their adult readers into reciting passages aloud at their book clubs and saying, ‘Mmm, yes, I see …’

Old people have to maintain this pretension, lest young people run up to them, steal their crown, and wear it to the pub, getting it all scuffed and smudged with garlic sauce.

The best young writers, on the other hand, are confronting their ignorance through writing, so inevitably their stories are explorations of new ideas. Ignorance dissipates pretension, and what we are left with is a distillation of the pure, heartfelt, curious sense of adventure that is consistently absent from so much adult literature.

These young writers have not yet been hypnotised by an engorged need for creative rhetoric: they’re not trying to dupe you into feeling something about something you don’t understand. They tell it how it is. They write about love (awkward, unrequited, shared, illicit), dreams (made, lost, abandoned), obsession, hatred (even murder), ambition and torment. And they don’t fuck around.

Older writers are great – they’re who we learn from – but young writers are who we can draw inspiration from. They’re writing about the present, but they are the future – these stories are the buds of ideas that will blossom in time.

Stefan and I have chosen a ‘winning story’, and two ‘runners up’: ‘Mutual Friends’, then ‘The Four Seasons’ and ‘House Party’. There is no such thing as a ‘winning story’. These just happen to be the ones we most enjoyed. You will feel differently – such is the beauty of literature, and the diversity of this collection.