Meet Me at the Intersection by Rebecca Lim

I enjoyed a lot of the other stories too, but since I've written mini reviews of them all, I'll leave them for you to read below if you haven't already seen them in one of my #ReadShortStories posts. His experiences were starkly contrasted with those of various people around him. It tells of the journey of a teen boy who starts off ignorant of Chinese culture but ends up learning that Chinese teenagers are just like him (but live in China). ‘The Last Stop’ by Alice Pung was not at all what I expected from the opening and is a story that firmly fell into the 'made me think' category. ‘Stars in our Eyes’ by Jessica Walton was a delightful celebration of geek culture, while including queer and disabled characters and refreshingly supportive characters. My two favourite stories gained that status for very different reasons. Note that I use 'stories' here in a generic sense to refer to all the pieces in the anthology, even though it included poetry and memoir. Some of the stories were fun to read, some were intentionally uncomfortable, other fell somewhere in between those two extremes and made me think.

With works by Ellen van Neerven, Graham Akhurst, Kyle Lynch, Ezekiel Kwaymullina, Olivia Muscat, Mimi Lee, Jessica Walton, Kelly Gardiner, Rafeif Ismail, Yvette Walker, Amra Pajalic, Melanie Rodriga, Omar Sakr, Wendy Chen, Jordi Kerr, Rebecca Lim, Michelle Aung Thin and Alice Pung, this anthology is designed to challenge the dominant, homogenous story of privilege and power that rarely admits ‘outsider’ voices. The focus of the anthology is on Australian life as seen through each author’s unique, and seldom heard, perspective.

Meet Me at the Intersection is an anthology of short fiction, memoir and poetry by authors who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQA+ or living with disability. Although I am familiar with the two editors from the spec fic books they've authored, most of the stories did not have a speculative bent, although there were a few. Taken as a whole, this results in a very broad and diverse anthology.

The idea being to highlight all sorts of marginalised writers. Meet Me at the Intersection edited by Rebecca Lim and Ambelin Kwaymullina is an anthology filled with intersectional Australian voices.

Meet Me at the Intersection by Rebecca Lim