by Ben Walter (Tasmania).
The conceit of shoreline: language is biased towards the island, but applicable as something less than metaphor to urban fringes. The horizon between two worlds modified by slow tides as we tick off decades passing, months crammed in to one new dwelling or a layer of sand shaved from a headland. Uneven, crystal outlines; bluffs, beaches and palmed rock pools, staggered land parcels we number with foreign codes.
Grey areas: there are always zones of transition, an implicit perichoresis; the cans and papers washed into the eucalypts, the birds left in city trees like bright shells. Climatological: will city shorelines grow as islands shrink? Notions of Singapore generalised as the two contrasted spheres intersect. Anthropological: on which side of the boundary do we live and move and have our being? “No man is a city.” Ironical: which of the two shorelines is more fluid?
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Ben Walter: Walter has been published in a wide range of books, journals and magazines, including fiction in Island, Griffith Review, The Lifted Brow, The Review of Australian Fiction, Famous Reporter, Tincture, Burley, Kalimat and Overland (upcoming) and poetry in Overland, Rabbit, Famous Reporter, Eureka Street, Cordite, The Red Room Company, Mary, Prospect, Blue Giraffe, Southerly (upcoming).
He is the author of Below Tree Level, a book and literary installation funded by the Australia Council, and has twice won Express Media’s Award for Best Project/Work for young people in Tasmania, for the craft/fiction anthology I Sleep in Haysheds and Corners, and the underground literary collective, Under the Fat Man.
Walters has been a guest of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, the National Young Writers’ Festival, the Tasmanian Poetry Festival and the Tasmanian Writers’ Festival. His debut poetry manuscript, Lurching, was shortlisted in the Tasmanian Literary Prizes for 2013.
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