Sue Hall Pyke

Divine Wings: Literary Flights between the Cyclic Avian in Emily Brontë’s Poems and Oblivia’s Swan Song in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2016)

A readerly aesthetic of ecological consciousness, outlined in recent ecocritical scholarship, has led me to connect a number of Emily Brontë’s poems (from an oeuvre created between 1835 and 1848) to the swooping turns in Alexis Wright’s third and latest novel The …

*Otherness: Essays and Studies,* Vol. 5 No. 2, 2016. (Image: journal cover)

Dream Writing beyond a Wounded World (2015)

If it is accepted that pro-environmental actions are related to positive perceptions of the external environment, then it can be argued that literature has the potential to shift readers’ preparedness to act for constructive ecological change. Texts that discern communications from nonhuman …

*The Human Place in the Natural World: Essays on Creation and Creatureliness,* Fordham University Press, 2015 . (Image: book cover)

Sensible Spectators: Agape at the Mouth of the Cave (2014)

A heartfelt part of my effort to live better in the world is to seek new ways to understand how I can sensibly go beyond my own skin. Here I build on this audacious desire, thinking through perceptions and significations specific to …

*Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology* Vol. 3, 2013/2014 now *Swamphen*) (Image: Sue Hall Pyke)

Meltemi (2014)

Always I liked Spiros Metropolis, but Mana hated him for all his life. You know why? Because his family were on the other side of politics to us. You think that doesn’t matter? It did. It was all about politics then. Mana …

Australian Love Stories (Inkerman & Blunt)

Bovinity (2013)

My devotion to the bovine is part of an ongoing internal ethical debate, which leads with different pulls from my mind and my body. It is a debate informed by my past, my writing practice and my ecocritical engagement. To get to …

*Southerly*, vol. 73, no. 2, 2013. (Image: journal cover).

Angie Thomas 2017 The Hate U Give (HarperCollins)

Righteous anger tearing up the e-page. Teenage heroics on top of surviving. Respect. This is fiction, a Mississippi girl telling a New York story, but it reads truer than the news. Hardcopy ordered for a mid-teen change agent close to my heart.

THUG LIFE …. the hate u give infants [or youth or anyone] f***** everybody

Kate Jennings 2002 Moral Hazard (Text, 2012)

Loving this until a student reminds me there are better ways of dealing with a loved one’s brain-shift into a different person. Not repayments, re-shaping love. The other students feel her pain, we all say amen. Again, I learn more than teach.

Rebecca Skloot 2010 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown)

Got me wondering. I mean, who owns what part of this story? That scholarship fund best be getting the proceeds or I’ve been consuming ill-gotten gains. Oh, those cells you’ve donated or had tested? No longer yours. You too could be immortal.

Detail from the Henrietta Lacks Foundation website

Elizabeth Gaskell 1855 North and South (Oxford World Classics)

More questions than answers. What’s a ‘fern-harvest’? Are wasps ‘impudent’ or privileged? Does kneeling together really do ‘no harm’? How to wear ‘pomegranate flowers’? And when (at last) might we listen alertly to speeches on ‘capital and labour and labour and capital’?

Claire-Louise Bennett 2015 Pond (Picador)

Nails, like me/us, sullied with scrabbling from those ‘dank and wretched’ (17) ditches that life creates. The expressiveness of jam stains, soaring shifts in syntax. I am the protagonist’s friend, I put my loving hand on this book, declare myself ‘ensorcelled’ (151).