AP features the Blake Prize shortlisted poems

Australian Poetry has decided to feature the Blake Prize's shortlisted poems as their poems of the week for the next six weeks.

Robert Adamson has won this year's Blake Prize for poetry

The 2011 Blake Poetry Prize for poetry ($5,000) has been awarded to

Robert Adamson for his poem Via Negativa, The Divine Dark


From the judges' report (Brook Emery, Bronwyn Lee and Judith  Beveridge)
 [Source: Blake Society's Facebook page]
"This is a powerful, visually striking, intelligent poem which explores complex ideas associated with negative theology in a humble but resonant way. The poem beautifully manages the movement between the immediacy of the present and difficult concepts such as time, suffering and the existence and nature of the soul; between the trivial ordinariness of the world and the large abstractions; between what can be knowable and precisely observed and what remains unknowable and concealed."

You can read the poem by downloading* the poem from the Blake Societys website. 

*Why don't they use the web medium for what it is intended for -- displaying text -- instead of using it to store PDFs that have to be downloaded then viewed. How arcane in this day of electronic publishing to bury the gold in a PDF.

Judge's report, King Island Poetry competition 2011

King Island Poetry competition 2011 – Results (also see http://www.fawtas.org.au/results.html)

1st Prize: 'Behold the Lamb'  by Janeen Samuel

2nd Prize: 'Death in Venice'  by Graeme Hetherington, Czech Republic.

King Island resident prize: no award.

Highly commended: no award.

Commended poems by David Campbell (2), Mike Cooper, Phillippa Cordwell and Lorraine Haig.


Judge's reportAnne Kellas13 August 2011

I'd like to start with a question: are poetry competitions a lottery? Are judges biased about what they pick as winners? I used to think so but I have come across a simple mathematical ratio that explains things: on average, in any poetry competition, by and large, there'll be five to ten percent of entries that are going to be in the running for the prize, and about 90 to 95 percent flawed pieces of writing in the judge's opinion. This poetry competition was no exception: there were 37 poems, from which two poems, right from the start, stood out as the contenders for the winning places.

What made me choose them? I could say, well, their execution was more adept, or their form more polished, but it's because, after a first reading of all the entries, those two poems stayed in my mind. They piqued my curiosity. I walked about with their images in my head. Stray lines came back to me unbidden. I had to find these two poems and read them again.

The cathedral's domes look feathery when wet,
like birds without the use of wings.

I had to find the lemon-ribbed image at the core of the other that had drawn me to it.

I wanted to go back to read them again, and when I read them a second time, my opinion that these were the winners was confirmed. (By the way, I read all the entries a several times.) A poem has to stand up to a second and a third reading -- and still please. Why else do we go back to read poems from the past? What attracts us to our favourite poets? Besides achieving the status of being what I would call a poem and not a piece of narrative, as many entries were, these two poems succeeded in their marrying of idea and image with a certain necessary grace and effortlessness. They also had that something that transforms a piece of writing on a page into something new that has not existed before. All this using only words.

In a poem, everything happens at the surface. The poet has the surface of the page as his or her canvas, onto which words and punctuation marks are sprinkled, in patterns delineated by white space and paragraph marks. But it's not the ragged right margin that makes a piece of writing a poem, it's not the breaking words and lines at the margin that makes a poem, it's not stretching out the lines and concertinaing them in again that makes a poem. The mere use of rhyme does not make a poem. A poem employs a reasoning of its own in its use of many things: metaphor, image, musicality, colour, tone. If there is no meaning behind the use of these "tools" of poetry then the poem too easily collapses back into being a collection of words on a page.

The breaking up of a word or a line on that surface of white space, if done at the wrong place, or for no apparent reason, is like an awkward trip in rhyme or meter, drawing attention to the author's pen instead of drawing the reader into another dimension of meaning: words encode meaning. The words a poet chooses either suit or clash with the music and breath of the poem when it is spoken out aloud. For we don't only read poems off a page or screen, we also hear them in our mind; poetry is an aural medium, a musical medium. It is the musical joining of image to meaning to rhyme makes the poem a poem.

