Since 2021, Portside Review has published contemporary writings from the Indian Ocean that transcend beyond J.M.G. Le Clézio, Amitav Ghosh, Lindsey Collen, Monique Agénor, and Marie-Thérèse Humbert. Celebrating the coastlines, hinterlands, sea routes and port cities from Cape Town to Bangkok, from Bombay to Northbridge, this quarterly digital literary journal is funded by the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Creative Australia, and the Centre for Stories. “[W]e are not a journal of critique and review, nor of scholarship and journalism, nor of doctrinaire reference,” wrote managing editor Robert Wood in the journal’s latest issue.
In this interview, I spoke with Dr Wood on the impetus behind Portside Review, new writings from the Indian Ocean, and running a digital literary journal.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): What’s the story behind Portside Review? Why is there a need, now more than ever, for an online literary journal on writings from the Indian Ocean?
Robert Wood (RW): Founded in February 2021, Portside Review is a quarterly online literary journal that publishes short stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and activism in written, audio and visual form. Based in Perth in Western Australia, we have had editors in Melbourne, Singapore, Bali, Penang, Mumbai, Cape Town, Myanmar, and elsewhere. We started it as a project through our parent organisation, the Centre for Stories, which teaches the craft of storytelling for social impact.
There is a need, as always, for the proliferation for artistic excellence that supports an ongoing peace, all with a sense of ecological attention, material place and geographic location. Our vision has been to see the Indian Ocean as a home of many languages, many interests, many sovereignties, and to reflect that through a journal focused on the English language without centering it. It is a project that allows us to connect laterally rather than vertically, that re-routes where and when we have come to be in the ports we call our own.
It matters now more than ever to maintain that sense of plurality, of solidarity in a fractious world; a world of climate crises; a world where literature is still the best method we have of maintaining an enduring peace. Literature is only as good as the peace we keep. That is not only about being non-violent, which is to say a critique of violence; it is also about the creative cultivation of conditions that are peaceful, which is also to say beautiful, difficult, nice, or any other category of aesthetic interest that does not rely on conflict.
A literary journal then serves the function of supporting peace while also at the same time being a peaceful way to express oneself. What is more calming, for many, than breathing deeply and sitting at your desk? Or reading and writing with a cup of chai at hand? As the activists of old would have it, this pen stops fascists. And so Portside Review is not propaganda for pacifists, though I would not mind such a description, nor is it freedom of expression just for the sake of it, though that too matters in a region where censorship exists. The journal is a simply a simple example of peace in our time for people who wish to see it, in all their diversity, opinion, reflection.
We do this on the internet despite the technofuedalism that is evident. We do it so we can reach that person who is our neighbour in every sense but the physical. We do it so we do not have to cut down trees and buy space on ships to send off physical matter that then circulates. We do it because we are young enough to forget the printing press and distant enough to know we are not isolated after all. We see that in peers like LIMINAL and Caravan, in Melbourne and New Delhi; and we see it in Mekong Review; all because of the frames that are around them, for their politics too, which enables, in their own subtle ways, the peace that will grow if we are empowered to allow it to.
AMMD: The Indian Ocean has been written, canonically, by J.M.G. Le Clézio, Amitav Ghosh, and Lindsey Collen. What do you hope to add to the discourse?
RW: Portside Review has added new voices, new forms, new relations. It is about the people and their craft, and how they can be read next to each other. The first four editions all focused on the Indian Ocean as a whole, so you might read a Cape Town poem next to a Kolkata essay next to a Broome interview. By placing new work next to each other, we see all the pieces in new ways, including the intercostal spaces between them. That is a good thing. It adds not only to ‘the’ discourse, but reminds us that there are many discourses, including new ones.
As for the canon, it is always forming and re-forming, like waves that lap over and over again, on beaches, on boats, on our hands when we place them in the ocean. I think, quite simply, that the most interesting work, the most insightful work, comes from people with lived experience writing from, about, and within their sense of place—and having that published, read, and appreciated within it too. It is then about a kind of homonymy, not autonomy nor heteronymy; about what happens when we respect our sovereignties to connect as siblings in oceans of myth, not as children nor parents.
AMMD: You have released special country-specific issues on writings from Indonesia, South Africa, Burma, Australia, India, and Malaysia. Essays, short stories, poems, interviews, and reviews are juxtaposed with the visual (photo essays) and the aural (sound recordings). Can you speak about the inception of each issue—from planning of the theme to publication to promotions?
