Lost in Track Changes

by Cate Kennedy, Krissy Kneen, Simon Groth (Editor)

Cate Kennedy, Ryan O'Neill, Fiona Capp, Robert Hoge, and Krissy Kneen take the personal and intimate craft of memoir and turn it over to the cut-and-paste transformation of remix culture, combined with a hint of old-fashioned parlour games. Edited by Simon Groth, Lost in Track Changes begins with five vignettes, short pieces of memoir. Each of these texts is passed onto another author within the group, tasked with remixing or transforming it into something else. The newly minted remix is passed along again and so on until each of the original source texts have passed through all five authors in series. Lost in Track Changes follows the journey of each memoir piece through its transformation, with hints of the changes tracked between. The original print edition was published in softcover with wire spiral binding, notebook-style with margins wide enough to park a truck on. This new edition replaces the binding with something more traditional, but retains those enormous margins. It is a book in which you are encouraged to take part and make your own highlight, cross out, make additions, even tear whole pages out. Lost in Track Changes is your book. Where we go from here is up to you.

240 pages, Paperback

Published July 8, 2019

About the author

Cate Kennedy is an Australian author based in Victoria. She graduated from University of Canberra and has also taught at several colleges, including The University of Melbourne. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. It was also shortlisted for The Age fiction prize 2010 and the ASA Barbara Jefferis Award 2010, among others. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has twice won The Age Short Story Competition and has appeared in a range of publications, including The New Yorker. Her collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Cate is also the author of the travel memoir Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight and Signs of Other Fires. Her latest book is The Taste of River Water: New and Selected Poems by Cate Kennedy, which was published in May 2011 and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry.

Reviews

[shae ambry · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is good if you’re interested in the literary writing process and how writers can influence and alter each other’s work

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept of this book is both innovative and unusual. It’s difficult to rate because it wasn’t actually rivetting from cover to cover but it was interesting to see how the ideas unfolded.