Marion May Campbell

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Biographical note:  Currently living in Melbourne Marion May Campbell grew up in Sydney and Perth. Her novels Lines of Flight (1985), Not Being Miriam (1988), Prowler (1999) and Shadow Thief (2006) have been shortlisted for major Austalian awards and twice for the Canada-Australia Literary Award. Not Being Miriam won the 1989 Western Australian Literary Week Award for Fiction. Two works for the theatre, Dr Memory in the Dream Home (1990) and Ariadne’s Understudies (1992) were performed at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. She has taught Creative Writing at Murdoch University and the University of Melbourne.

Biographical note:  

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714308
ISBN:  9781844714308
Author:  Marion May Campbell
Title:  Fragments from a Paper Witch
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Dec-08
Extent:  192pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  18 mm
Weight:  288 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 26.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Why Fragments from a Paper Witch? Through paper encounters we can ignite, meld, metamorphose returning utterly altered. These pieces are about the struggle to resist crippling expectations and cultural framings, but they also explore a range of modes of being (and un-becoming) a woman in passion and in grief, in the flesh and on paper. For me to write is to discover rather than to depict, to connect with new possibilities and new modes of being, but also to explore the underside, the savage side of familial and social relations, where the protective ‘cosies’ of the self are shed and, skinless, one finds new grafts beginning to take. These works at times literally use graft, or other writers’ words to commemorate amorous connections impossible without the ardour of paper encounters. In her preface Gail Jones writes, These are encounters which stimulate intellectual and affective jubilation (another of the writer’s favourite words). […] there is also here a kind of literary cruising, writing as charged transfer, as the vigilant address of arousing desire. Campbell’s oeuvre is essentially of this order. I commend this luminous volume to readers in the fervent hope it will elevate her to wider notice and confirm her reputation as a major Australian writer.

Table of contents:
Preface to Marion Campbell's Fragments from a Paper Witch
1 MYTHTAKEN
A for Ariadne
To sing your sire in
Icarus
Walpurgisdunkel
the word here
2 SPECTACULAR MOTHERHOOD
Time Inside
Spectacular Motherhood
postnatal blue
the future is a practised hand
there is no electric miracle
Her own elastic sentence
3 THAT HORIZONTAL VERTIGO
Unnaming Maria
Fragments from a paper witch
1999
Other languish
Nightfill
4 WHITE PICKETS AND RAZOR WIRE
The Half-Life of Creonite
white window shopping
5 CROSSING
beach riding lesson
the prowler
Nuit bis
i, of the swarm
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

Time Inside

In the sun-slatted room, listen:
the little cat licks, purrs

stops absent-mindedly.
Eyes narrowed, she suspends you

in amber warmth, lets day fold over you
until in any mother’s belly dark

you’re less alert to sharp vowels
of children in their bright space

far from yours. Now deep inside the water bowl
receiving only mirrored skies

you hold at bay all that’s compass slavery:
sextant, vector, set course.

Somewhere else, heaping up
are punctual calls unheeded

terminal clauses tangling.
Here, only tidal intentions:

sea’s surge & trough or wave slap.
Glad within this time sack

that is your life
turned back so future edge, edge past

touch to make the loop now
time out, you are

amniotically buoyed
& rhythmed by the not-you

beating in your belly
humming in the traffic’s wake.

Previous review quote:  Campbell is experimental and adventurous with words and launches often into unexpected riffs, her writing gathering steam as she moves further and further into her subjects’ moody and intense interior worlds.

The Bulletin

Previous review quote:  Campbell strives for and attains the thwarted and transgressive articulations of a William Faulkner.

The Age

Previous review quote:  This marvellously rich work.

Philip Mead
The UTS Review of Cultural Studies and New Writing

Previous review quote:  Marion Campbell uses language in a fluid and engaging way, mixing rich, poetic prose and inflammatory use of the vernacular at will.

Bruce Russell
Antipodes

Previous review quote:  Campbell’s is a thoroughly feminist voice. Her books are manifestations of female fluidity of thought… She has a genuine ability to create characters through insight and empathy.

Leslie Walters
Australian Women’s Book Review

Previous review quote:  ‘Prowler’ is good writing (…) because it explores a fundamental emotional truth: the rift in every individual which is both excavated and healed by these lethal connections to life and to others.

Carolyn Bliss
World Literature Today

Previous review quote:  Campbell’s writing is dazzling. For virtuoso performance there is no one to compare her with other than Janet Frame.

Stephanie Dowrick
Vogue Australia

Previous review quote:  A work of wit and audacity, power and complexity, a dance, celebrating and justifying the women’s stories it tells.

Delys Bird
The Good Reading Guide

Previous review quote:  Marion Campbell’s inventiveness, intelligence, ear for language, absolutely fine descriptive faculty and more, make Not Being Miriam a masterpiece.

John Weyland
The West Australian

Previous review quote:  A fiercely intelligent novel.

Dinny O’Heane
The Good Reading Guide