Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn

Dec 1, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn

In March 2020, the first modern fish extinction was announced to a quiet reception. This was perhaps unsurprising: it occurred during the same month the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, and the smooth handfish, or Sympterichthysunipennishad long slipped from view. In fact, the most notable feature of its disappearance seemed to be that it was the first marine animal classified as extinct by the United Nations Red List.

Apr 28, 2024 | killyourdarlings.com.au | Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn

Fact-checking is not an easy job in an era of misinformation. In fact, the actor Daniel Radcliffe said that preparing to portray a magazine fact-checker in the play The Lifespan of a Fact made him more nervous than going onstage. In a research stint at the New Yorker, he was tasked with a restaurant review. First, he had to ring up the place of business. After confirming the spelling of the restaurant’s name, he went through the items, ingredients and cooking methods listed in the review.

Nov 29, 2023 | meanjin.com.au | Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn

Reviewed: So Close To Home, Mick Cummins, Affirm PressIn playwright and social worker Mick Cummins’ debut novel, So Close to Home, we meet eighteen-year-old Aaron Peters in the throes of heroin withdrawal. An ‘incoming tide of pain’ causes him to shiver in warm rooms; noise becomes unbearable, drowning out the possibility of coherent thought. The novel continues to introduce us to a cast of supporting characters, who each flit in and out of Aaron’s life.

Aug 27, 2023 | overland.org.au | Scott Robinson |Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn |Lizzie O'Shea

To weep into stones are fables. —Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne-BuriallCarbon sequestration proposes to reverse the ongoing particulate re-distribution of the air; that is, to turn the world upside down. The increasingly suffocating proportion of carbon in the atmosphere must be withdrawn and re-buried, whether through mineralisation as stones, which do not leak, or in unstably lachrymose carbonaceous deposits like trees and soil.

Aug 1, 2023 | meanjin.com.au | Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn

Reviewed: The Crying Room, Gretchen Shirm, Transit LoungeAs a child, I sometimes went to a church where there was a crying room for children; the glass panes were strong enough to muffle the audience’s crying sounds. It would reflect them back tenfold at the crier, but would rarely silence them. The same stifled anguish is evoked in Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room, a collection of interwoven stories that mix speculative and realist fiction.