Returning Home

Last month we learned that Meanjin will be published by the Queensland University of Technology. This has been framed as a homecoming for the journal. 'Meanjin returns home' was the subject line of the email I received from QUT, a sentimental marketing gesture that makes me uneasy. Meanjin is the subject of the sentence here, but for the past six months, Meanjin – whether you understand Meanjin to mean the journal's employees, its writers and readers, or a glob of IP – Meanjin has been conspicuously without agency, grammatical or otherwise and, moreover, the question of who has been doing the pushing and pulling and consigning of the journal has been unclear. Now Meanjin is as an autonomous vehicle that has taken itself back to base. Full marks to the comms team; I don't think I've seen a news feature that has not used the 'returns home' line. (Yes, it is terrific news that Meanjin will be relaunched, and I'll stop being a curmudgeon in a minute.)

Most of us are used to the anodyne rhetoric of university announcements. I was very interested in this sentence from QUT's press release:

Under the terms of the transfer, QUT will appoint an editorial board to ensure Meanjin’s independence, values and standards are maintained and recruit an editor through a national competitive search.

This is an undertaking to safeguard the editorial independence of Meanjin. It certainly sounds reassuring. There was plenty of speculation that editorial freedom was at issue when MUP ditched the journal last year, and that persons in the higher echelons of the Melbourne University governance chart objected to the publication of essays on Gaza, particularly this one by the Executive Officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, Max Kaiser.

One might understand the prerogative of a festival director to program the writers and artists she pleases to be a version of editorial independence; see Louise Adler's recent thorough statement on this: 'As the director it’s my responsibility to curate a festival which entails choosing who will and who won’t be invited. It’s not hypocrisy to choose some writers and not others. Not programming someone who believes they should be invited is not an act of censorship. It’s not surprising that one or two embittered writers, aggrieved to have not received an invitation, prefer the aggrandised explanation that they were “silenced”. This characterisation is understandably preferable to the simpler explanation that their work might not have been regarded as of sufficient literary merit.'

As straightforward as this should be, editors and artistic directors are reckoning with new limits to their freedom of expression, and so are writers. This is particularly the case in Queensland. Last year a State Library of Queensland prize panel decided to award K.A. Ren Wyld a black&write! fellowship. The award was never made, reportedly after the Queensland premier and arts minister wrote to the director of SLQ to complain about a social media post about Yahya Sinwar made (and deleted) by Wyld.

In the furore leading up to Isaac Herzog's visit to Australia, David Crisafulli announced that he would make chanting the words “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”  punishable by two years' jail. Jeff Sparrow in Crikey characterises Crisafulli's restrictions on free speech and protest as tougher than those of the Bjelke-Peterson era, and tougher than those mobilised by conservatives against anti-apartheid protesters during the 1971 Springboks tour. He writes:

The slogan “from the river to the sea” expresses a determination to free Palestinians from the racist laws and restrictions they endure. During the apartheid era, the racist regime described the African National Congress as terrorists and claimed that majority rule meant the slaughter of whites. But no Australian government ever contemplated banning the advocacy of freedom for South Africa. 

In this context, what does editorial independence mean for a Brisbane-based Meanjin in 2026? Obviously editing Meanjin will be great gig; there will be a queue of good folks wanting to helm a re-energised journal in a supportive university environment. It's clear that everyone involved at QUT is thrilled by the decision and committed to doing everything they can to set up structures that will protect the incoming editor. The question remains, a kind of test, I guess: will the new Meanjin editor be able to commission freely work on matters of urgent currency: Gaza, free speech, anti-semitism, Islamophobia?

Further on the semantics of Meanjin returning home, on naming, culture and place, 'Makunschan, Meeanjan, Miganchan, Meanjan, Magandjin' by Gaja Kerry Charlton and published in Meanjin in 2023 is indispensable. She writes:

Our Elders’ words echo always—language is culture, culture is language—but what does this mean with a history of being forcibly removed, shredded by disconnection? Goori-ness hinges on connection to Country. Unpacking original placenames and their meaning is paramount for Truth-telling, and healing People and Country in the light of Story of Place. Self-determined language repatriation is a fundamental right of First Nations peoples.

This is a long piece about the names and histories of the lands and waterways in what is now known as Brisbane, about contemporary language-mapping initiatives, about the errors, mistranscriptions and elisions of colonial planners and mapmakers: 'It’s important to highlight that many language words were historically recorded with multiple spelling demonstrating the challenges for early writers with foreign ears attempting to phoneticise an ancient language.' Charlton takes her time in this piece, asks her reader to slow down and to listen to what's at stake with naming places; an apt antidote to the slick sloganeering of 'Meanjin returns home'.

I keep checking back to see whether this recent newsletter post about the LA Review of Books has been taken down. Yowsers! Get it while it's still lukewarm etc etc. If the link is dead, my guess is it's because someone got sent a letter by a lawyer. At least, that's what would happen in Australia if you dished up so much identified dirt without getting it heftily legalled. (No one wrote a piece like this about Meanjin...) The title is self-explanatory: How the LA Review of Books destroyed itself. There are two separate but linked sets of claims being made in this piece; the first, about exploitative labour practices, and the second, essentially, about editorial freedom, specifically the freedom to publish pro-Palestinian perspectives on Gaza. It would be remiss not to note that there's pushback in the comments and more broadly on social media about the characterisation of LARB's editorial policy as one suppressing the voices of Palestinians and their allies. If you put 'Gaza' into the search box of the LARB archive, the results show that there has been plenty of pro-Palestinian material published over the past two years. At issue is when the LARB started to publish pro-Palestinian material, and how that changed after October 7.

