Verge 2025: Blue (Verge Creative Writing)

New Australian writing from emerging and established writers The blue geometries of the seats of a departing train. Lightning striking twice out of the blue. The rhythm of faint blues. Blue is the most mysterious and evocative of colours. It can signify the beginning of love and the end of life. It can evoke tranquillity or tension. For Ted Hughes, blue is a ‘kindly spirit’, an ‘electrified’, ‘thoughtful … guardian’; for Joni Mitchell, it is a sigh-filled song, a ‘foggy lullaby’. For Henry David Thoreau, the ‘blue ground’ is the source of ‘new truth’. And Goethe writes: ‘We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances us, but because it draws us after it.’ In the nineteenth edition of this creative anthology, writers from Monash University and beyond share fiction, nonfiction, poetry and experimental forms. They explore shades of blue that ravish the senses, narratives saturated in melancholic hues, and poetry that hums with an electric charge of blue.

Cassie Kropp (they/she) is studying a Masters of Research in Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. Their plays have been performed in the Anywhere Theatre Festival in Brisbane but now they focus more on academic writing.

Yong Li holds a bachelor’s degree and a PhD from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. She is a lecturer in the School of Marxism at Shanghai Maritime University and a visiting scholar in Chinese Studies at Monash University. Her recent publications appear in Waste Management, Journal of Environmental Management and Environmental Research Communications, among others. Her research interests encompass pro-environmental psych�ology and behaviour, political trust and NPO management.

Adara Rose Luis is a writer, scholar and poet. Her research examines male violence against girls and women in children’s and young adult literature. Adara has presented at international conferences and published poetry, and has held academic editing roles.

Jonathan Ricketson is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University. His fiction and nonfiction writing has been published in Meanjin, Australian Book Review and Griffith Review. He is the 2025 ABR Rising Star.