Circular Feed

Background: Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now (1986), Kwame Appiah’s Making Conversation (2006), Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) form key influences on the research methods and craft choices of Circular Feed, specifically in terms of linguistic and aesthetic innovation as alternative method of reader engagement. While narratives around dehumanisation of detention center refugees proliferate in Australian media, there are very few fictionalised accounts that adequately represent the fragility of that experience to a larger readership. Contribution: Circular Feed utilises an innovative aesthetic of a collective narrator’s perspective, resembling a Greek chorus. The varying individuation and deindividuation of multiple characters without a singular protagonist is an experimental but aesthetically accurate form of depicting the general public perception of detention centre refugees, as a collective monolithic whole with very little points of individual separation. Eventually forming one of the stories in my collection, this craft method brings in an acute realism to a fictionalised account that challenges reader habits of conventional narratives, and thereby conveying the irony of dehumanisation through aesthetic innovation. Significance: The story was commissioned by Martin Alexander, the editor of Asia Literary Review, for its Summer 2016 issue. Considered the ‘Granta of Asia’, the publication has featured works and interviews by Aung San Su Kyi, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Seamus Heaney, Bei Dao and Lio Xiaobo. The story in the collection was reviewed in TEXT Journal as “a confronting story…whose names are all etched into the conscience of readers in this razor-sharp tale” (Burns 2019)