Shapeshifting: First Nations Lyric Nonfiction

by Ellen Van Neerven (Editor), Jeanine Leane (editor)

Shapeshifting, co-edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven, is a wide-ranging collection of nonfiction by First Nations writers that breaks new ground. These lyric essays push the boundaries of nonfiction beyond the biographical or the academic, with pieces that experiment with form and embark on carefully crafting and re-crafting interventions that both challenge and expand existing genre structures. Shapeshifting brings to the fore a whole new genre waiting to take shape, to be formed, informed and re-formed by First Nations Australian writers. Contributors include Charmaine Papertalk Green, Jim Everett, Jenni Martiniello, Natalie Harkin, Mykaela Saunders, Daniel Browning, Evelyn Araluen, Alison Whittaker, Rhianna Patrick, Melanie Saward, Timmah Ball and Hugo Comisari.

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

Ellen van Neerven (they/them) is an award-winning author, editor and educator of Mununjali (Yugambeh language group) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, and non-fiction on unceded Turrbal and Yuggera land. van Neerven’s first book, Heat and Light (UQP, 2014), a novel-in-stories, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. van Neerven’s poetry collection Comfort Food (UQP, 2016) won the Tina Kane Emergent Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize. Throat (UQP, 2020) is the recipient of Book of the Year, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, and the Multicultural Award at 2021 NSW Literary Awards, and the inaugural Quentin Bryce Award.

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I don’t wear my scars on the inside anymore. I am not afraid of being vulnerable, of being seen as weak. And if that means I am not a man in the eyes of other men, then I will die on the broken ice of the frozen archipelago. A real man feels and suffers and cries and shakes and winces and flinches and starts and self-soothes and flails and asks for help and breaks down and reconstitutes." - Daniel Browning
Some of this continent's best writers are collected into this volume, and it was a job trying to work out which ones to talk about. Well, not entirely, because Browning's ever-more-confident voice in Bundjalung for Queer, swoops and soars between sorrow and joy, love and fuck-you-all in ways that my words can't do justice too. And Alison Whittaker's searing Around the waist is one of those essays you feel you have lived life to read. I can't stop thinking about it. She brings such lyricism, propelled by this potent combination of power and vulnerability, that somehow seems to pass courage through the page. I'm probably not making sense, which again, just read the damn essay.
For others, Evelyn Araluen brings us a meditation of trying to live at a moment loaded with hopelessness (my words) "How will I remember this time in the long future? Will I think back with nostalgia, with a sad sorry fondness for the girl who tried to write herself into an understanding of a world that didn’t need to be distilled, but rather dismantled? Will I be angry for all the time I wasted not learning, not doing, not working? Will I remember what it was like to be afraid, to be lonely, to be so angry at my powerlessness against history, against the unending wars of modernity?."(her words) Futile rage feels less futile when rendered so lyrically.
And Jaenine Leane brings a cyclical, rythmic approach to calculating the spin of years in Power of Balance, along with Melanie Seward's poignant Future, Present, Past, one of the few contributions that builds memoir heavily in approach.
There is a lot here - this collection deserves some attention it seems not, so far, to have gotten. We are still learning, I think, how to listen to First Nations writers, without confining the kinds of narratives we expect. This collection is often surprising, and all great writing should be.

[lou garciadolnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this collection through twice. these essays are all bangers!!!

[emily faye · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5