As Ye Sow
Before I begin, a few vows:
I don’t have shares in harvest magazine.
I’m not dating a harvest editor.
Style plays 2nd fiddle after content.
And I’m sober, despite the launch’s booze.
That covers most bases. Just in case a skeptic reader sniffs any strategy behind the forthcoming gush. My tally of conflicting interests? Nil.
Because harvest is a hoedown, a festival of new writing. For $15 and some quality hammock time, I ventured into Norman Mailer’s living room, an African bus, Coolgardie roadhouses and Friedrich Nietzsche’s dark skull – each sortie sharp in the telling.
harvest is a lower-case quarterly, born in Melbourne last week, the brainchild of RMIT refugees Davina Bell, Julia Carlomagno and Rachael Howlett. The volume “sprouted from the belief that Australian writers have much to say.” And I must say, at first blush, I wondered if the saying hasn’t been largely said, and disseminated.
I mean don’t the shelves groan with ample journals? Hasn’t the crazy [insert surname here] family history been annotated? The coming-of-age schtick? The backseat fumble, or the mammogram turmoil? Don’t the columns and blogs and zines of our world kick the issues tin-can enough? Isn’t landscape poetry dusted?
Not yet. Not likely. Not judging by harvest’s auspices.
Escaping the hammock, I can tell you that this slim volume breaks fresh ground. The writing is smart, lyrical, lean. The roll-call of writers – including Gauri Yardi, Anthony Levin, Ryan O’Neill – is a prime-quality crop. Unlike so many campus titles, harvest is not the fruit of some daydream collective duty-bound to publish its own imperfection.
Read Nick Powell and you’ll save yourself a tank of petrol – that’s how vividly his poems evoke New England, his imagery as crystalline as that patch’s granite.
Or go trucking with Meg Mundell, and there’s a few jerry cans saved. While I’m still trying to redeem my Frequent Flyer points thanks to Jack Cassidy’s meteoric tour through Redneck, Canada.
Nor have I mentioned the look. Hiring a new designer for each story, the editors have enlivened the 72 soy-ink pages with quirk and pizzazz. A sort of McSweeeney-Lite to be flippant, the only liteness the page count, not the calibre.
Of course, any maiden magazine can miscarry promise. Name you genre; the odds are short. Issue #1 will always be the legacy of untold hours, stiff drinks, brainwaves and aspiration. Reap the best stuff. Woo the wondrous printer. Hand-pick the artwork. So let’s give harvest a full-year cycle before I lose any more sobriety.
If harvest is our guide, then this wide brown land is fertile. I haven’t seen a riper debut since those Atherton coffee beans. Meet the agronomists at http://harvestmagazine.wordpress.com/ or buy your hit and savour.