RECENT WORK

 

Whispering Road, an essay in Meanjin (paywalled).

The road from Dodges Ferry is a long black line that curls around the water. Soon it will be thicker, with new lanes drawn beside it. It’s a growing area, half an hour’s drive from the city. You can wander down to the beach and smell the seaweed, drop your thongs and pick your way over small stones that press into your feet; then jump into the cold water and try to forget the skates lounging nearby.

 

The Wind Is Trying To Kill Us, experimental nature writing in The Saturday Paper.

The wind is trying to kill us. Here in the loose forest that has been shaken and then shaken again, so that trees and bushes and rocks have fallen down the back of the slope’s couch and vanished; perhaps blown by that wind, or perhaps the ridge rolled them off as it turned over and went back to sleep.

 

The Switch, a short story in Phase Change: Imagining Energy Futures (print)

Today it is snowing, so Harry and I watch the flakes melt into the surface of the water. Harry drives the bus and I do the spiels. Sometimes we swap but it never goes well – Harry gets his dates mixed up and I crash into huge fucking rocks that seem to come out of nowhere; mostly when I turn around and frown about the dates. We only change it up when we really need a break and there aren’t many punters asking tricky questions.

 

SELECTED WORK, ORDERED BY PUBLICATION

Antipodes

• Issue 33:2: “Stump Psalm” (Poem).
• Issue 33:1: “We May Warm Ourselves” (fiction).

Australian Book Review

• Five poems in States of Poetry 2: Tasmania.

Australian Poetry Journal

• Issue 8.2: “Rocky Whelan’s Cave” (poem).
  

Award Winning Australian Writing

• 2015: “The Face of the Derwent” (short story).
  

Best Australian Science Writing

• 2018: “Speak for the Trees” (essay).

Best Summer Stories (Black Inc, 2018)

• “Unbury Me” (fiction).

The Big  Issue

• Issue 605: “To Bee or Not to Bee” (Essay).
• Issue 593, 2019 Fiction Edition: “The Slide” (Fiction).

The Canary Press

• Issue 4: “Smooth Green Skin” (prose poem).

The Canberra Times

• June 19 2021: “There is Always More Than One Canopy” (poem).

The Centre for Stories

• “The Quietness of Giving Up Writing” (essay).

Chart Collective

• “Step and Then Step”  (nature writing).

Cordite Poetry Review

• “South”  (poem).
• “The Tall Man”  (poem).
• “My Dad and I Are Discussing His Olympic Career” (Flash fiction).
• “The Land as Breath” (essay).
• “Mt Frederick”  (poem).
• “Pale and Cold” (prose poem).
• “Another Story” (poem).
• “This Wealth of When”  (poem).

Dark Mountain (UK)

• Issue 20: “For The Perishable Body” (experimental nature prose).

Griffith Review

• “The Bridge” (fiction).

The Guardian

• . “Speak for the Trees” (essay extract).

Island

• Issue 158: “Beast Evolving” (experimental nature prose).
• Issue 156: “Hidden in the Bush: In Search of Australian Nature Writing” (essay).
• Issue 153: “The Loyalist” (poem).
• Issue 153: “Unbury Me” (fiction).
• Issue 150: “Sedgeland Nation” (poem).
• Issue 147: “Landscape within Landscapes” (fiction).
• Issue 138: “An Anti-Glacier Book” (fiction).
• Issue 133: “The Battlements of Raoul” (essay).
• Issue 130: “The Angels” (fiction).

Kill Your Darlings

• Issue 17: “The Lake” (fiction).

The Lifted Brow

• Issue 34: “Jackpot” (flash fiction).
• Issue 18: “A Field Guide to the Huts of Mt. Wellington: 1913″ (fiction).

Lithub (US)

• “Beast Evolving” (fiction).

Mascara Literary Review

• Issue 16: “Winding the Land” (fiction).

Meanjin

• “Whispering Road” (essay).
• “Tempting the Pest” (experimental nature prose).
• “An Irrelevant State” (essay).
• “Atlantis Minor” (experimental nature prose).
• “What I’m Reading” (essay).
• “Flathead Out One Day” (fiction).
• “Cladding Sentiment” (poem).
• “Speak for the Trees” (essay).
• “Days of Yielding” (fiction).

New Australian Fiction

• 2021: “Flash and Glow” (fiction).

Overland

• “The Oysters Roar” (poem)
• “The Economist” (fiction).
• “On the Defunding of Island Magazine” (essay).
• “The Myth of the Vogel” (essay).
• “We Are All Superman”  (fiction).
• “You Can be a Successful Writer, But Only if You Live in Melbourne or Sydney” (essay).
• “All Hollows” (fiction).
• “It’s All Happening Here” (fiction – also produced for Radio National).
• “Hymns” (poem).
• “What Fear Was” (fiction).

Phase Change (Tenth Planet Press, 2022)

• “The Switch” (fiction).

Plumwood Mountain

• Issue 7.1: “Orchidacean Footholds” (poetry).

Review of Australian Fiction

• “The Eradication Program” (fiction).
• “Algae” (fiction).

The Saturday Paper

• “The Wind is Trying to Kill Us” (experimental nature writing).
• “For the Perishable Body” (experimental nature writing).

Southerly

• Issue: 77.2: “Mt Styx” (poem).
• Issue 76.1: “Intertextual Reservations” (poem).
• “Pads”  (Poem: Long Paddock).
• Issue 74.1: “Joseph Hooker’s Hands” (poem).

Westerly

• Issue 60.1: “Timing the River” (fiction).

Contact me:

e. hello@ben-walter.com
t. @ben_walter