One lifetime is not enough, for all my words – Koraly Dimitriadis

Sacked by Overland

March 11, 2012 at 8:34 am (Creative commentary) (blogging, overland, voluteer bloggers, women minority writers, women writers, writers from cultural backgrounds)

On reading the title of this post you might instantly think ‘soar grapes’ but the truth is, I still love Overland. I’ve loved every minute of blogging for them, even when I was criticised and slammed. I always listened and tried to understand every opinion. It’s all about learning and growing for me. I wanted to blog for Overland more regularly but couldn’t for financial reasons, since we didn’t get paid and I’m a single mother trying to make a living from my writing. But in the interests of public debate, I feel what has happened should be brought out into the open and discussed. And I am sure everyone at Overland knows I am not one to sit on my opinions.

On Friday I, along with some of the other Overland volunteer bloggers including Maxine Clarke who has been blogging for the journal since 2007, received a courteous email from Overland explaining a few things. Firstly, that Overland have decided to ‘close the group blog’ because it has been a ‘hard beast to keep going’. I entirely agree with this and have really felt for the paid blog editor, Jacinda Woodhead, and the work involved in keeping tabs on all the bloggers and editing the tonnes and tonnes of content. In the early days of the blog there were only a handful of bloggers which included the editors at Overland. I started in 2009. The bloggers had the keys to the blog. Bloggers could express their views without boundaries and be as creative as they desired. I especially enjoyed Maxine’s punchy political poems. Sometimes a poem is more effective than an article. The writing was uncensored and Overland was about freedom of speech. Back then the blog had personality, which I believe, was then diluted by all the bloggers they brought on, all the content, and the editing restrictions placed on us. There are too many voices, too many posts, which is why I agree with the decision that it was time for a change.

But what really had me stop and question was that they had ‘received a small amount of funding from Arts Victoria to hire four ongoing reviewers’ and they are also going to be ‘recruiting seven political bloggers’. But no invitation was extended to me or any of the other bloggers I spoke to who received the email. I was offered a yearly subscription to the journal for my troubles, even though in the past, I was told that in order to blog for the journal I had to be a subscriber. The email also mentioned the names of the four hand-picked reviewers, important names, bigger names than me(well, definitely less controversial). The email also said they would be redesigning the website to make it more ‘professional’. Yes, the photo of me stabbing Ben with my stiletto was probably not what they were hoping for. Or my post on poetry or pornography which has generated over 108 comments to date, more comments than I have seen on Overland in a long time.    

I really don’t want to personalise this. I have no hard feelings towards Jeff Sparrow, the chief editor for Overland. I know he is trying to do the best job he can do given the difficult climate in the publishing world. He gave me this great opportunity after I was awarded a spot in the Overland master class in 2009 and I am thankful. But back in 2010, Jeff posted an article on Overland about blogging and payment. In the article he explains that Overland can’t pay bloggers because they don’t have the funds. But clearly now they have the funds and they have decided to pass those funds onto new bloggers who have not contributed to building up the blog’s audience. Does this mean that all bloggers out there, blogging for free, are working hard to build audiences in the hope they will one day be paid for their work only to be replaced with bigger names when the money does come along? 

Clare Strahan, editor of Overland’s recent publication, Women’s Work, writes ‘The underrepresentation of women in writing is something with which Overland has long been concerned. We’ve debated this inequality in the Overland online community…’ I plan to read and review this collection but on face value I can already see a few things. There was no call-out made for submissions to this publication. It includes a handful of writers: Anne Hotta, Georgina Luck, Helen Addison-Smith, Susie Greenhill and Cheryl Adam. A glance at the surnames tells you that the group are not from diverse, cultural backgrounds. Reading the review on Crikey I can come to the conclusion that their intention to ‘explore our contemporary relationship with the natural world, with gender, privilege and loneliness, and ask what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world’ means they have omitted stories from strong, challenging, confronting female voices breaking boundaries in their lives and through their writing. It’s just the same predictable voice, and the title they have used really fits that premise.

So then I ask, are Overland really supporting women? Or just supporting women that fit the role of what society believe women should write? With the decision they have made they have chosen to silence at least three very strong female voices from different backgrounds: Trish Bolton, Maxine Clarke and myself. When blogger Mark William Jackson reviewed my book, Love and Fuck Poems on Overland, he named the review ‘a voice that demands to be heard’. Well not so as it would seem. It’s a passionate, woman’s voice that needs to be silenced with bigger PhD names. The latest stats show us that the odds are against you if you are a female writer in this industry. Try being a female writer from a migrant background. I’d like to see the stats on that.

What I will miss most about Overland is the ability to be able to post commentary that challenges the academic, literary community and beyond. Instead I will write here on my own blog and hope the audience will follow. But in my opinion, Overland may be aligned to the left politically but creatively they are very much aligned to the right, and this sadness me. If the creative revolution was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen at Overland. But for me, they don’t live up to the slogan of ‘radical culture’ and don’t embody the literary journal I thought they were back when I took part in the master class. All you have to do is look at the print journal’s fiction and poetry to see it is traditional and makes no attempt to break creative boundaries. The myth has been dispelled. Once again, conservatism wins the race.

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