{"id":10811,"date":"2018-05-27T15:12:47","date_gmt":"2018-05-27T05:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=10811"},"modified":"2018-08-25T12:38:11","modified_gmt":"2018-08-25T02:38:11","slug":"46-great-opening-lines-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=10811","title":{"rendered":"46 Great Opening Lines: 40"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s pre-dawn, all dark. Breeding season.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First words of ‘Breeding Season’, Amanda Niehaus, in\u00a0Overland<\/em>, Spring 2017<\/p>\n

I’ve been buying literary journals for a couple of years now, reading short stories to see how writers write in the 21st century. My translations are mostly of 19th-century stories, so I need to prompt myself to read today’s writing. It’s never good to get stuck in the past.<\/p>\n

Overland<\/em> is one of the Australian journals I’ve been reading. Not every piece is to my taste, but there’s usually one in each issue that I read and re-read. ‘Breeding Season’ was such a story, drawing me in with the very word breeding, not in the title but in the first line. And then, later, the mention of an antechinus.<\/p>\n

I once caught sight of an antechinus in a sawn tree trunk in Wangaratta. I’d heard about them, how they resemble mice and rats, how we can confuse them all, but this one was prettier than any rat and I suspected that the crevices of the old trunk were more suited to a native marsupial than an introduced species. He stood still long enough for me to snap his photo. I wrote about the antechinus and my trip to Wangaratta in an earlier blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Antechinus, North Beaches Reserve, Wangaratta (river beaches not ocean beaches…)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To return to the great opening line: my interest was triggered by the word breeding, evidence that the first words of a story can click somewhere in the reader’s experience, or in their hopes and fears. I wasn’t disappointed, for within ‘Breeding Season’, Amanda Niehaus writes about the jelly-bean sized babies of the antechinus and a woman’s own baby growing inside her.<\/p>\n

I read this prize-winning story in my copy of Overland<\/em> but it’s also available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s pre-dawn, all dark. Breeding season. First words of ‘Breeding Season’, Amanda Niehaus, in\u00a0Overland, Spring 2017 I’ve been buying literary journals for a couple of years now, reading short stories to see how writers write in the 21st century. My translations are mostly of 19th-century stories, so I need to prompt myself to read today’s … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “46 Great Opening Lines: 40”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1088,20],"tags":[487,1239,1238,885,1187,871,1241,2,1242,246,1240,7,8,21,270],"class_list":["post-10811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-46-great-opening-lines","category-my-photos","tag-21st-century-literature","tag-amanda-niehaus","tag-antechinus","tag-australian-animals","tag-australian-literature","tag-australian-mammal","tag-australian-writing","tag-literature","tag-marsupial","tag-opening-lines","tag-overland-journal","tag-photography","tag-photos-2","tag-postaday","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10811"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11273,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10811\/revisions\/11273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}