I’m thrilled to be published in The Saltbush Review.

My piece, ‘A Vagrant Hush of Snails Unfurling’, inspired by Hanley’s river snail, is in Issue 2 of this brilliant South Australian-based publication.

As I forewarned the editors, “the piece is either fiction or non-fiction in its most liberal interpretation.” I left out “with passages wanting to be poems” … I didn’t know how to classify this work and wasn’t sure it would find a home. I’m delighted a snail I wrote about via my upbringing near Lake Bonney — in whose waters the creature secretly thwarted its own extinction — has found a literary home through my writing, literally at home.

The Saltbush Review team recognise a true story when they see one, so you’ll find my piece in the issue’s non-fiction list.

Here’s a peek:

We arrived during the secret spell. The gone spell. Like the snail, we tended to hushes of sylvan riverbank, where we’d lie hidden like underwater surfaces. Unbuttoning ourselves. Quietly interlacing our limbs — with the thriving metropolis spiralling below us, its glory ricocheted above. He liked the lower curves of me. I liked to eat him up.

[excerpt] A vagrant hush of snails unfurling, moi, the saltbush review, Issue 2

You can read the full story and Issue 2 of The Saltbush Review here.