Still digging: from grunge to post-grunge in Australian fiction

The Minimum of Getting By is a collection of short fiction in the dirty realist style, set in the urban environment of contemporary Australia. The collection centres on the inner lives of a cast of marginalised characters, all of whom are stuck in some way – in bad relationships, in self-destructive patterns, in the past, in their own heads. There is rarely much in the way of narrative action but, when it does occur, it is often cyclic, returning the characters emotionally, if not physically, to the same place from which they began. The manuscript draws inspiration from the Australian grunge fiction of the 1990s, utilising many of its techniques, including its inner-city settings, its minimal narratives, its emotional bleakness and sometimes-autobiographical/always-confessional tone. Far from merely replicating grunge fiction, however, I have attempted to create a type of ‘post-grunge’ literature by critically engaging with the themes and archetypes of grunge, and reinventing them in a contemporary setting. In the accompanying exegesis, ‘Digging in the Dirt’, I look at the original grunge fiction as well as proposing ‘post-grunge’, a current movement in Australian writing to which the creative manuscript belongs. In the first section of the exegesis, I provide a brief overview of the grunge lit phenomenon of the 1990s, isolating a number of the key techniques and tropes of the genre, including the gritty urban setting; the linear narrative; the ‘confessional I’ narrator; the assumption of autobiographical content; the subcultural affiliations; and, finally, the ‘disrupted individual’ archetype, and its gendered archetypes, the ‘transient female’ and ‘static male’. In the second section, I discuss the work of Kalinda Ashton and Luke Carman in terms of a post-grunge framework, looking at the differing ways both authors have interpreted and reinvented ‘grunge’ in their own writing, with particular emphasis on the archetypes of the ‘post-grunge male’ and the ‘static female’. I also place my own manuscript within this framework, discussing the individual stories in terms of their differing relationships to a grunge and post-grunge style of literatures.