We are excited to announce that Issue Eight is launched today! You can purchase it here or subscribe to the journal here.

Five of the issue’s pieces are now available online for free: click through to read them.

The edition kicks off with Maria Tumarkin’s lead essay, ‘Sublime and Profane: Our Contemporary Obsession with Food’, and continues with Clementine Ford remembering her time as a phone sex worker. Scott Steensma fights his sister for copies of Penthouse and Georgia Gowing visits the Catacombs of Paris.

In fiction, we’ve got an excerpt from Michael Sala’s forthcoming novel, and short fiction from Jessie Cole and Matthia Dempsey; and for our interview, we speak with author of The Life, Malcolm Knox. Don’t forget to check out Anthony Morris’ contemplation of good guys and bad guys in Justified and Breaking Bad, and Natalie Kon-yu’s reflections on reading Siri Hustvedt and Lionel Shriver.

So get into it! You know you want to.

‘Téléphone‘ by zigazou76 at flickr, CC BY 2.0

In our second Issue Eight sampler, Clementine Ford reminisces about pesto pasta, phone sex and other attempts at adulthood. Our final instalment of Issue Eight teasers is on its way – watch this space!

I’d moved out of home at the start of my second year at university, and the realities of fending for myself were moving into sharp focus. ‘Vegetables’ had become a thing of the past, a distant memory associated with heated living rooms, clean sheets and mothers who made sure you didn’t go to bed with wet hair. My housemate, Sim, and I had taken to cooking the same thing every night – a bag of pasta with a jar of pesto mixed in and half a block of grated cheese.

After dinner, we’d retreat to the back step to smoke cigarettes like the self-assured adults we felt certain we were. On the nights our boyfriends upset us (and Lord knows how we even had them), we’d disappear into Sim’s room and drink vodka straight from the bottle while Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Adia’ played on repeat behind us.

We are so grown up, we’d murmur to each other, reclining in poses we best thought reflected the bored wisdom of our years.

But it had to end. I didn’t have Sim’s metabolism or her genes. I didn’t look like Cate Blanchett in profile. I didn’t look effortlessly chic in my Bonds t-shirt and bootleg jeans. I looked like a freckled dugong in dire need of some vitamins and a decent bra. And for those things, I needed cash.

WANTED: Creative, open-minded ladies for friendly chat line. Enjoy flexible working hours, the potential for excellent salary and the freedom of working at home. Apply within.

The subtext might have been hidden behind a veneer of chirpy professionalism, but I was nobody’s fool. I wasn’t born yesterday. I didn’t have sucker written across my forehead. No, I cracked that code 23 right open. This was no ordinary chat line, set up to service all the lonely folk out there who just wanted a nice lady to workshop Harry Potter theories with, or debate the relative merits of savoury snacks versus sweet. This was a sex thing. They wanted creative, open-minded ladies to chat to men about sex. Harry Potter might come up, but it would likely be in the context of Sirius Black needing to be disciplined by a stern and uncompromising Professor McGonagall.

I could be that person, I reasoned. I could get inside the mindset of a disciplinarian like McGonagall, should it come up. I was creative. I was definitely open-minded, and I knew this because a few months prior I had pulled my top off in a glorious display of authoritarians-be-damned pique at Unibar and danced boisterously to Christina Aguilera’s ‘Come on Over’ in my brassiere. On a chair.

Better still, I now had some kind of practical experience with the whole sex thing. After spending my entire adolescence in the barren wilderness of the chronically untouched, I’d finally found a boy willing to not just press his lips against mine but his groin as well. It made a nice change from my school days, which had been characterised by my innate understanding that I was not the kind of girl who could expect a boy to find her physically attractive.

No, I’d been giving blow jobs and engaging in careful, consensual sex for the better part of two months. Who better than me to bestow their skills of lewd repartee and innuendo on the good men of Australia?

– Clementine Ford is a freelance writer and broadcaster living in Melbourne. She now has a pathological fear of answering the telephone, but this is less to do with erotica and more to do with debt collectors.

Pre-order Kill Your Darlings Issue Eight, or subscribe to the print journal here.

‘Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.’

