All of Our Selves

Edited by Marise Phillips

Centre for Stories

In her foreword to this engaging and surprising new anthology of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and screenplay published by Centre for Stories, editor Marise Phillips notes that the stories therein seek to find value in the parts of ourselves we typically try to hide, particularly the pain and loneliness of the “human condition.”

She goes on to describe the writers as having the “courage of conquerors” to explore difficult topics like “mental illness, war and its detritus, heartbreak (and) childhood fears.” Ultimately it is the idea of a singular self which is challenged. Echoing Walt Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes,” Phillips posits that the collection challenges the idea of a singular self, instead promoting the concept that “we all have multiple selves.”

Thus, this anthology provides terrific value for money. For you’re not just getting the work of 21 writers, but of potentially hundreds.

Phillips’ ordering of the pieces is well considered, the whole forming a tonally modulating suite which urges the reader gently yet fervently on towards the final page.

Jordanian/Iranian writer Lobna Rouhani’s opening story On Grief and Love sets the stage: “Amal and Amina grew up in chaos. But in the best type of chaos. They shared a three-bedroom house with their parents, four brothers, grandfather, and their grandfather’s beloved parrot.” A bittersweet tale of bereavement and familial bonds, it reminds us that “there is no need to rush through life.”

Nyungar technologist and digital writs activist Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker’s dystopian vision of an all-too-near future, Constellate is powerful, poetic and prescient, “At dusk the hours are liquid and liminal,” “Timber shakes to the tune of memories,” “Messages failed and their contents lay constellate among waves,” “The Country beneath my feet is ancestral substrate.”

And in disability advocate Jaylan Lee’s selection of poetry, we hear a voice finding hope, love and inspiration in the world and the people beyond the embodied self, an expansive vision of inter- and intrapersonal growth in which happiness looks like hope, like “A whale. Big and powerful,” feels “like a butterfly flying around./Both are magnificent,” and where perhaps that same butterfly is, in the poem Victory: Meet My Superhero, “a woman/who is a social butterfly,” “And, we are best friends.”

So many stories, so many selves, from others including Carly Beth, Jose Da Costa, Daniel Hansen, Melanie Hobbs, Randa Khamis, Megan Ugle, Syarisa Yasin and more. All, as Karen Escobar writes in Bite, invite us to “Bite my skin/and tell me what you take/so I may tell myself who I am.”

All of Our Selves (RRP $24.95) is available directly from Centre for Stories and from selected Perth bookstores.