By Uma Patel

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By Chloe Wilson

Or maybe it’s Lola. Or Ginger.
I can never remember. This season
eleven were shot, perhaps twelve,

some by strangers, others by those
they know well. Asphyxiations are
predictable, and someone

always gets stabbed. It’s a pattern.
Trace the trajectory, the spatter,
then cut to the ads.

At least blunt trauma
affords an opportunity
for variety – have we tried

a stuffed bird, an encyclopaedia,
a Chippendale chair. The question
is how to disguise repetition;

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Dear Mr. Attenborough,
By Rosanna Stevens

Sometimes, at the pinnacle of a Mountains evening, when the trees are settling their plumage for roosting, when the house lights open their eyes for nocturnal duty, and a black Mitsubishi Colt slinks past our front garden, I imagine my neighbourhood is ripe for your hushed, staggered, and reflective commentary. I think of you often, David. In fact, I am writing to tell you that, despite any amphibious-looking developments in your old age, I love you.

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Reality TV’s Bloodless Coup
By Barnaby Smith

In the early months of 2011, during television’s summer lull, Channel Seven began running ads for Conviction Kitchen, a prime-time vehicle that seemed to tick all the reality boxes. The ads featured burly, angry men hurling pots and pans, floods of tears, and ultimately, the inevitable hugs of redemption. They managed all that in 30 seconds.

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The Heidi Klum Show; or Skinny Deutsch Girls Try to Walk Good; or Ze Germans Spend a Pretty Pfennig On a Whole Lot of Not Much
By Sam Cooney

Okay, so I’m pretty sort of sure that I am writing this here piece for a website literary magazine gambit that I think will be called The Channelling. Actually, that’s all I know. I’m not sure why I have been asked to do this, but I think ‘why’ was expunged from the global lexicon in like 1995 or maybe 2001 or something, so I’m not worried. I think when N’Sync sung ‘bye bye bye bye (bye bye)’ so many times in that killer song of theirs, it was saying bye to why. I don’t know where I just came up with that. If this was the New Yorker I’d have a phalanx of researchers and fact-checkers, but this is not the New Yorker, it’s a fusty corner of the internet.

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The Impact of Go Back to Where You Came From
by William Mollers

Kicking back in my swivel chair, I flick open my laptop and wait for it to start up. All I can think about is watching the latest SBS show, Go Back to Where you Came From, having missed its debut on my television screen. I wait and eventually windows icons flash across my screen, my beautiful background of Lake Eyre comes up and then suddenly everything calms. I click on the Firefox icon, anticipating what I am about to watch.

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The Wire Season Five as Metafiction
by Sam Twyford-Moore

I had some trouble writing about the fifth season of HBO TV series The Wire when I was commissioned to write an essay on the series. It was hard to incorporate the fifth season in a discussion about the previous four seasons because it was markedly different. The fifth season was seen by some as a let down, coming off the back of the fourth season, which was claimed by many to be the best season of the best television show ever made. That was some legacy to live up to, and it was always going to be difficult to do so - most said that the show’s makers, David Simon and Ed Burns, had failed, but it could be argued that the only way to deal with that legacy was to look at what it actually means to make a show like The Wire, and that is certainly part of what they set out to do.
 

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Why Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus Will Make You a Better Writer
By Jacqui Dent

Anyone who has been to any sort of creative writing class – whether it be for film, television, books, poetry, theatre, all of the above, will be familiar with the advice to read/watch critically. Experience the very best, we are told, the best books, the best films, the best TV shows and think about what makes them so darn good.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I find this almost impossible to do. When I’m watching a great film, I don’t want to stop and start thinking about why it’s so fantastic. If I find myself doing that, I have to ask myself, how good can it be? Really? Because good writing is difficult to spot. That’s kind of the point of it. Kind of the essence of what good writing is. That you’re not aware of it.

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