Tag Archives: short story

Today I have a new story published in Issue #6 of Tincture Journal: The Cicada Clock.

Tincture Journal (@TinctureJournal) is a relatively new Australian-based literary magazine, edited by Daniel Young (@jazir1979), Stuart Barnes (@StuartABarnes) and Jessica Hoadley (@JessicaHoadley)

My story, The Cicada Clock also seems to have inspired the front cover.

Image copyright of Stuart Barnes

I also get to share the Table of Contents with Brisbane-based authors I know, Stacey Larner and Tiggy Johnson.

From the Tincture Journal website:

Issue Six of Tincture Journal is available now. To celebrate the launch of this issue, an interview between Stuart Barnes and poet Stu Hatton is now freely available on our website along with the rest of our interview series. Inside the issue you can also find Stuart’s interview with Nathanael O’Reilly. Both of these poets have new books being released this year and we are very excited to be featuring their poetry and the accompanying interviews.

Table of Contents

• Editorial, by Daniel Young
• Inferior Bedrooms, Part Six, by Meg Henry
• The Horror of the Body, by Sam van Zweden
• Waiting, by Tiggy Johnson
• The Interesting People of Mount Kiliminjaro, by Stephen Koster
• Christian Girls, by Nathanael O’Reilly
• I Was Not Like the Other Kids, by Nathanael O’Reilly
• Nathanael O’Reilly interviewed by Stuart Barnes
• The Cicada Clock, by Adam Byatt
• Spash, by Les Wicks
• Carnival, by Beau Boudreaux
• Rain of Ashes, by Rhys Timson
• It’s a Marilyn Free-For-All, by John Grey
• The Man Who Killed James Dean, by Sam Ferree
• Back to Front, by Nathan Hondros
• Memory, by Andrew Hutchinson
• hail the goer, by Stu Hatton
• i sit unfinished    in breath-, by Stu Hatton
• A Look of Revelation, by Deborah Guzzi
• The Favour, by Annette Siketa
• Circles, by w.m.lewis
• Only After School, by Anna Ryan-Punch
• Mrs Fernandez, by Su-May Tan
• The Happy Mule, by Frank Scozzari
• Proximity, by S. G. Larner
• White Noise, by Eleanor Talbot
• It’s An Adventure If You Want It To Be, by Calista Fung

I hope to post a review of the issue next week; I’ve already read a few pieces and there is some amazing work.

Can I please encourage you, if you are a reader, to support small literary magazines whenever you can as they are vital in building our literary culture. A copy will only set you back $8 (and back issues are only $5). There is a wealth of reading material in a superb range of short stories, poetry and interviews.

But a bit of background to the story (and no spoilers).

I wrote the story in January when on holidays on the beach in Brunswick Heads, just north of Byron Bay in New South Wales, Australia.

I forget which book I was reading (I was working through three) but it had  a line about cicadas and the image stuck. I began the story on my iPad, throwing down scenes and ideas about two childhood friends in their final year of primary school, prior to starting “big school” the following year. It is set in the late 80s, a time of nostalgia for me (but it’s not autobiographical).

It took a while to find the focus of the story, utilising the cicada as a metaphor of adolescent metamorphosis, framed by school as the awkward ground of burgeoning adolescence and puberty, mixed with the innocent acceptance of life as it is and a burgeoning awareness of sexuality.

I made the conscious decision to write this story in a different style; to forgo my usual poetic, flowery prose and instead strip it back to bare, almost minimalistic sentences. I have a tendency to use imagery prolifically in my stories; here I pared it back to single images or none at all. Instead I wanted the action and dialogue to create the characters, setting, thematic focus and subtext of the narrative. It was to mimic the headspace of the pre-teen protagonists, letting the story unfold through their eyes.

I hope I can encourage you to purchase Issue Six of Tincture Journal, support literary magazines and enjoy the literary delights.