Secrets: New and Selected Works is an eclectic collection of short fiction, poetry and a surrealist play written by Rachael Hains-Wesson (PhD), an award winning author. The ‘New and Selected Works’ have been specifically chosen to showcase a new kind of writing that blends and bleeds. Each narrative is either strange, a blend of ideas, or embedded with themes that have various abstract subliminal messages for the reader to discover.Secrets is ever changing. The work begins with an essay that explores the nature of blended writing before continuing with a story about a peculiar relationship between a Death Adder snake and a girl who is shipwrecked off the coast of New South Wales, Australia in the late eighteen hundreds. A parallel story is then re-told in ‘Killing me Softly’, but with an alternative viewpoint that has been influenced by Henry Lawson’s timeless short story The Drover’s Wife. The reader then meets the girl again, but this time she is trying to figure out the meaning of first love in contemporary times. However, her Doctor seems more lost than she is. The reader encounters various other crisp-like prose pieces where images, everyday objects and where characters set a fast-paced narrative to uncover mysteries of the land and mind. A selection of poetry is peppered throughout the work before the reader is brought face-to-face with a bird’s life, a baby, the nature of dreams, passion, and erotic revenge that has a twist at the end. Refreshing theatrical experience marked by crisp direction and a keen sense of rhythm. [Canberra Times July, 2001].The author utilises metaphor, movement and various theatrical devices to present content which is notoriously ‘difficult’ in a highly original, engaging way. This is thought provoking, profound work (Santha Press, 2000).
