Julianne Schultz

Well, it was a great gift being able to do Griffith Review with that intensity for that length of time.

And because we started early on with the notion that we would adopt a themed approach, but that the themes would be designed to stretch your brain and provide different entry points.

So it was never just a journal that had a theme and we're going to have 25 different essays about climate change, for instance, or whatever the topic was.

But it was always designed to have memoir and fiction and poetry and some visual stuff, you know, as well as the sort of analytical essays.

So in terms of the way it changed my reading, every edition required me to do a crash course in whatever that subject was.

So I think that what it was was a gift that gave me the opportunity to read much more deeply and much more expansively into areas of great common, of importance in a way that you wouldn't do if you were just, you know, it was just a job or something.

When we first started, I remember David Gaunt from Glee Books saying people are looking for their tribe and they're looking for people who are as expansive as they are in the topics that they're interested in.

So they're looking for other people who are engaged around these issues.

And something that became very clear to me at that point was that the people come at these subjects, you know, these big issues of the day, you know, big cultural and political and social issues.

They come at them from all different perspectives.

And so realising that, it made me think that people both read and write differently.

So one of the things, for instance, you talk about how things have changed.

One of the things that I realised quite early on was that when I was, for instance, talking to academics, and there were no metrics in an academic profile that gave them any points at all for doing the sort of writing that Griffith Review was.

Early on, we did have a good ARC ranking, but that changed with policy changes.

But there was nothing that really gave them an incentive to engage in the public domain.

So trying to find a way of getting people who are thinking deeply and researching deeply about really big issues, but giving them a way in which they could engage in the public domain, I think actually did change the way some people wrote quite significantly.

And so I remember having conversations with people and saying, look, what is the personal thing in your life?

You know, where has your interest, your intense interest in this really pretty technical subject, where has that come from?

And always there would be a kernel of something that had happened that had triggered their interest that had then taken them into a particular path.

So opening the door that said, actually, you can write about that as well as writing about the big issue.