The first issue of Splinter features a piece on international law’s failure in Gaza – written by poet and human rights lawyer Sara M Saleh – alongside near-future dystopian fiction about YouTube influencers, America’s gun control debate and cannibalism; and a story of foot sex (and grief) during Grey’s Anatomy reruns.
There’s nothing else like it in Adelaide – partly because it’s the first local literary journal to go into print since 2012, and the first published by Writers SA in the organisation’s near-40-year history.
The “sharp and hard to ignore” new literary mag will be published biannually by Writers SA with support from Flinders University, Uni SA, the University of Adelaide and Arts SA. It’s fair to say it’s a milestone for Adelaide’s writing scene.
“The need for a literary journal published out of Tarntanya is something that’s been talked about in writing circles for a long time,” says Splinter editor Farrin Foster. She’s also the founding editor of Citymag, a documentary filmmaker and a longtime champion of print media.
“I think everybody working in the literary scene in South Australia is working with very few resources trying to make a lot out of a little. And that means their capacity to help shepherd emerging writers, or even more established writers, through the process of navigating the literary industry is pretty low. The journal is another avenue for people to see themselves published and feel they have someone to talk to about how to get published.”
It will also facilitate and nurture early-to-mid-career editors by giving industry experience to an 11-strong volunteer editorial committee.
The 192-page first issue features new fiction, non-fiction, poetry and literary criticism from 25 writers around Australia – including seven from SA – Nigeria and Berlin. There’s an essay on sonic environmental destruction; a critique of the Eurocentric lens often applied to First Nations work; and a piece that asks why literary sad girls are having such uninspiring sex.
“As an editor coming from a journalism and magazine background rather than coming from inside the literary tent, I wanted to make it super approachable, maybe a little bit fun,” says Foster. “There are literary journals who have elements of that, but among the print journals there’s a lot of focus on really excellent writing and really big thinking on complex issues. Which Splinter definitely wants to engage with. But we want to make sure we’re doing that in a way that brings in a bit of humour as well as that intellect and intellectual rigour.”
The mag is a product of its time, directly engaging with the state of the world right now, including the ongoing issue of perception versus reality, says Foster. “Like, explorations of whether there is any such thing as an objective reality, and what happens is when your perception starts to flip.
“When I realised people who are on the extreme other end of the spectrum to me often also think they are doing the right thing and they’re looking at the same information but taking away an entirely different narrative, I was like, ‘What do we do about this as a species?’ We can put some conversations about that in a journal, I’m sure that will help,” she jokes.
As for the name Splinter? “I wanted it to feel kind of urgent and grippy,” says Foster. “I was thinking about a word that had that sense of being niggly. One of the other things I like about Splinter is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reference.”
