Interior Despots: Running the Border
210 x 148 mm 134 pp colour cover, paperback, perfect bound
Price $AU
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About the book
'Interior Despots is an important publication that asserts the continuing vitality and crucial role of small presses in promoting women's writing. It is a multi-layered and diverse collection of “border crossings” where theory and writing practice meet in exciting and innovative ways.' - Barbara Brook
Interior Despots showcases the work of ten Tasmanian writers alongside their national contemporaries and is a celebration of the diversity of contemporary Australian writing.
Interior Despots explores repression, using the idea of a border, in skirmishes where the writer confronts the desire not to know with the need to say. Each contributor situates herself in language and speaks the un-nameable, through a series of interviews with their cross-border selves.
In breaching the domain of the repressed, and addressing the previously unthought, each contributor invites the reader to think in other ways. The material and insights in this collection disrupt the accepted patterns of thinking and ready-to-wear language. The pieces are savage, humorous, insightful and real.
The project began in 1997, when Sue Moss and Karen Knight invited writers around Australia to submit work exploring the theme of repression -- 'the hidden shape of desire, a trauma or an unclaimed memory, the unsaid, the unshed and part-buried shadow that insists on pressing toward expression.'
Many writers responded in work ranging across genres.
The result is a collection of essays, short stories, poetry, performance texts and ficto-criticism by twenty-four Australian writers.
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The anthology includes Tasmanians Sarah Day, Julie Hunt, Karen Knight, Sue Moss, Lyn Reeves, Angela Rockel, Anne Shimmins, Lian Tanner, Philomena Van Rijswijk and Terry Whitebeach.