What holds my attention is the familiar narrative of long-term organisational precarity and dysfunction. The Los Angeles Review of Books has been the most prominent digital-only review since it was launched in 2011, the one that other orgs pointed to to make their project intelligible to donors and readers. It was visible to readers in Australia, and desirable as an outlet for local critics because of that visibility. I wrote a long piece for them a million years ago and got paid $150, a lot of words for little money. As exciting as it was to be published there, it is not feasible for a freelancer to work on that basis. Rates evidently haven't risen at LARB in the last fifteen years, and in some instances, they're lower.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how LARB worked as an organisation when I was at the Sydney Review of Books, trying to figure out how they published so much material, why some of it was terrific, and some of it less terrific. The LARB has always published an enormous volume of work; one of its strengths has been that it gives a broader account of contemporary publishing than other outlets, that books got reviewed there that were otherwise only discussed in academic journals. Their website, though, is a mess, and always has been, a digital space crammed with unvariegated content, with appeals to read this, to go to that event, to donate money, to sign up for this. It suggests an organisation trying to do everything, all the time, to commission twice as many authors and to pay them half as much.

It turns out that not only was LARB not paying their writers well, they weren't paying editors and other staff adequate rates. There's a vast list of editors managing commissioning and editing of reviews: there are editorial staff, subject editors, editors at large and contributing editors. Many impressive names! Totally impossible structure! This what happens when you see opportunities to do more good stuff, and can't turn them down, when you want to say yes to everyone. (Per Adler above, editorial independence requires say no, as well as saying yes.) You bring in more unpaid or underpaid editorial staff, give them a title, and hope for the best. This puts pressure on salaried staff, on sign off and checking procedures and results, generally, in inconsistencies, both of process and quality of work published. Of course the website is a mess, of course no one gets replies to their emails. There are plenty of reports of LARB writers getting ghosted or having their work spiked without explanation. The journal has grown in terms of output and reach – but after fifteen years it hasn't developed into an organisation that can pay its writers and staff, or operate in anything like a sustainable manner. And so its the writers and staff who carry the cost.

Organisations can keep chugging along like this, with improvised processes, a high staff turnover and a cohort of frazzled writers – until there's a crisis. And evidently for LARB, as for so many publications around the world, the crisis point was October 7. What is this explosion of discourse around LARB reveals, especially in the context of Australian and Canadian journal publishing, are the uncomfortable limits to editorial independence in a not-for-profit (or university) environment, in publications and organisations that rely on donors or public funding, and in circumstances where relationships between staff and boards are not clearly delineated. This is the challenge that the new editorial board of Meanjin must confront as it drafts its policies.

Another missive from LA, this time a eulogy for the singular literary broadcaster, Michael Silverblatt. Jynne Dilling's fond piece on Silverblatt, 'You've Done It Again, Michael' appears in n + 1. Bookworm was the first literary podcast I listened to with any frequency, back before David Naimon's TinHouse interviews, way before American Vandal, before Backlisted. I used to load episodes of Bookworm from the archive onto my iPod, choosing writers whose voices I wanted to hear in conversation with Silverblatt, plug it into my car stereo somehow, and listen as I drove in circles around the Illawarra and southern suburbs of Sydney.

There he is speaking with Toni Morrison about the human capacity to love under duress; celebrating John Ashbery’s poetry as an “exchange of incomprehensions” and agreeing they are both “happiest in the forest where things lose their names”; offering such a generous reading of Infinite Jest that David Foster Wallace was prompted to ask if Silverblatt would adopt him. He was the rare interviewer to loosen up the taciturn W. G. Sebald—it’s the most animated I think I ever heard Sebald sound, as he and Silverblatt begin rhapsodizing at length about the fog in Bleak House, in what tragically turned out to be one of the final public conversations of Sebald’s life.

I don't think I'd ever read a profile of Silverblatt, so I had no idea until I read Dilling's piece that he never used email, that he relied on the telephone, that he was such a perfect creature of the printed book. All befitting a man of broadcast radio, not the podcast epoch. Episodes of Bookworm are a neat 28-minutes long, nothing compared to these tremendous two-hour podcasts that I never seem to be able to finish. And yet Silverblatt is such a devoted reader and poses his questions with such care and intensity, that the episodes seem fully formed. As I listened to Silverblatt, I would sometimes grumble to myself that he seemed to love every book that he read, that he seemed to suspend criticality in favour of a kind of hyper-attentive affinity. I think, though, that was the point. Being an intense and voracious reader was his vocation, not being a critic. There's another nice piece on Silverblatt from 2023 in LARB here. And the mighty Bookworm archive sits here at KCRW.

Other reading... Harriet Armstrong's Lol semiotics in Granta; Sheila Heti ditching SSRIs and experimenting with psychedelics, very much my jam, also in Granta; a pretty readable Infinite Jest at 30 essay (why are the rest of them so bad, especially the disavowals?); Justin Chang on Sirât, a movie I can't stop thinking about, will probably write about (see it in a cinema); Ruth Reichl on lemons and Danny Kaye (for the niche audience who loves Ruth Reichl's writing and listened to Danny Kaye tapes on repeat as a kid).