Some of the entries were the start of poems and I'd encourage their authors to go back to them and complete them. The end result might be a protest poem, or a philosophical poem or a nature poem. Some entries never got beyond being the description of an event. The story in a poem can be strong, but the form might need to be a prose poem then, and not a prose poem chopped into lines. An event might ignite the poet into action, and a narrative might weave its way through a poem, but in the course of the poem, something must shift, change. That event, that narrative, must help take both the reader and the poet somewhere new. Let imagination work to find what that is¹.

Poems are often ruined because of how they end. Too often, the poem itself had already ended, but the poet put in a final appearance, rounding it off with “an ending" ... It's the poet's job to let the poem work its magic and get out of the way.

Some poems were ruined because, although they used rhyme and meter cleverly and even pleasingly, at some point the writer resorted to a contortion for the sake of rhyme or metrical foot: and like Churchill, that is something "up with which I cannot put".

In his judge's report for the 2005 Write Stuff poetry competition, Stephen Edgar said it all comes down to how a poet uses language.

Language. Not just sentiment. Not just plot. One poem found its way into the list of commended poems purely on this score -- because so few poems in this competition dared to let the tiger of language out of its cage. It's a poem called Sitting in the bush, a veritable thicket of stick-like words that bristle and battle their way as if through thorny undergrowth and it even invents a word or two to claw its way to a new meaning. It's not a perfect poem but it is striking because it does battle with words. Poems can be imperfect and still work. Like a crack in a glaze, a fault can let the light of meaning in (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen).

Another poem in the commended list, Dance, describes a relationship. It's an off-hand, slightly off-balance poem whose theme is matched by its off-balance line endings. Yet another, Tumblehome, uses that seafaring image as it allows the words to roll and sway while it keeps its balance thanks to its own inner kind of tumblehome. Both Greyface, with its kindly dramatic tone, and Hitch-hiker tell a story interestingly within a poem's frame and sustain the reader's interest to the end.

Finally it is the use of metaphor and imagery, in a way that is integral to the poem's meaning, that made me settle on "Death in Venice" and "Behold the lamb" as the two winners. "Death in Venice" gets second place, for its wonderful evocation of the atmosphere of decaying, sad-angel European city, and first goes to "Behold the lamb" -- it wins for its sheer simplicity and its use of imagery. I was slightly repelled by the poem's subject matter at first, but the poem won me over. I will never forget it for its lemon-ribbed core, for the way the hooves of the little dead lamb are described as butter curls / innocent of earth. It lies there under the pines, unmourned by its mother:

Already, the merciful crows
have taken away the eyes
(no need to see your way
into darkness you do not comprehend)
have pierced the side
into a chest no larger
than a ribbed lemon, lung
dark and dense as liver,
where no air has been.

In the penultimate issue of Five Bells, Ron Pretty cites poet publisher John Leonard as saying that "poetry reading circles -- poetry book clubs -- should be established -- and that writers' centres and poetry organisations should consider setting these up². I think this simple idea is excellent for an age of meagre opportunities and in cases where writers work in isolation both physical and geographic: especially writers on King Island would benefit from the adoption of Leonard's idea. Well, we all need to "hear" good poetry read aloud. I'd encourage the entrants in this competition whose poems didn't get a mention today -- and in fact everyone -- to read more poetry. I encourage poets to make the effort to read poems outside their usual comfort zone. There's still the public library -- the Visigoths of our dark ages have not yet confined all books to the tip. As long as we still have electricity to fire up the new Alexandria Library that our friends at Google and all the poets on YouTube are building, there's the plethora of poetry online to read, and to inspire us all.

Notes:

1. On the topic of imagination, see Unless it moves the human heart, by Roger Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt who says great writing is often less about what happens than about how it happens. He encourages poets to strive for imagination rather than invention, for anticipation rather than surprise, and to write with precision and restraint.

2. Five Bells, v.17, n.1-2, Summer/Autumn 2010, p.53. (Contact the new non-government peak body, Australian Poetry Ltd. for copies.)

Judge's report - Henry Savery short story competition 2011

FAW 2011 Henry Savery National Short Story Competition
results (also see http://www.fawtas.org.au/results.html)

1st Prize: 'Tasty Necessities'  by Neil McInnes of NSW

2nd Prize: 'Bitter Fantasy'  by Neil McInnes of NSW

Judge's Report
Giles Hugo

13^th August 2011

There were 55 entries in this year's competition -- a good indication of the keen interest in short story writing among FAW members nationally. The wide range of approaches to story telling was also gratifying -- there are many ways to skin the fictional feline.

