Alison and Graham Kershaw tell how they, too, literally, shift text around by way of their letterpress. At the opposite end of communications technology, Benjamin Law surveys the banalities of social media. Moorhouse, Rachel Robertson, Alice Pung, and Rozanna Lilley each provide thoughtful reflections on writing about family.

Many poems in this issue perpetuate the recent trend of recording the natural world, and birdlife in particular, but they come from some fine practitioners – Diane Fahey and Ross Donlon among them. John Kinsella’s poem about a storm could be read as a companion piece to his bushfire poem that was shortlisted in the 2013 Porter Prize. Maria Takolander and Eabhan Ni Shuileaháin move into very different territory with potent images of personal tragedy.

Of the fiction, Lucy Neave and Marcella Polain offer strong stories dealing with human–animal relations – works also dealing with ethics, if not the ethics of writing. Laurence Steed’s compelling story of boyhood recalls Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992).