January 5, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments
We’re seeking unpublished creative nonfiction writing, poetry, and new experimental prose for an anthology of creative writing by disabled and neurodivergent writers.
To be edited by Mascara and published by NewSouth Publishing the anthology focuses on the perspectives and voices of First Nations and CaLD, disabled writers as well as those with multiple marginalities.
This anthology of creative writing seeks to challenge dominant power structures, through a disability justice approach, by platforming nonfiction and nonfiction poetry writers and amplifying intersectional voices whose stories are so often unfairly erased. The ongoing pandemic has revealed the deep inequalities and barriers faced by First Nations disabled people and CaLD disabled people. They have been, and they continue to be disproportionately impacted. Through the vivid nonfiction writing by disabled and neurodivergent First Nations and CaLD writers, this anthology will offer community building and a deeper understanding.
The call out is open to diverse styles within the genre, including new experimental writing alongside established creative non-fiction and consideration of theoretical essays.
Guidelines for authors:
Word limit for flash prose: 1500 words.
Line limit for poetry: 200 lines
Word limit for prose and creative non-fiction essays: 3000 words
All contributions will be paid $500
Deadline (extended): 5pm COB: 30 April 2025
Formatting & Process:
- We accept only Microsoft Word doc files (.doc and .docx)
- Format your document in 12 point, Times New Roman, 1.5 spaced
- Name your file by surname and genre (e.g. yoursurname_poetry)
- In the subject line of your email, write your surname and genre of submission (i.e.
non-fiction, creative non-fiction or poetry)
- In the body of the email, include a short bio and attach your submission file
Send submissions to: disability_anthology@mascarareview.com
February 13, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Naomi Williams writes on Kaurna Country. She enjoys experimenting with poetry and prose. Her poetry has been published in Raining Poetry in Adelaide in 2022 and her ekphrastic prose in FELTspace Writer’s Program 2021. She is a lyric writer and was a creative collaborator with the UNESCO Creative Cities Equaliser Music Video Project in Adelaide 2021. She has recently completed her Honours in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Naomi enjoys performing spoken word at open mics around Adelaide and performing comedy raps as part of the duo Bubble Rap.
Oranges and Soccer
Orange is the colour of passion that burns so bright it’s almost NEON.
It catches in a retina forever.
Orange on the horizon, the orange I eat with my fingers spills juice and tangs my lips, cell
walls as soft as lips, they burst, or am I thinking of a mandarin?
When was the last time I ate an orange?
They never tasted so good than at my soccer game half-times, the mingled aromas of sweet
orange and fresh mud.
When did I last play soccer?
With my dog in the backyard. She carries that deflated ball in her mouth. A man was
throwing them out one day.
“The boys have got new ones,” he said. “They didn’t want to pump them up.”
The bounce of a ball on grass, the thunk of a boot sending it into the swish of a net— poetry.
I wasn’t fast enough, forgot the value of being alive.
I watched from the sidelines as boys from school played at lunchtimes, legs itching to run for
the ball.
Some lucky times it went near me and I could kick it back.
I only joined in once with a friend.
I was too embarrassed otherwise.
The pack of boys, only the good, or the popular got a kick.
I was neither.
Torturous to watch.
Now I play with my dog.
She’s a bad bitch.
She boops the ball back into my hands like a pro.
October 8, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mascara Literary Review is delighted to announce the contributors of RESILIENCE, an anthology of poetry, fiction and essays, to be published with Ultimo Press in November 2022.
We received an impressive number of high quality submissions for this anthology, which made the selection process incredibly competitive. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work and have been patient with us as we worked through the process.
