Category: journals

Literary journal Meanjin magazine finds new life

The literary journal Meanjin will return to the city it was born in that bears its Indigenous name.

The Queensland University of Technology announced on Wednesday it had acquired the 85-year-old journal, whose life was cut short by Melbourne University Press in September.

QUT’s successful bid marked a full circle for Meanjin, which was founded in Brisbane/Meanjin by Clem Christesen in 1940 before moving to Melbourne in 1945.

The QUT vice-chancellor, Prof Margaret Sheil, said the new ownership agreement committed to maintaining the journal’s rigorous standards by safeguarding its editorial independence and the appointment of a dedicated editorial board.

(Read more | Kelly Burke’s article at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/feb/11/meanjin-literary-journal-new-life-queensland-australia (The Guardian, 11th February 2026)

Vanessa Page in conversation

Vanessa Page hails from Toowoomba but feels most at peace in the outback. A seventh‑generation Australian with First Fleet ancestry, she fell in love with books while spending lonely holidays with her grandmother. She’s the only university graduate in her family—BA in Journalism (USQ), PR diploma (RMIT), and a Master’s in Professional Communication (USQ)—earned while raising a baby and battling doubters. A lifelong footy fan, she turned that passion into a master’s thesis on sport as news. Publishing her first poem at twelve, she revived her writing in her thirties, joined Brisbane’s Speedpoets scene, and now thrives within the supportive Calanthe Press community.

Rosanna E Licari interviewed Vanessa for the current issue of Stylus Lit, launched September 1st, 2025.

Rae Armantrout | ‘The absence of certainty’, a conversation with Kate Lilley

(Cordite Poetry Review, 4th February 2025)

Kate Lilley: … One of the things you said when we were having a bit of back and forth about how we might do this was when I asked you what often gets left out, because everybody writes about (for good reason) the markedly intelligent, propositional, ‘thinky’ character of your work, it’s markedly ‘intellectual.’ You said emotion and affect tend to get left out. Why don’t we start there with some of these poems?

Rae Armantrout: Ok, I like that question. It’s true. People often talk about the ambiguity of my work and how to make meaning out of it – how meaning might be problematised, which are all intellectual problems that are very interesting to me. I like your word ‘proposition,’ Kate. One thing I like to do is to throw out a proposition that may or may not be true, it could conceivably be true, and then pose examples of what it might mean and look like for it to actually be true. Often, the examples are problematic, somehow. It’s like they’re chunky, unwieldy pieces of the world, and how do they line up with these propositions that I’m trying to use to describe it?

So, having said that I want to get around to emotion since I don’t talk about it much. I may not be good at talking about it, but I can tell you that every poem of mine starts with a feeling. And usually with a feeling I can’t identify, maybe because it’s complicated, kind of a compound feeling of ironic yet wistful or a sad yet angry combination of feelings. But also, sometimes, I need help understanding the source of the feeling, and that’s where a poem starts – when I try to identify the source of a feeling.

(Edited transcript of the conversation at Cordite Poetry Review)

(Complete interview online on the Australian National University’s Art and Social Sciences YouTube channel)

RIP David Bircumshaw

Sorry to learn of the loss of English poet David Bircumshaw recently. Had thought I might get to catch up with him on a visit to England mid last year, but it didn’t eventuate. We published a couple of issues together (British and Australian versions) of a short-lived poetry journal (‘The Chide’s Alphabet’) years back; can’t recall whether the British original was print or online (or both), the Australian issues were modest print versions. RIP

 

Research journals and gatekeeping

Caitlin Cassidy, The Guardian, 10th March 2024

“We’ve set up a crazy system where publishers own and control knowledge and we’ve let them do that,” Foley says. “Researchers give content for free, sign over copyright, and publishers make a lot of money.

“You can get rubbish, nonsense and misinformation online for free but you have to pay for the good stuff. We need to make sure we’re getting the right information out there.”

Journal publishers have one of the highest profit margins of any industry, taking in an estimated $20bn US a year.

More …

‘Otoliths’: issue 65, southern autumn issue

Issue sixty-five of Otoliths, the southern autumn 2022 issue, is now up.

 

This issue, which marks the beginning of the seventeenth year of the journal’s existence, contains a mix of — sometimes mixed — photographs, paintings, short stories, poetry, interviews, magazine columns, & manifestos from an international contributor list including Karl Kempton, Linda King, Mark Pirie, Dario Zumkeller, AG Davis, Mark Cunningham, Sanjeev Sethi, Ken Friedman, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, James Cochran, Jim Leftwich, hiromi suzuki, Michael J. Leach, Elancharan Gunasekaran, Louise Landes Levi, KJ Hannah Greenberg, Chuck Joy, Marco Giovenale, Jimmy Crouse, Andrew Cyril Macdonald, Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Mario José Cervantes, Timothy Pilgrim, Alan Catlin, Paul Ilechko, Jim Meirose, Adam Fieled, Gregory Stephenson, John Sweet, Sterling Warner, Jack Galmitz, Lynn Strongin, Texas Fontanella, Richard J. Fleming, Sarah Bilodeau, M.J. Iuppa, John M. Bennett, Carla Bertola & John M. Bennett, Harvey Huddleston, bofa xesjum, fred flynn, John McCluskey, Ben Egerton, John Gallas, Nathan Whiting, Laurent Grison, Volodymyr Bilyk, Xe M. Sánchez, Ellen Wardman, Barbara Parchim, Bruce Robinson, Jeff Bagato, jim mccrary, Gale Acuff, Grzegorz Wróblewski, harry k stammer, Howie Good, Jen Schneider, Alberto Vitacchio, richard lopez & Márton Koppány, Heather Sager, Keith Polette, Michael Basinski, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Daniel f Bradley, Dave Read, Robert Beveridge, Tom Beckett, Mary Kasimor, Connor van Bussel, R. S. Stewart, Tony Beyer, Daniel de Culla, John Levy, Joanne Bechtel, Kenneth Rexroth, Nathan Anderson, Jeff Harrison, Bill Wolak, Clara B. Jones, Nicole Raziya Fong, Charles A. Perrone, Russ Bickerstaff, Paul Dickey, Sabine Miller, Keith Nunes, Diana Magallón, Bob Lucky, Cecelia Chapman & Jeff Crouch, bart plantenga, Joshua Martin, Jillian Oliver, Réka Nyitrai, Marilyn Stablein, Jerome Berglund, Christopher Barnes, Peter Cherches, Jürgen O. Olbrich & Hubert Kretschmer, Kay Kestner, Cameron Morse, Eric Hoffman, Gavin Lucky, Kiriti Sengupta, Patrick Sweeney, Robin Wyatt Dunn, Jane Simpson, Elmedin Kadric, Kit Kennedy, Steven Tran, dan raphael, Andrew Taylor, Charlotte Jung, Michael Borth, Carol Stetser, Penelope Weiss, Marcia Arrieta, John M. Bennett & Jim Leftwich, Márton Koppány, Rich Murphy, Cecelia Chapman, J. D. Nelson, Kit Willett, Angelo ‘NGE’ Colella, H. A. Sappho, Martin Stannard, Michael Brandonisio, Paul Pfleuger, Jr., Katrinka Moore, David Jalajel, Keith Higginbotham, Susan Gangel, Judith Skillman, Bob Heman, & Guy R. Beining.