Verge 2021: Home

Description

The death of a bird haunts the relationship between two siblings. A lonely narrator waits for a bus that never comes. A boy makes soup with his grandmother and wonders about the memories she has buried. For the sixteenth edition of Verge, we asked contributors to reflect on the theme of Home, a word that took on a new meaning after a year of solitude and separation. We chose this theme because we hoped to read about homes of all kinds: unhomely homes, abandoned homes, unlikely homes, forgotten homes, found homes. And we were awed by the beauty, depth and variety in the pieces we received. Our writers explored homes of past, present and future; they probed the bleakness of domesticity and mourned the loss of what was once held close. They wrote about familial ties and found communities, about the painfulness of childhood and the bonds of ancestry. Writing, indeed, to make a home in.

Jessica Phillips is a PhD candidate in Literary Studies at Monash University. Her thesis examines empathy between human and nonhuman animals in contemporary Australian literature. She works as an editor in youth mental health research and her non-fiction writing has been published in Overland. Anders Villani holds an MFA from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program, where he received the Delbanco Prize for poetry. His first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press. A PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Monash University, he lives in Melbourne. www.andersvillani.com. Georgia White is a writer, editor and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is currently completing a PhD in Literary Studies, examining space, mobility and gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic texts. Her writing has appeared in Australian Book Review, Overland and SBS Voices, amongst others.