We are excited to share that the RESILIENCE contributors are…
Hani Abdile | David Adès | Jessica Alice | Frances An | Alison J Barton | Fleur Lyamuya Beaupert | Luke Beesley | Behrouz Boochani translated by Moones Mansoubi | Anne Brewster | Simone Busch | Effie Carr | Luoyang Chen | Angela Costi | Lucia Cupertino translated by Mario Licón Cabrera | Sarah Day | Josie/Jocelyn Deane | Lyn Dickens | Koraly Dimitriadis | Sam Elkin | Susan Fealy | Holly Friedlander Liddicoat | Dominique Hecq | Matthew Hooton | Barbara Ivusic | Anna Jacobson | Bec Kavanagh | Michelle Kelly | Simone King | Lee Kofman | Jo Langdon | Bella Li | Debbie Lim | Miriam Wei Wei Lo | CB Mako | Nicole Melanson | Guido Melo | Dani Netherclift | Dawn Nguyen | Daniel Nour | Brian Obiri-Asare | Thuy On | Suneeta Peres da Costa | Felicity Plunkett | Stephanie Powell | Isabelle Quilty | Christopher Rees | Claire Miranda Roberts | Seth Robinson | Jurate Sasnaitis | Paul Scully | Christine Shamista | Maria Takolander | Lucy Van | Ellen van Neerven | Beau Windon | Grace Yee
Pre-order a copy of RESILIENCE here!
This project is made possible by the support of the Australian Council for the Arts and Creative Victoria.
July 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
We’re thrilled to announce that the winner for the 2021 Mascara Bundanon Writer’s Residency is
Isabelle Li
Isabelle Li is a Chinese Australian writer and translator. She has published in various anthologies and literary journals in Australia including The Best Australian Stories, Southerly, Westerly and UTS Writers’ Anthology. Her collection of short stories A Chinese Affair was published by Margaret River Press in 2016. Her prose translations have appeared in Sydney Review of Books and her poetry translations in Mascara, World Literature and Works. Her Chinese translation of Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture is published by Zhejiang Literature; Art Publishing House. Isabelle is currently studying her Doctor of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
Isabelle Li’s ‘The Northern Tomb’ is exciting, engaging, and very promising. It employs a smooth narrative voice, suffused with telling details and implications of character; a facility for drawing the way characters gently push and pull against each other. There are many clever, artful details about the narrator, her son Dawei, and Mr Zhao. It is confidently handled. There are also clever hints throughout about the cultural setting and details of contemporary life. Li shows a deft touch and subtle hand for the telling detail. Straightforward and raw, it inscribes real and personal experiences in Australia and provincial China, replete with their violence and personal destitution. The emotional leaps are handled well through stoicism and resignation. Her writing is a mature example of the trans-migration of the imagination and its understated translation into melancholia and dislocation.
We thank our 2021 judges: DECLAN FRY and BRIAN CASTRO
A few words from Mascara
“The applications we received speak to the sheer talent, voice and diversity of stories, essays, mixed media and poems in our cohorts. We were thrilled with the response, the vividness and creative lifeblood infusing the projects.”
About
In partnership with the Bundanon Trust, the inaugural Mascara Bundanon Writer’s residency is an exciting opportunity for an emerging or established First Nations or CaLD writer with an innovative project that pushes their writing craft into new expressive and conceptual territory. We received applications in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, graphic fiction. The winner receives a two week residency at Bundanon, a stipend of $1,000 and a manuscript reading to be arranged with Ultimo Press. A chance to immerse in the layered landscape and history of Bundanon, a place of renewal, where new relationships to country, history and creative practices are formed. We thank the Wodi Wodi and Yuin people for their care of and connection to land, culture and community.
