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James Griffin

James Griffin will create three extended cycles of lyric ballads and prose poems to create the fictional rural Ghost Town Bridge, its inhabitants and events. He has already completed a cycle of 15 songs and linked poems called Songs for a season at Ghost Town Bridge.

The first cycle introduces characters and key events, and hints at narrative threads: murder mystery, who blew up the wheat silo, how many antique stores can one town hold, who created the library upstairs at the hotel, and how do you get a song on jukebox there.

In cycles two and three, James will develop characters and let events and narrative threads play out to create a portrait of contemporary rural and regional Victorian life.

The trilogy explores rural Victoria from the perspective of three generations and the research focuses on decades in which generations comes of age. The town is partly imaginary and a composite of features of existing towns – Corryong, Chiltern, Mansfield and Dimboola. The work has a strong magic realist element in which some characters are animals that can talk and the dead live on in the present.