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Fisher, Jeremy
Road Closed
2007, Fisher, Jeremy
Road closed / Water over bridge / The turgid brown Hunter washes more valley away / This full rain has most times drenched this thin red earth in March
Gay Liberation
2012, Fisher, Jeremy
In February 1973, I set out to find Gay Liberation - not the philosophy, which was vaguely coalescing inside my head, the organisation. I'd heard about Gay Liberation because of its recent demonstrations and the resulting hullabaloo in the press. It was a demonstrable part of the light of change beginning to shine across Australia since the election of Gough Whitlam just two months before in December 1972. Gay Liberation had broken away from the more conservative CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution), which focused on law reform, to advocate more radical public activism. CAMP itself was founded only in 1970. Gay Liberation as a movement was born in New York out of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in 1969. These incidents were the first time homosexuals fought back against police harassment and discrimination. As a result, Gay Liberation espoused a radical philosophy more in line with the spirit of the times. This didn't make it more acceptable, just more visible. The people in CAMP understood the need to work behind the scenes as well in order to effect meaningful change. This was something I would not appreciate for many years, but I was young and silly, and momentous and meaningful change seemed realisable in that brittle, bright light of the first year of Whitlam.
Using online workshopping to teach the writing of short fiction: at the threshold of digital pedagogy
2014, Fisher, Jeremy
Face-to-face workshopping is a favoured method of teaching creative writing and it has received significant attention as a pedagogical tool. Approximately 80% of the students studying writing at the University of New England (UNE) do so as online students. As face-to-face workshopping has been seen to be an integral tool in teaching the writing of fiction, this was an inhibition to including fiction units in UNE's repertoire. A new short fiction unit was introduced in 2014 that pioneered the use of online workshopping using selected forum groups on Moodle at UNE. This paper reports on the implementation of workshopping in the teaching of the writing of short fiction in an online environment where students have not met face to face and only interact in online forums. While the results overall were successful, there were some downsides when students found themselves outside their comfort zone or perplexed at the relative freedom of expression permitted in a unit where the assessment requirements were demonstration of their creative activity. Students were also encouraged to engage with a range of online activities separate from the forum groups and open to all. They took to these with gusto and the overall student satisfaction for the unit was very high.
Katharine Hacker: The Have-Nots
2010, Fisher, Jeremy
The Have-Nots was first published in Germany in 2006. It was the winner of the 2006 German Book Prize for best novel. The prize is richly deserved. This is a complex narrative, melding individual concerns and social issues into a highly charged, gripping text. Hacker excels at building tension and the level rises from the very first page where we are introduced to Dave and his young sister Sara, who have just moved with their angry father to Lady Margaret Road in Kentish Town, London. There is no immediate further explanation of Dave and Sara, who disappear from the story for a while as Hacker moves us over to Berlin on the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. What should have been a party is a gaggle of disbelievers watching the continual replays of the collapse of the towers on television. Isabelle is one of them. Jakob is another. Jakob has just returned from New York. One of his legal colleagues has died in the catastrophe. Ten years before, Jakob and Isabelle had shared an afternoon in Freiburg. Now, in the uncertainty of September 2001, they begin an affair and marry. In Hacker's competent narrative hands this occurs seamlessly, but the reader is left with nagging doubts. How does Hans, Jakob's friend from university, feel about this? Hacker gives her readers a few clues as the narrative relentlessly progresses, but always there is doubt and a deliberate, disconcerting lack of clarity.
The Writing and Publishing of Australia's First Gay Novel
2015, Fisher, Jeremy
The Australian writer Gerald Marcus Glaskin was quite a handsome fellow, though his naval record - complexion sallow, hair black, eyes brown; height five feet ten inches; scar on his forehead - suggests otherwise. His good looks were combined with a sharp mind and a quick wit, overall a combination that served him well for much of his life. While Glaskin's reputation as a writer has faded, his legacy should not be forgotten. His writing was powerful and found an appreciative audience in the 1950s and 1960s. One book in particular deserves revisiting and it holds an iconic place in Australia literature. No End to the Way, published by Barrie & Rockliff of London in 1965 under the pseudonym Neville Jackson, is the first overtly gay Australian novel (Hurley 190). The book had a powerful impact on a generation of young Australian men coming to terms with their homosexuality, as demonstrated by the audience responses to a version of this paper delivered to the Australian Homosexual Histories conference at the University of Melbourne in November 2013.