RW: Each issue depends on the people we work with. We have to recognise and celebrate all the hard work of our marvellous guest editors, writers, artists, interns, and readers in those places. They are what makes Portside Review what it is. When we have good people to work with, we can have an issue from there, dependent, of course, on funding. Our eight nationally-focused issues in 2022 and 2023 have all emerged because we know good people.
At a planning level, we meet, we talk, we have a tea or coffee, maybe an ice cream, and we build the issue from the good feeling that emerges in this space. The publication process, as many other editors will appreciate, is about ensuring that the technical and production side can support the artistic and creative vision. They are equally important halves that help us put Portside Review into the world. That matters too for how we spread the word on an issue that has just come out.
It is then, like all good things, about caring for people; about trusting others to get it right, and just giving them space to be themselves. The ‘management,’ then, is fairly soft, while the production is tight. We hope by doing it this way, we are able to be in service to the writers and readers who want to be shared across the region.
AMMD: On the other hand, Portside Review, based in the ancestral and traditional lands of the Aboriginal Whadjuk people, also refers to itself as a product of collaboration that “transcends nation states on local concerns in conversation with regional peers in Australia, Africa and Asia.” How do you reconcile being country-specific while at the same time, embodying “a cross cultural community creation”?
RW: Country is not nation. Countries are already multiple, and it is simply about allowing that to surface, it is about sensing the depth that pre-dates legislation, pre-dates colonisation, pre-dates inhabitation. A port perspective offers us this, offers us the complexity of being in two places, of being a bridge or a boat or an offering that floats. What matters then is the detail we are given, the idea that we can keep asking questions or keep descending into the depths. The further down you go, the more complex it gets, the more interesting and murkier too.
For me, it was about setting the scene of the region in the first four issues in 2021, and then keeping the frame around it permeable in 2022 and 2023. Even in our country specific issues, we might have a work that is transnational, an essay on Singapore by a diaspora writer that allows Melbourne to creep in; a poem about Myanmar where we glimpse London. That means our attentiveness as readers is always sought in a way that challenges our idea of closed off borders, that reminds us we are all mixed up any way we look at it, when we remind ourselves to turn inward and outward at the same time.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on New Writings from the Indian Ocean, what books and works would you include as key texts? Who are the figures, classic and contemporary, that you would be inclined to incorporating to its syllabus?
RW: To teach is always an honour; to educate and enlighten students, just like readers, is something that really matters. For me, however, it relies less on figures and an idea of the classics, than it does on issues and themes—on a sense of anthologies, not canons, in the making.
I would want to engage with the idea of ‘sovereignties’, which is often best articulated by First Nations writers, in a way that predates mere nation states and latter-day empires. I would want to share in the sense of ‘ecology’, which is often, paradoxically, made eloquent by those who live in cities, for whom nature is a fragile partner, be that vultures on boardwalks or rubbish in waterways. And I would want to empower others to see ‘peace’ as being the true matter of life, the solitude and serenity we experience when we have solidarity.
There are so many writers and texts that can be framed in these analytics, and to share in that is worth celebrating. To me, the Indian Ocean then, to its great credit, enables a collective and mutable understanding not an individual or static one; where the thing to include is inclusion itself.
AMMD: The editorial you wrote for the latest issue harkens back to the journey of the journal. Where do you see the journal going five or ten years from now?
RW: Ten years is far. Five years less so. I would hope that a new crop of editors take over, that they are good people who can then share good writing for good readers because of their goodness. I would hope we maintain our aesthetic excellence and ethical integrity. That seems to be the principle of Portside Review beyond its content and form, those twins that enable beauty and peace to flourish. In the next decade, I imagine we will still be faced with issues of geopolitics, of climate change, of conflict; and so, we hope to keep connecting people as a way to build understanding, as a way to celebrate how fantastic so much literature from here actually is.
Portside Review, even if it closed tomorrow, which it won’t, has already proven the concept of itself. It is a reminder of what we already know—that you can celebrate beauty in every rockpool, that you can empower the crab and the lobster and the seal, that you can find yourself when you look in the reflection that laps at your feet. That will all still matter in 2033.
Robert Wood is the managing editor of Portside Review. He is the Director of Writing at the Centre for Stories in Boorloo (Northbridge) Western Australia, and has worked for the organisation since 2018. Prior to that, Robert was an Endeavour Fellow at Columbia University in 2017-2018, and an Assistant Editor at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016. He has also participated in activism on industrial, refugee and human rights issues, and was Chair of PEN International (Perth) from 2018 to 2021. He lives in his hometown of Boorloo/Perth and likes to see art with his wife and take his two kids to the beach.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023) and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, Finland to Australia, and translated into Chinese and Swedish, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Their lyric essays have been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, their works can be found at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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