Marion May Campbell – TEXT Review: The Man on the Mantelpiece

Another enthusiastic review of faculty member Marion May Campbell’s memoir The Man on the Mantelpiece (UWA, 2018) has been published in TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.

In an article that reviews both Marion’s memoir and Carol Lefevre’s The Happiness Glass (Spinifex, 2018), Moya Costello describes both books as “remarkable…sure-fired sources of impressive structuring”, which model “a brave, exciting and inventive way to proceed”. 

The Man on the Mantelpiece is an experimental memoir that explores the queer fallout of the death of Marion’s father. During a 1952 electric storm off Wattamolla NSW a waterspout drew in the CSIRO Cloud Physics Dakota, atomising all those aboard, including her father. Or did it? When his living body has disappeared, what to make of the uniformed man on the mantelpiece?

In June, Marion also launched new books by two colleagues: Susan Pyke’s Animal Visions: Posthumanist Dream Writing (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature), and Kathleen Mary Fallon’s new collection A Fixed Place: The Long and Short of Story (UWAP).