Welcome to issue four.

This issue we have not one, but two interviews. In the first, multi award-winning author Christos Tsiolkas talks about his fascinating meta-novel 7 ½ . In the second, Kate Hall and Timothy Ryan, the organisers of the inaugural Victorian Q-Lit Festival, talk about the whys and wherefores of putting together the state’s first queer literary festival.

Given this coincidental confluence of gay content, we declare this our first Queer Issue.

The two fiction pieces are about the nature of endings. Or perhaps drifting away is more accurate. Famed Italian horror writer Paolo di Orazio destabilises with ‘Oh, Mother’, while poet and playwright Gayelene Carbis breaks your heart with ‘We Stood’.

In essays, David Roberts turns his critical eye on Vrasidas Karalis’ criminally neglected 2020 novel,  The Glebe Point Road Blues, while filmmaker and critic Bill Mousoulis cogitates on melancholic musicals from Greece and France.

Our poesy kaleidoscope in these windblown seasons enfolds earth fire water sky, acclaimed, award-winning, seasoned and soaring poets for your ear and eye—our feature Eileen Chong flows with the luminous ripe sense-memory lines we revere her for—angel’d fingerprints carry Amanda Anastasi’s strophes—breath space quietude in Prithvi Varatharajan—mosaic eyes through mirror time in Henry Briffa and Denise O’Hagan—Mayu Kanamori says of her poems, “I wouldn’t actually call them ‘translations,’ they are simply the Japanese versions of the poems”—Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli tears it up with our first ekphrastic poem—and Michael Alexandratos translates the troubled soul of Greek proto-surrealist Michail Mitsakis to remind us we are all misfit poets coming in from everywhere.

Finally, the scintillating Ramona Koval privileges us with a peek into her writing space in Among the Chaos. See y’all in November with issue five.

Kalliope X