SHORTLIST
Timmah Ball
Timmah Ball is a non-fiction writer, researcher and creative practitioner of Ballardong Noongar heritage whose practice is influenced by a short career in urban planning. Her writing has appeared in a range of anthologies and literary magazines such as The Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Griffith Review and Columbia University’s The Avery Review. In 2016 she won the Westerly Patricia Hackett Prize and is currently an Arts House Makeshift Publics artist in resident and editor of First Nations writing for The Westerly Magazine.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
Timmah Ball’s Blue Print for Another World is remarkable for its melancholic tone and questions the power of conceiving design and planning to refigure Australia as ‘a multifaceted continent whose unique and divergent cultures make up a complex ecosystem rather than the western construct of states border, regions and capital cities.’ It is marked by its searching, frank assessments of self and place and the contradictions of reflecting on change within the luxuries of capitalism: ‘in the cycle of deep discussion we only ever brush the edge of change.’ This is a work of ficto-criticism and it cleverly reconstructs a map viewed from a complex First Nations ecosystem. Her writing is richly engaged, revealing a strong social commitment to the connection between poetics and cartography, between language and country.
Luke Patterson
Luke Patterson is a Gamilaroi poet and folklorist living on Gadigal lands. He is interested in the ways bioregional identities and consciousness are expressed through localised and vernacular forms. Luke’s research and creative pursuits are grounded in his extensive work with Aboriginal and other community-based organizations across Australia.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
TEK expands on the “Authority” and constitutes a poetic and methodological experiment that plays on the anthropologically derived term “traditional ecological knowledge”. Patterson’s poetry is muscular and sinuous. Its interlaced rhyme patterns and use of assonance and slant rhyme are notable, providing music and movement to the verse. He has a great command of language and his commitment to ecology and the environment is unquestionable since he combines this with knowledge and history. The cadences and rhythms of his work are outstanding: city and country; capitalism and indigeneity; climate and chaos.
Saba Vasefi
Saba Vasefi’s personal lived experience as a refugee and exiled feminist poet and writer together gives her unique experience and insight. Since seeking asylum in Australia and started to write in English, I have been focused on completing my PhD and fulfilling my journalistic work. For four years, she was director of Sydney International Poetry and Arts Festival, and two years director of Diaspora symposium. Recent Work Press has published her current project the Borderless, A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
Saba Vasefi’s poetry is dramatic and lyrical. There is a conflation of poetry and autobiography, which gives her work a frankness that is limpid and clear-sighted. Saba Vasefi’s poetry is notable for the contrasts it draws between the mundane and violent: ‘No matter how many holy verses / they made my mouth express, / no prayers found their God.’ A highlight is ‘The Forbidden Gender’ which begins with a contrast between its quotidian details and the shock of the last line: ‘The road had potholes, / the school had veils, / and the students / lay dead under their burqas in a well.’ It includes perhaps one of the best couplets in the collection: ‘Instead, we were free / to die as much as we desired …’
May 6, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments
Invisible Eye
by Gayatri Chawla
Authorspress
ISBN-13: 9789352072736
Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA
Themes surrounding politics emerge organically in some of the poems in this book especially as it relates to the 1947 partition of British India into two (and, later, three) countries. To start with there are some place names: one of these is Sind (part of which is in today’s Pakistan) and another is West Bengal (in today’s India; part of what was originally called “Bengal” now comprises the country of Bangladesh). It turns out that an individual’s feelings with respect to this event can be complex, particularly so if you are a woman.
The ways that these things are communicated often rely on the everyday. Names of mundane things appear that are particular to the subcontinent. “Papad” is a kind of savoury baked item that is made from seasoned dough made out of a pulse. It is commonly called “papadum” and is served as a side dish with meals or as an appetiser. “Kulfiwala” is a seller of a frozen dessert called “kulfi” that is indigenous to South Asia (not just the subcontinent; “wala” is a Hindi word that can mean a vendor of goods or of a service), “kokis” is a deep-fried, crispy Sri Lankan food made from rice flour and coconut milk, “gram dal” are whole pulses, “sandesh” is a Bengali sweet made with milk and sugar.
