contributors -poets, scholars and more -'against each other as a means to creating a conversation' (298).When I look for the definition of ululate online, what comes up immediately is this: 'howl or wail as an expression of strong emotion, typically grief'. Howling and wailing are, perhaps, a little too strong for the affect of Staying. Staying is an expression of strong emotion. And the emotion is grief … but the affective residue of the book is also acceptance and resilience.Jessie Cole is not a contributor to Offshoot, but her most recent book, Staying, after two novels, is a memoir. Perhaps the most comparable piece with Cole's in Offshoot is Zoe Thomas' '(Snippets of) Littoral Freedom: Collecting Nostalgic Remnants on the Distant Shores of Childhood'. Thomas's work features a strong place and paternal relationship. Cole's three books share a resonant triplet-ness. They are set in the Northern Rivers (although not clearly stated, with the exception of Staying, as such). The Northern Rivers is subtropical, and, with high heat, rainfall and good soil, its biodiversity is significant in scope. Central in the memoir is her father's descent into madness.Cole's memoir is an extraordinary thing. In any context, anywhere on the planet, in this moment, it echoes, though personally, multi-various forms of global-public trauma (for example, Australia's lack of official reconciliation with its Indigenous peoples, Nauru, Yemen, Syria, Israel/Palestine). Devastating is the suicide of Cole's step-sister and then her father. Dreamlike and exceptional is her upbringing in the hinterland forest of Byron Bay. Courageous is her putting-pen-to-paper for this memoir. Deeply reconciling is her devotion to the land, much-beyondconcrete-cityisation:Returning home … was fraught… How rare it is for the dispossessed to regain their homeplace. When my family fled our home at the height of my father's madness, we never expected it to be restored to us… Returning … there was a sense of welcome in the rolling hills, the endless green expanse of forest, and the curving, bright-pebbled creek of my home. ( 161)As the editors of Offshoot say about the genre of life writing itself, it has 'numerous innovative incarnations' (3). Brien and Quinn sharp-sightedly mention biography as inclusive of 'non-human animal stories ' and objects (308). Jessica White states in her essay on the writing of Annamaria Weldon in The Lake's Apprentice is that it is an ecobiography of 'the myriad life forms' in Yalgorup, a Western Australian coastal national park. White defines the genre of ecobiography as 'a grafting of life and environmental writing which illuminates our embeddedness in, and dependence on, our ecosystems' (121). Equally ecobiograhical are the nonfiction poems of Jeanine Leane, 'Gatherers', and Phillip Hall, 'Brolga Clan'.A singular characteristic of Offshoots is the inclusion of another form of ecobiography: exquisite plant drawings, and poetic-descriptive text, by Alice Ewing. Brien and Quinn state that the 'botanical examples … reflect and tease...
