I wish I could tell you the Sydney harvest launch at Berkelouw’s Newtown was a fantastic affair. All I can tell you is that the last five minutes of Ryan O’Neill’s reading from his fiction piece “The Eunuch in the Harem” was pretty damn funny. Which I already knew, because I scored my copy of Issue Five earlier in the week (seriously, my nostrils, meaning the inside of my nose, were stained with coffee as a result of reading O’Neill’s story). All I can tell you is that people were lining up to have editor Davina Bell sign their pretty-like-a-patchwork-quilt copy of harvest after the formalities had come to a close. All I can tell you is that, arriving late due to an unprecedented gridlock that gripped the CBD and an ignorant decision to choose bus as my mode of transport, I stood out in the freezing doorway, looking in on toasty warm launch-groupies and literary enthusiasts as they enjoyed frivolous festivities.

So that was Sydney launch.

harvest issue five opens with an article by Davina Bell urging her “precious snowflakes” (baby writers) to disregard Ted Genoway’s article in Mother Jones, which instructs said baby writers to “swear off navel-gazing”. Davina’s article essentially defends the younger generation of writers, who have not experienced world-shaking events to shake up their/(our?*) lives and world views.

Curiously, about halfway through, we come to Dan Bigna’s reader’s guide to writing like Charles Bukowski, who happens to be an author I quite admire. I say curiously, because Bigna’s piece points out Bukowski’s remarkable similarity to his Post Office protagonist Henry Chinaski, on account of Bukowski’s soul destroying stint as a mailroom clerk. “Bukowski shows us that artistic expression can transcend the dullness of a constricted life, and give hope to the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same kinds of situation as the embattled Henry Chinaski.” Navel-gazing much? Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Genoway!

These two pieces in particular, along with Anthony Levin’s deconstruction of a poem, form the corner posts of this issue which suggest to me that harvest is no longer just a hip literary magazine with freshly plucked talent and pretty pages and fun household games such as “Literopoly”, but is growing into a medium through which relevant discussion about the culture of the written wor(l)d. In this case, the inward-gazing, self-reflective prose of young writers that seems to have formed generational gaps in the writing community, if Genoway’s article is to be taken as absolute truth.

Chris Flynn closes issue five with “Rethinking the Australian Literary Identity”. While it’s a highly topical subject (i.e. writing locally for a global readership and diminishing significance of determining a national literary identity), I found nothing groundbreaking in Flynn’s commentary and will say no more on the matter (because harvest have encouraged responses to this piece, and I’ma save a more articulate version of my thoughts for that).

(*I don’t know if I count as a baby writer. Embryonic, more like.)