To understand the cover images I asked a friend of mine who is from India. She said that the man carrying the woman on his back probably refers to the partition; the woman is tired and cannot walk anymore. About the other woman whose image appears on the book’s cover and the scarf she is using to cover part of her face, my friend said: “If it’s part of the saree you’re wearing it’s called ‘pallu’. If you’re wearing a ‘kameez’ it’s called ‘dupatta’. If you’re poor, it’s just a piece of cloth.” These words, she went on, are used right across the country and veiling of the face, the way the woman on the cover is shown doing, is a sign of modesty. There is one poem in the collection named ‘Purdah’ which talks about other feelings that can stem from this emotion. Google defines “purdah” as, “The practice in certain Muslim and Hindu societies of screening women from men or strangers, especially by means of a curtain.” The word can also refer to the curtain itself.
Like the many listed above, there are other markers of identity used in the book but the author does not labour her points. Feelings stemming from the displacement that is mentioned in the Amazon blurb relate to her father’s forced removal from that part of Sind that is now located in Pakistan, a place where he had lived. This theme emerges in some of the poems with a sometimes-subtle force.
Time spent with the poems reveals a rich patrimony. These are genuine poems that reach out in order to grasp truths that could not be revealed any other way. Chawla’s voice, furthermore, comes across as authentic. Many of her insights are original though some of the poems are more successful than others.
‘Hyperopia’ (it means “short-sightedness”) is, fittingly, a short poem: it runs to only six lines. What it lacks in volume it makes up for with expressive power and the richness of detail it offers the reader. It is like a haiku in that it captures a moment in time, an instant of personal observation: a woman is sitting at her desk looking at her PC’s screen. She normally wears glasses to see the computer programs she uses but at this moment she does not have them on. She looks out the window and sees things clearly there: the washing on the clothesline. Inside the room she can see a figure of the baby Krishna in a painting on the wall. On the kitchen windowsill is a pottery vessel. But what is on the PC’s screen is just a blur.
Given the context that I have already discussed, such a poem is eloquent. It speaks about the inability of people to clearly see the things that are closest to them. What does she see on the computer display? It looks like “bluish purple bruises”. People might easily identify faults that are apparent in other countries, but at home they might not be able to discern them. As a poem, this small addition to the volume is very strong. How did the bruises get there? What made them? Who made them? Nothing is crystal clear but much is implied.
‘Sweet Bengal II’ also contains echoes of events in the distant past (a past that, still, from reading what this author writes, are relevant today). On its surface the poem is about the confection “sandesh” mentioned at the top of this article. The person through whose perceptions the poem is focalised is talking about her love of this type of food but there are subtexts available if you spend a bit of time with the poem. These lines, for example, contain larger themes:
Self-centred pistachios sit uptight
pristine islands in butter paper
heady mix of cottage cheese and saffron
Sandesh dear, I love you.
Something good can come from the mixing of many different kinds of ingredients. In the case of this food, chenna (cottage cheese) is used as the base but it can be mixed with saffron for colour and flavour. On top you can put pistachio nuts to give it extra piquancy. Given this piece of encomium, Chawla’s other views about her country (she was born in Mumbai, an entrepot drawing people from different parts of the country) seem contextualised intelligently and with nuance. Here is the type of thing that only poetry can deliver: a complex insight into a large issue that affects many people that is given through the lens of the individual. One person’s feelings about a favourite food can be made to stand in for the feelings of the multitude.
‘Cocoon’ (the title itself is redolent with meaning in the context of things already spoken about in this review) gives you another personal view of the world. In this case, the idea of the twin is linked with another idea: the mother. On a mantlepiece is a matryoshka doll (a Russian children’s toy that comes in a form where smaller dolls, of different sizes, are contained within larger ones). Layers can be revealed by removing the outer casing, but there are two dolls sitting on the mantle side by side.
they look related
distant cousins,
cousins distant over a family feud.
