Westerly today

We as editors have been thinking for a long time about how to take Westerly into the future.  We tend to think in terms of our constituencies, the people who give the magazine its meaning and purpose.  These include groups and individuals from universities, the writing community, the reading community, in fact, the whole worldwide republic of letters.  We have a duty to promote writing, which means in the simplest terms, to help writers and readers find each other.  We have a duty to Western Australia as a place that is unique and whose intellectual life we help to sustain, even as we call upon it to sustain us.  We have a duty to our neighbours, both those within the Australian nation, and those within the region of South / East Asia and the Indian Ocean rim.  Our ideal, the one we've inherited from those who have edited Westerly since 1956, is a cosmopolitan regionalism.  The creation of this blog is our attempt to call out to those who know or would like to know Westerly.  We would dearly like to develop Westerly as the place for intelligently conversing about literature and ideas.  We intend to periodically blog on issues that have come up in our own discussions and which we seek to develop as possible themes in our journal - Westerly magazine - and our various activities and events.  But we would also like our constituents to drive us in new directions that answer their vital needs.

Delys Bird & Tony Hughes-d'Aeth