My mother was fond of this quote. She was also fond of that one about success being ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration, and the one about doors and windows and imaginary men.

Unfortunately, the only quotes I’ve ever managed to commit to memory come from uncomfortably un-PC British comedies. This probably explains why my life has consisted of rather less perspiration, preparation and ensuing success, and rather more slothful couch-sitting, adolescent giggling and sexual fantasies involving Rowan Atkinson.

Had I paid more attention to my mother’s borrowed words of wisdom, I may have avoided the situation I now find myself in, again: essentially unemployed, largely unappreciated, and wholly dependent on government coin to keep me in house and home.

Read the whole of Clementine Ford’s Issue Three piece here.

‘Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.’

My mother was fond of this quote. She was also fond of that one about success being ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration, and the one about doors and windows and imaginary men.

Unfortunately, the only quotes I’ve ever managed to commit to memory come from uncomfortably un-PC British comedies. This probably explains why my life has consisted of rather less perspiration, preparation and ensuing success, and rather more slothful couch-sitting, adolescent giggling and sexual fantasies involving Rowan Atkinson.

Had I paid more attention to my mother’s borrowed words of wisdom, I may have avoided the situation I now find myself in, again: essentially unemployed, largely unappreciated, and wholly dependent on government coin to keep me in house and home.

After brief stints on welfare in both the early and middle parts of the noughties, I have returned once more to the ranks of the great unwashed. At the age of twenty-nine, with the notches of various careers marking the bed post, I find myself lining up at everyone’s favourite hellhole for my fortnightly dose of demoralisation. The dole can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Clementine Ford is a freelance writer from Adelaide who spends far too much time watching YouTube videos and drinking tea. She lives in hope that she may one day find gainful employment.

Format Festival‘s Academy of Words was held on 14th March. Panels were held all day at the zine space on Peel Street, Adelaide, including Criticism and Reviewing, It’s all gone Dave Eggers: the current state of literature in Australia and The Great Zine Explosion.

Clementine Ford (also a contributor to Issue One) spoke about mining the personal in her blog and freelance writing, and I spoke with Paul Callaghan about how similar writing video games is to other narrative forms of writing.

Download the podcast here. Podcasts are produced fortnightly.

Produced by Sam Szoke-Burke. Music by Pompey.

Finding Out by Kalinda Ashton

Love in a LOL-ed Climate: Internet Dating by Clementine Ford

‘Shit Never Fucking Changes’: The Enduring Pleasure of The Wire by Anthony Morris

Before I discovered that the lemons life throws at you are not always suitable for lemonade, I suppose I was like any typical girl who fancied she might one day get married.

It wasn’t a question of ‘if’ so much as ‘when’. Marriage seemed to be as much a natural, evolutionary progression of adulthood as the cessation of pimples or the ability to live away from one’s parents. I wasted little energy worrying about the fellow involved, imagining his entry into my life to be as perfunctorily inevitable as the very act of growing old. My husband would emerge into my life fully formed, the vagaries of courtship having been dealt with as if in a distant dream. One day I would be a young girl, allowed finally to wear her first lipstick; the next, I would be married.

Of course, the folly of youthful expectations never lends itself well to reality. Not only am I entering my twenty-ninth year convincingly single, I have discovered that there is no set date at which one can expect to be free from the brutal inconvenience of skin blemishes.

Don’t be alarmed. This isn’t one of those dreadful singleton laments that have become the domain of media puff pieces since Sex and the City dehumanised women everywhere. Nor is it an example of the lady doth protest too much, determined to convince her audience that the mere thought of tethering her wagon to some rogue cowboy fills her with inexpressible repugnance.

Rather, it’s an exploration of what happens when we find that what we expected as children turns out to be a fantasy driven by saccharine cartoons and the ritual brainwashing of Golden Books. It’s an examination of what my grandmother would refer to as ‘making the best of things’. It’s a perilous journey into the shallow end of the gene pool, only to discover that science hasn’t begun to scratch the surface of in-breeding’s lasting consequences.

Ladies and gents, I have stared into the abyss and found that it had only one thing to say: Welcome to Internet Dating.

Read Clementine Ford’s ‘Love in a LOL-ed Climate: Internet Dating’ in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings.