Meet the Fellows: Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship 2014, Round Two

Ender Baskan, Untitled, (Memoir)

The only child of Turkish migrants, in June 2013 I travelled to Turkey to try to explain myself to myself. I arrived to an Istanbul ablaze. The Gezi Park Protest movement had swelled from a small sit-in to a nationwide crisis. Within hours of getting off the plane I was shot at, tear-gassed and chased down the streets by Riot Police in central Istanbul. Welcome home. A memoir – part travel story, part meditation on migrant life – this is a story about growing up in today’s Australia.

Meaghan Bell, Future Summer, (Poetry)

Future Summer is a series of poems investigating the apocalyptic outcomes of global warming and climate change. The aim is to develop a series of thirteen poems which will then be made into a chap-book. While there are many depressing visions of a dystopian future, this series reflects possible utopian visions, which engenders hope and a desire to act.

Elin-Maria Evangelista, Esperanto for the Despairing, (Fiction)

Esperanto for the Despairing is the story of a handful of Australians travelling to Stockholm for the 1934 world congress in Esperanto. This is a journey that will change their lives. As the title indicates, language(s) play a great part in the novel, which looks at not only Esperanto as a phenomenon but also depict how learning an additional language impacts a diverse group of characters in the story.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross, Wake in Fright: The Story of Australian Film (Non-fiction)

A cultural history of Australian cinema, charted via discrete essays on key films from our industry’s inception until today. Combining techniques of arts criticism, narrative journalism and historicism, this book will look at the unifying motif of terror in Australian cinema and how this fits into our larger national mythology.

Christa Jonathan, The Long Way Home (Short stories)

The Long Way Home is a short-story cycle with illustrations that will be published as a series of themed zines. The work will be primarily based on travel writing and my experience growing up as Chinese-indonesian and living in Melbourne.

Chad Parkhill, About Time: Daft Punk’s Discovery, Technology, and Temporal Displacement (Essay)

‘About Time’ is a critical essay that seeks to analyse Daft Punk’s 2001 album Discovery in terms of technology and temporality. This project will engage with continental philosophy of technology and time (particularly figures such as Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault and Derrida) in order to examine how Daft Punk have utilised the technology of sampling to create an album that is ‘out of time’ or ‘timeless’.

Kieran Stevenson, The Johnston Tradition (Fiction)

The Johnston Tradition is a novel that follows Padraig Johnston, a young man who has fallen into a life of alcoholic isolation since the suicide of his father when he was 19. It’s a book in which the protagonist’s cat has a smoker’s cough, in which he’s plagued by an eight-foot monster that spouts sarcastic invective from behind the dry-wall. But it’s also about self-actualisation, about worth, about depression and mental instability in a world that doesn’t always cater to them. It’s about remembering that you carry a universe in the basin of your brain and how that will never be worthless.