Another toy, a snow globe, appears near the end of the poem. It contains an empty bench (perhaps a bench where a famous dollmaker put together his creations?) Suddenly, in the final two lines, the eyes of the person who focalises the poem return to the task she is performing in the kitchen: possibly preparing for dinner some potatoes, which have their own eyes. In this revelatory series of images, as in the case of the even shorter ‘Hyperopia’, a hundred different feelings converge in a poem of 17 lines. One thing leads to another as the eyes of the person focalising the action flit around the room and as her mind restlessly wanders, finding thoughts emerge unbidden.
‘Concealer’ is also complex, and centres on a woman seen in the street by the person focalising the action. The person seen appears to be superficial: the clothes she wears and her accessories point to conspicuous consumption. But suddenly the poet shifts perspective and you are transferred to a place within the life of the woman seen. Here, a darker truth appears suddenly, at the end of the poem, like an accusation. Why the “scars”? Who is superficial? And then: what can we really know of the lives of others? This theme had already been alluded to in ‘Cocoon’ in the word “sondering”, which I had to look up. Google defines “sonder” as, “The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.”
In ‘Fidelity’ the author turns to look at her parents. In this poem, feelings associated with parents – common to people everywhere in the world, it would appear, and commonly full of conflict – rise to the fore. Once again, you have eloquent details from observations made in the domestic sphere. The eye might be invisible, but still it sees everything.
One of the most wonderful things about reading fiction is being exposed to the ideas of people who write books available in translation. But even – as in the case with the present collection of poetry – where the language used is English, a book written by someone from a foreign country can be full of insights into other cultures and societies. But no matter how different they might be, it always turns out that people, wherever they are born and brought up, are broadly comparable in terms of their motivations, desires, and dreams. The context might differ but humans are always humans.
MATTHEW da SILVA is a journalist and writer who lives in Sydney.
October 2, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Traverse
by Tineke Van der Eecken
Wild Weeds Press
ISBN 978-0648320678
Reviewed by SAMANTHA TRAYHURN
Traverse by Tineke Van Der Eecken is a novel about the micro-offences that culminate in the end of a marriage. Physical distance and emotional distance. Wandering minds, snide remarks, broken trust. Part travel memoir, part personal reflection, it shows how a relationship doesn’t dissipate with a single wrong doing, but is slowly eroded by tides of actions that break a person down. At the core of the memoir, a wife (Van der Eecken) recounts a 5-week traverse through rugged Madagascan terrain – the territory of her husband’s affair with a work colleague – as she accompanies him on a field trip in an attempt to save their marriage. The premise alone is enough to pique interest. Some readers will identify this as an act of bravery, and others complete reckless abandon. Who would want to sleep in the same villages, swim in the same rivers, and eat the same meals, as their husband and his lover? This isn’t a typical divorce narrative, but we soon learn that there isn’t much that is typical about the relationship we observe.
Tineke and Dirk are a Belgian couple who spent their courtship and early married life in Africa, before moving to Australia and then England, following Dirk’s work as a geologist. At the time that the narrative takes place they have two children, and have just uprooted a life they had grown to love in Australia, to settle in Cotgrave, a small English village. As part of his new role, Dirk takes frequent field trips to Madagascar where he meets and falls in love with logistical manager, Fara. Tina is left to try and assemble a new life in Cotgrave, while sensing that her husband is drifting away from her.
We had met in Africa and we had married in Africa… We had our children in Africa. Was I now becoming associated with middle-class English life for him? I had no part in the choice of our home base, but it became clear that he was looking at me across a distance… (39).
After each trip Dirk returns more and more enamoured with Madagascar, and Tina soon learns that it isn’t just the place, but also another woman, that has won his affections.
Early on in the Prelude we learn that this story is being recounted six years after the fact, and is a collection of memories filtered through anger and a sense of betrayal, but most of all a desire to comprehend just what went wrong. “I must do this – must record to understand,’ (12) Van der Eeken states as she sits down to write her memoir.
