In several essays, Hewett’s creative ‘empty room’ appears in similar guises: ‘the space of the walk’ (Nandi Chinna) and ‘the poetic space’ (Catherine Noske). Donna Mazza’s and Brooke Dunnell’s stories explore the power of such spaces to unsettle us – in Mazza’s ‘The Exhibit’, the narrator is ambivalent about the ‘sliced and fused’ embryo in her womb – while the form of Kia Groom’s mischievous poem a ‘Pre-Emptive Eulogy’ for a ‘tooth-baby’ suggests the ‘holes’ the speaker fears. Significantly, it is in ‘a room / for violin and piano’ in Geoff Page’s poem ‘Allegro’, in the ‘hushed moment’ before play, that death-in-life shows itself – perhaps most potently through the man who wears a ‘coat too heavy for the weather’.

There is a freshness here that gives notice of an ethos of expansion and engagement at Westerly; this creative space is charged.