HEAT 17

The final issue of 2024, HEAT 17 offers writing from Indigo Bailey, Alice Allan, Louise Carter, Noelle Janaczewska, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Ursula Robinson-Shaw and Eirill Alvilde Falck.

Few noticed that I was gone. Those who did registered a subtle disequilibrium in the texture of the world, as if reality had burst a single pixel...

So writes Indigo Bailey in 'Les Figurants', a cinematic short story that takes us into the surreal world of a figurant, as a film extra is known in French, which was also slang for a cadaver that nobody wanted to claim.

Dialogues of different kinds resonate throughout the issue. Alice Allan and Louise Carter converse across poems, writing to each other about friendships, heartbreak, literary gossip, and world events. Noelle Janaczewska contributes an excerpt from a new monologue, or to use her term performance essay, which starts with the speaker's love for the forgotten queer writer Amy Levy, whose life and writing she discovers in the library archives, and interweaves segments of Levy's biography with her own to offer a rich reflection on love and censorship.

Gods, ancient neighbours and colonial subjects are figures in Vidyan Ravinthiran's poems, which criss-cross histories both personal and geographical. What to do with one's past is also the preoccupation of Romy, the central character in Ursula Robinson-Shaw's short story 'TA RA RA', which steps from the declining 'value' of personal essays about trauma to view the ahistorical present in all its confusion and coldness.

Finally, in 'Permission to Reinstate', Eirill Alvilde Falck delivers an epistolatory work of fiction in which a student earnestly defends a professor's practice of taking an unpaid assistant.