Entering the Liminal Cinematic Universe
By Tara Kenny
Journalist Tara Kenny surveys the Liminal Festival, capturing minor details and hefty conversations.
Back in March, while heavily pregnant, I heroically attended Liminal’s seventh birthday soiree at Collingwood’s Panacea bar. When Saraid de Silva shared a passage from her debut novel Amma, which translates to ‘mother’ in Sinhalese, it felt like she was speaking directly to me. Reading the book the following week, I happened upon the character Nisha, ‘who burns so bright everyone around her is harder to see’, and so my son was named. Which all goes to say, I approached the inaugural Liminal Festival ready, willing and able to have my life similarly changed.
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Friday Night | 2 August
Scoping the room, I’m struck by the formidable size of the crowd and its makeup of both classic Liminal readers (young and young-adjacent Asians and their friends, all hot) and Wheeler Centre heads (white-haired retirees with ample time for reading). While Liminal started as a series of interviews with Asian Australians who deserved attention that they weren’t necessarily receiving elsewhere, it has since expanded into a complex literary cinematic universe that, although still by and for Asian and other writers of colour, is now beloved around the country by readers with impeccable taste.
Where Acknowledgements of Country at these things are often perfunctorily bumbled through, Indigenous Elder Aunty Diane Kerr opens the night with a Welcome to Country with care and specificity, locating the site where we’re gathered as the traditional land of her mother, grandmother and ancestors’ family before ‘offering her hand in friendship so we can all journey together.’ Leah Jing McIntosh, Liminal founding editor, follows by reflecting that the independent publishing game is not about the destination, but rather, the friends you make along the way. She’s partway through a rousing bit about how if Liminal is done right, it eventually won’t need to exist, when I’m distracted by the rogue shutter noise of a phone camera. A couple who—based on familial resemblance and enthusiasm—I surmise to be Leah’s parents, are proudly snapping photos while their (presumed other) daughter reprimands them. While these days, the word ‘community’ is bandied about so freely that it’s come to feel null and void, this is an intergenerational family affair. I swear I hear a baby sweetly cooing somewhere in the distance and testament to the safety of the space, there is no Arj Barker-coded heckling.
Reading from her essay on the relentless drudgery of wage slavery, Cher Tan habitually casts her eyes sideways and scrunches her face, giving the impression that she’s both perplexed and displeased to find herself in command of a simping audience. ‘I’m excited about this festival… which I don’t often say about literary festivals,’ she offers, which from Tan counts as gushing praise. Michael Sun also affirms the festival’s leadership in ‘daring to imagine what a literary festival looks like… without Julia Baird or Chris Tsiolkas.’ Where writers (e.g. me) tend to be miserably incapable of vocalising their work in a way that justifies the format of a literary reading, witnessing Manisha Anjali’s performance is a full body — dare I say, ASMR — experience. She makes the phrase ‘Red 1982 Toyota Starlet’ sound enchanted and enchanting. When Brian Castro takes to the stage with a messenger bag slung across his shoulder, as if prepared to make a swift getaway, I’m immediately charmed. He reads a masterful excerpt from his upcoming novel, Chinese Postman, the cover of which displays the titular character sporting a messenger bag. (His marketing team should make merch.) And while I’m somehow oblivious, a quick Google reveals him to be the author of thirteen books, and the first non-white writer to win a literary prize in Australia (for his 1982 debut novel Birds of Passage). Which begs the question, how was I forced to read two Tim Winton books in high school but no Brian Castro?
Later, over competitively-priced champagne from a mini bar by The Moat, I intercept Michael Sun to praise his performance and he insists that his musings on the twin pleasures of loving Julia Fox and being a horrible housemate were mere comic relief among a series of increasingly devastating readings. While Liminal’s editorial lens skews political and experimental, part of what makes it such a pleasure to read and write for is the editors’ willingness to trust and provide space for writers to interrogate their obsessions, however niche and arguably deranged. Case in point: my crazed ramblings on Schapelle Corby, Britney Spears, Prince Harry and Paris Hilton’s memoirs have found a perhaps unlikely home within the Liminal Review of Books. (Although Harry claims to be anti-racist, famously, none of these figures are Asian).
In the lobby, I find Leah with her sister (confirmed), who has flown in from New York to surprise her, tulips in hand. Leah introduces me to the promising young Iowa Writers’ Workshop-pedigreed novelist Raeden Richardson. When I beg off getting a drink downstairs, because I have to put my literal baby to bed, Leah waves me off, saying, ‘I guess this is my baby.’ It’s unclear whether she’s talking about Liminal or Raeden, but I approve either way.
