The stories in The Feel of Steel were originally published separately in a range of Australian venues, including literary journals like Heat, newspapers like The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend, anthologies like Best Australian Essays, and women’s magazines like House & Garden, and Women’s Weekly. Their appeal is broad enough to appeal to both the casual reader chuckling over their morning cuppa, or the more serious one, pondering the deep and painful mysteries of life. The writing itself is sharp and clean, yet at times as sensual as poetry, as Garner tries again and again to speak about those things that defy language. The landscape is the commonplace – things that happen to everyone – a new sport, babies, a big trip, divorce, moving house, but by focusing on those areas intimately, and using her strong powers of description, Garner elevates these experiences. In “Writing Home”, Garner explores the nature of home; the Homerian Ithaca of her childhood, or some kind of Jungian ideal. Apart from the usual narrative recollections, Garner presents those moments when we smell, or touch something, and “boom! I was small”. Keeling over from the intensity of this kind of sensual recall, “So far away and sunk so deep that no conscious act of remembering can seize the exact feel of it.” The mini-stories turn and twist, and like poetry, the sentences throw out their punchlines or moments of transfiguration with enough power to make a reader draw in breath, for example, from “The Goddess of Weeping” : “I would have to acknowledge something that I already knew in my heart was true: the fact that people, even the ones you trust, the ones you are closest to, are capable of anything. Anything at all.”
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