With this proclamation readers quickly understand that this isn’t a travel story simply penned for entertainment and a love for far off lands. If anything, to Van der Eecken, Madagascar evokes at best discomfort, and at worst disdain. The country becomes entangled with her bitterness so much so that it becomes a third accomplice in the affair. It is after the first part of the book (Tremors) when Dirk’s unfaithfulness is revealed, that Tina decides she must overcome her negative feelings towards the place, and embark on his final trek with him, if the marriage has any hope of survival, “We would not be able to continue together unless we resolved what separated us most. I needed to go to Madagascar with him.” (71).
From the converted railway carriage where the author writes, it is as though even after an extended period of time, the act of writing is a salve for a deeply personal wound that can only be truly healed by retracing.
At times while reading, I felt weighed down by the repetition and self-pity of the narration– it is difficult to endure the circulatory thinking of a scorned partner, perhaps because it recalls repressed feelings, or makes us think about how we would behave in the same situation. That being said I found myself drawn in: I wanted to know just what the author was capable of enduring, and how she was able “to traverse and emerge on the other side” (9). Van der Eecken’s writing is at its strongest when she is truly present and offers her observations of the landscapes and cultures she experiences: “The roads built by the French reminded me of other rural roads in Africa. Once the industrious (and mineral greedy) colonial administrations had left, the roads had gradually deteriorated and made it impossible for motorised transport to pass. Now they looked like honeycomb.” (121). “In the last few years vanilla has increased from 30 to 190 euro per kilo” (133). “There were no independence monuments, no little shops, no signs of any contact with the outside world.” (151). These interesting facts and tidbits not only provide a counterpoint to Van der Eecken’s internal conflict, but also give an insight into who this woman is when she isn’t pining for her husband. She is worldly, compassionate, astute, creative, strong. It is a stark reminder of what jealousy and fear of rejection can stir in a person.
Many readers will find it hard to like Dirk, let alone understand the author’s desire to remain married to him. He is presented as belittling and mean; self-absorbed and cold. When Van der Eecken expresses that she misses her career, he responds off-handedly, “what career? You never had one” (56). When she talks about the book that she has been working on for a number of years while juggling family life, he snidely comments, “you’ll never finish that book… You better look for a real job” (29). When she is seized with fear and can’t cross a makeshift bridge during the trek, he scurries past her and utters over his shoulder “crawl if you have to” (162), never offering a hand. Of course, we are receiving one-sided memory, but the cracks in the relationship seem clear early on. Perhaps this callousness is Dirk’s way of distancing himself so he can pursue the love that he feels for Fara. So, when Van der Eecken documents moments of affection or making love, I was always surprised and a little bit disappointed. I suppose I wanted her to deny him, but I was reminded of how when anger and love mingle, things are only ever further complicated by these fleeting moments of romance.
One of the biggest questions that Traverse raised for me is, how much is a sense of place tied to a sense of self? Here, a woman who has been following her husband and his career all over the world senses that she has lost something along the way. In the final section of the book (Postlude: A sense of home) when Van der Eecken thinks back to sitting outside the renovated railway carriage in Australia with her friend Ros, she realises that by identifying a sense of belonging, she feels at ease: “I felt like a river that, after a long drought, had returned to its riverbed” (211). In this section Van der Eecken goes on to hint at the true motive for penning her story: overcoming an acceptance of betrayal that began with her father and followed her all her adult relationships.
I had lost all trust in my father, and by extension, in men. When the man I loved back then betrayed me in a similar way, it was the beginning of false starts in my own relationships, the compulsion to follow my parents’ patterns (211).
While not a perfect piece of literature, Traverse is a real account of the complexities of relationships, and is a rewarding reading experience that demonstrates how one can marry physical adversity with emotional adversity to gain the strength to go on.
SAMANTHA TRAYHURN is a writer living on the Central Coast of NSW. Her work has appeared in Westerly, Overland, LiNQ Journal, eTropic, and others. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University. She is also the editor of Pink Cover Zine.