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Saturday | 3 August
Back at it the next morning, only slightly late for ‘Language Under Occupation’, the room is once again impressively bustling, especially given it’s pre-noon on a Saturday. Evelyn Araluen, Mykaela Saunders and the festival’s producer Hasib Hourani share their collective desire to write for their own people, whether mob or their funniest relatives, and the irritation of being misconstrued by critics (as a critic, I’m deeply suspicious of the latter position). When Brian Castro slinks in, someone reverently stage-whispers, ‘That’s Brian Castro.’ Bow down bitches, bow down.
Outside, The Paris End writer Sally Olds is chatting to my long lost primary school friend Robert, who’s here to support his girlfriend Bella Li, who’s about to speak on the ‘Visions & Revisions’ panel. Robert and Sally’s girlfriend Kat concur that it feels good to be a literary WAG. As I take my seat inside, I snoop at the WhatsApp correspondence of the elder statesmen to my left (in my defence, his phone text is tantalisingly large). He and his confidante are discussing their linguistic pet hates; namely, when people misuse the phrase ‘which begs the question’. Later, when Lucy Van utters those very words, I look over to find my neighbour aggressively texting. The session mainly consists of a live, close reading of Lisa Gorton’s ‘Empirical I’ from her collection Empirical. This is a festival ‘for readers and writers’ and while I fancy myself both, all this talk of syntax and stanzas almost makes me break out in hives, personally victimised for my shabby command of the English language. I’m welcomed back in when James Jiang drops a Tinashe reference, describing a good editor as someone who ‘can match my freak… but with a good technique’, while animatedly wagging his finger.
That afternoon, Brian Castro, Jessica Au and André Dao agree that the great Australian novel is nothing to aspire towards. Brian goes further, recommending the freedom of writing from the position of ‘a failure in the world’, nationally and personally. Cher Tan echoes this sentiment during ‘Critical Limit’, when she deadpans that she was ‘hoping for more negative reviews of her book’. (Writer and ex-Frankie editor Emma Do assures me that while people are always misreading Cher as sarcastic, she’s ‘actually so earnest’, suggesting Tan does genuinely loves her haters).
Poets Andrew Brooks and Elena Gomez begin ‘Writing Utopia’, the festival’s final in-person event, by acknowledging the discomfort of a literary gesture towards paradise in these times of war and crisis. They spend the session reading their correspondence, which includes poetry, interrogation of the validity of such poetry in the face of very material violence, and the chronicling of tender moments of reprieve. The care between them is palpable; Andrew treasures “Lenny” while she bosses him around like an older sister. I receive the conversation as a love letter to relational, process-oriented collaboration; if we are to go on living while immeasurable suffering rages around us, surely the only thing that makes it bearable is the striving towards something else, even when it feels futile.
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Sunday | August 4
Back in the safety of my lair, I fire up my laptop for Panda Wong and Jenny Zhang’s conversation, ‘Yesterday’s Goo’. I’m frightened because Leah has warned me that the chats are so scatalogical and while not much offends me, excrement does. I’m still scarred from reading New York literary darling Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, with its punishing, multi-page description of the protagonist taking a shit.
If anyone can help me unlearn my deeply internalised anti-defecation beliefs, it’s Jenny and Panda. They insist that while describing bodily functions may be uncouth, language is frequently used for far more morally reprehensible ends (currently, obfuscating a genocide through the passive voice). The pair venture that writing about shit is also an antidote to the most palatable genre of diasporic literature, which favours descriptions of emotionally unavailable immigrant parents showing love through cooking. The work of authors such as Michelle Zauner and Amy Tan is undeniably beautiful, but culinary delights shouldn’t be a prerequisite for immigrant characters to be afforded humanity. While white readers gobble up stories about immigrants labouring over “exotic” foods, some Asian diaspora writers love to talk about their bowel movements. Through conversations like this, Liminal pushes the boundaries of diasporic literature, championing writers who — like Jenny and Panda — would rather rhapsodise about what comes out of their bodies than what goes in. Consider me officially pro-potty mouth and undeniably altered for eternity.
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Tara Kenny is an arts and culture writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.
The Liminal Festival took place 2–4 August 2024, in partnership with The Wheeler Centre. This collection of work is in concert with, and responds to, the panels, conversations and provocations put forth by some of the nation’s most talented writers, artists and thinkers.
Find out more about the Liminal Festival here.