Mark Rossiter

Wikipedia image entitled “The Congo River near Mossaka”

I happen to be writing a collection of stories based on a trip I made across Africa some eighteen years ago. One of the stories, ‘The River’, is about a pirogue trip up the then Zaire River (before and since, the River Congo). This is one of the world’s great rivers, flowing from the mountain ranges in the east all the way through equatorial Congo and down to the sea. And from its mouth, the river is navigable past the capital, Kinshasa, back up to Kisangani, where traffic is stopped by the Stanley Falls.

I was part of a group of young people travelling by truck across Africa and a number of us hired a pirogue, a canoe, to take us four days up-river from the town of Bumba to Kisangani. This was no ordinary canoe: two hollowed-out tree trunks roped together made a stable sleek boat, powered by one small outboard petrol engine, our home on the water and under the stars for three nights. Continue Reading »

This creative non-fiction piece is to be published in Arcade Publications‘ Nth Degree, the 2010 Anthology from AAWP, the Australian Association of Writing Programs. Continue Reading »

Blog post on the subject of the Young Narrator on the Guardian’s Books site by Australian writer Evan Maloney.

Includes my choices of Young Narrators (Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and Christopher Boone) and also some others which perhaps do not strictly fit into the category, because either they’re older or they turn out to be writing from an adult perspective (therefore they’re only retrospectively Young Narrators). In these latter examples, the voices may appear to be young but their choice of concepts, concerns & language constructions, not to mention knowledge about the world and their retrospective writing stance, reveal they are not in fact using the true voice of a Young Narrator.

Of course, writing is all smoke and mirrors, it’s all about creating an authentic voice but this often means utilising every tool and technique available to elicit an emotional reaction. And, as Maloney says, “challenges of writing in the voice of a young narrator are off-puttingly severe”.

Evan Maloney’s new book is Tofu Landing.

The Cutwater literary journal, edited by Dan Collins and Sam Twyfford-Moore, is launched on Saturday 11 July.

There’s a line in my piece, “The Last Travel Story”, appearing in the literary journal Cutwater, published next month, that includes the phrase, “soon-to-be-extinct fish”.

So what, you say. Well, as is noted in Hari’s report below, only that we humans (collectively, not individually) are responsible for the likely imminent extinction of yet another species. Gone. Fished out and forked off. Finito bonito.

Anyway, “The Last Travel Story” is a bleak ditty, a sordid exercise in self-indulgence. And a credo of sorts. Pass me the vodka, it’s time to write that letter.

Johann Hari: Could we be the generation that runs out of fish?

The process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction

Continue Reading »

Mark Rossiter receives a brief mention in the Sydney Morning Herald “In Short” review of We All Need A Witness today.

Continue Reading »

The 2008 UTS Writers’ Anthology entitled We All Need a Witness and featuring Mark’s story ‘H, and the City within the City’ is announced. Here’s the website.

Mark Rossiter reading from ‘The Song of the Many’ at Stanton Library in promotion got the UTS 2007 Anthology What You do and Don’t Want.

Mark’s short story ‘The Song of the Many’, published in What You Do and Don’t Want, appears in Relax, the book section of the Canberra Times, as the Sunday Story (Jun 10, 2007).

After some three years of trying, forty-odd (and probably forty odd) story-starts and at least ten submissions… I finally made it into the Sydney Morning Herald’s Heckler column.
Continue Reading »