How to tell your father to drop dead: ... and other stories
2013, Fisher, Jeremy
A collection of short stories that engage with topics in contemporary Australian culture, on topics ranging from family dynamics to gay culture.
Review of 'The Light Between Oceans' by M.L. Stedman: Vintage, $32.95 pb, 380 pp, 9781742755700
2012, Fisher, Jeremy
M.L. Stedman's first novel was the subject of spirited bidding from several publishers when her agent put it up for auction in 2011. Stedman lives in London, where she has contributed to literary journals, but she is originally from Western Australia, where this book is set. Her three-part novel tells the story of Tom Sherbourne, a returned World War I digger who not only carries the guilt of survival but who is also estranged from his father and brother. They had expelled his beloved mother from the family home after she was caught in a dalliance inadvertently revealed by Tom. In Point Partageuse (Augusta, I suspect), on his way to operate the lighthouse on Janus (yes, the name's significant) Rock, he meets the considerably younger Isabel Graysmark, daughter of the local schoolmaster. Her older brothers have both been killed in the war, leaving her the only child of grief-stricken parents. Alone on Janus Rock, far out where the Great Southern and Indian Oceans meet, Tom receives correspondence from Isabel that eventually leads to marriage. Isabel then joins him on the island. Over the years she suffers three miscarriages, the last just a few days before a boat containing a baby and a dead man washes up on Janus Rock. Isabel convinces Tom that they should keep the baby and raise it as their own. Whatever could go wrong? With so much guilt and grief at play, almost everything. Yet, despite the Gothic plot line, an overdose of metaphor ('a single fat cloud snailed'), unnecessary changes of tense between sections, and a very inconsistent, perhaps non-existent, narrative point of view, the final section of the novel maintains an emotional power that lifts it well above its other weaknesses, and that was no doubt the reason why publishers were keen to get their hands on it.
Hans-Ulrich Treichel: Lost
2005, Fisher, Jeremy
Hans-Ulrich Treichel is professor of German literature at the University of Leipzig. He has written five volumes of poetry and his flair for words is strikingly apparent in his writing. The ironic narrative voice of Lost, his first novel, that of a young boy, provides a darkly comic edge to a story emanating from the displacement of a family in Germany following the end of the Second World War. At first the young narrator believes his older brother starved to death when his parents fled the invading Russians in their flight from Prussia to Westphalia. But when he is old enough, his mother informs him she gave his brother away to another refugee when she thought she and her husband were about to be shot by the Russians. "I didn't have a dead brother. I had a lost one. That was hardly a plus for me," the narrator notes. His mother laments that she didn't even have time to tell the peasant woman to whom she entrusted her son his name, Arnold. The narrator suggests that maybe their baby boy was lucky and they named him Arnold again.
Out of the Shadows: The Emergence of Overt Gay Narratives in Australia
2015, Fisher, Jeremy
For most of the twentieth century, as it remained in much of the world, homosexuality was illegal in Australia. The country was also subject to publication censorship relatively draconian for an English-speaking nation. This combination ensured overt homosexual works were comparatively unknown in Australia, even as titles imported from other English-speaking countries. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, publications of the homosexual rights and gay liberation movements began to appear. These were soon joined by more commercial publications aligned to an increasingly overt gay subculture. While censorship continued to be imposed on these publishers and publications under State jurisdictions, and many struggled economically, a few managed to eke out an existence. While gay-targeted newspapers and magazines documented the emerging gay subculture and provided entertainment, a number of newly-established small presses concentrated on more literary endeavours and produced a considerable number of novels, poetic works and play scripts. A number of writers published by these gay presses were taken up by more established publishers and have since gone on to mainstream success. Newspapers and magazines are still a feature of the gay media in Australia, but have now been supplemented by online publications. In light of the lessening of targeted censorship in Australia, this chapter explores the emergence of overt gay narratives and recounts their evolution from that date.
O Life: Review of 'Dare me! The life and work of Gerald Glaskin' by John Burbidge: Monash University Publishing, $34.95 pb, 349 pp, 9781921867743
2014, Fisher, Jeremy
Never heard of him - that's the most common reaction when I mention Gerry Glaskin. Some Western Australians remember him, as they should: he was born and spent his last years there. Yet in between he was a bestselling novelist in the 1950s and 1960s. He was translated into French, German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Norwegian. Doubleday commissioned him to write a book about northern Australia. He was also a prolific short story writer, with two published collections. All of this is documented in the appendix and reference list of Dare Me! So how and why has Glaskin been erased from the Australian literary consciousness?