Julianne Schultz

And so I'd sort of very early on said, no, no, we've got to have fiction in it.

I mean, partly because I think it's a really important, you know, it is its own art form and needs to be there.

Partly, and I think this was in the preface that we had at the front of the journal at the time, you needed the emotional insights that came from a novelist and you needed the imagination that came there.

You needed the sort of factual analysis that came from essayists.

There was a series of sort of categorisations that we put in.

to that description of what the journal was trying to do.

And the concentration that poetry can bring.

Absolutely.

Yeah, that's right.

But the other thing which I think is really interesting is that often what you find, and I've found this now, you know, repeatedly, is that a writer is playing around with an idea, you know, what the big idea is that they're sort of, you know,

And it might well be that they write it as a piece of non-fiction, you know, early on, as part of that sort of sifting and sorting that goes on in their brain.

I mean, the best example, I think, in many ways, in a contemporary sense, is Holly Ringland.

So Holly wrote her first piece of published, you know, professionally published work for us, which was about living in the desert.

And it was for the Looking West edition that we did in conjunction with Curtin University years ago.

And that was, you know, I met her at a conference about fairy tales.

She said, I've got a story that I think you might like.

I looked at it.

I said, yes, this is fabulous.

It went in The Looking West.

We then, you know, kept in touch with her and gave her various fellowships and published her in various other forms.