I followed my usual judging process of reading all the entries right through and assigning a "first impression" rating of 0 to 10. After 24 hours I repeated the process and made minor adjustment to some ratings. The two prize winners stood out from the rest right from my first reading. However, I reread all the entries twice more to confirm my impressions and judgements.

The quality of entries was extremely variable. Most that did not make the cut simply failed as short stories. A short story is not:

• A wildly complicated tale of crime, death and duplicity more suited to an outline for an episode of a TV thriller.
• A travellogue about "what I did on my OS holiday" -- often exacerbated by a saccarinely romantic or dystopic affair.
• A philosophical treatise on life, the universe and everything. Even Douglas Adams needed a whole novella to explore that.
• A rambling anecdote spanning decades and a cast of dozens, roughly threaded together by the presence of the narrator.
• A childhood fragment about some kindly saint who warms the heart but chills the brain.

Several worthy attempts that achieved the form of the short story were spoilt by poor writing:

• Flat or clichéd language.
• Clumsy use of words.
• Unconvincing dialogue. Here I suggest to all writers that they read all passages of dialogue aloud to judge their authenticity. Do people really speak like that, or only in parody?
• Unfunny attempts at humour.
• Totally unconvincing switches of personality or character at very short notice. Old dogs -- and bitches -- rarely learn new tricks. Some real people do -- but the cirumstances have to be extraordinary, not just convenient for neat plot purposes.
• Poorly executed endings. This was probably the most common reason for failure to make the grade. A bang or a whimper? Both can work. The last line is your final shot, your last note before your word fall silent in the reader's mind or continue to reverberate. Miss it or blow it and you have undone all the careful wooing and stalking of the reader that your words should have achieved.

In judging competitions such as this, it has always been of interest to me what themes emerge in the entries. This year among the deeper themes that appealed to entrants were:

• Sea changes.
• Vietnam veterans and those close them.
• The shadow of trauma.
• Life in a retirement or nursing home. And this is where one of the prize winners excelled.

Unfortunately I had to disqualify three entries because of identification issues. In two cases -- inadvertently or otherwise -- the authors were identified by cover sheets with names on them stapled to the back of the entry. In one case an email was stapled to the back of an entry -- with the names of a sender and a recipient, one of which might have been the entrant. This should have been picked up before I was given the entries to judge and I urge the organisers to review and improve their processing and scrutineering. Fortunately none of the disqualified entries made the short list for the two prizes.

And so to the winners.

I'll start with the runner up: the second prize of $100 in the 2011 Henry Savery Short Story Award goes to Entry No.15, Bitter Fantasy.

I liked this on first reading because it is a simple tale of injustice and retribution -- somewhat in the Roald Dahl vein; well told and nicely restrained in the slow advance of looming menace and gruesome resolution. A very bitter fantasy, but most satisfying.

And the first prize of $400 in the 2011 Henry Savery Short Story Award goes to Entry No.14, Tasty Necessities.

This is one of the rare cases where comic writing succeeds -- not because it tries to be a laugh a line, but because the humour emerges convincingly from real characters and situations. The premise -- that one of the residents of a retirement village can fundamentally change the lives of his fellows by daring to promote their virility and sexuality -- is both novel and delightfully realised. In area of human experience that is generally shunned as taboo, or treated as somehow bizarre, this story asserts the value of the liveliness and spirit of those who choose to grow old slightly disgracefully. Rebels with a cause. And why not?

Congratulations to both winners and the 53 others who tried so hard. It is most gratifying to see so many attempting to master the short story genre -- certainly not the easiest, but very satisfying on those rare occasions when your efforts succeed.

Giles Hugo

13^th August 2011

Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize 2011: Shortlist announced

Last night, the Whitmore Press Manuscript prize announced the shortlist for the prize (publication of a limited edition chapbook in early 2012).

Shortlisted poets are:

• B. R. Dionysius
• Paula Green
• Dominique Hecq
• Jill Jones
• Jo Langdon
• Laura Jean McKay
• Eddie Paterson
• Nathan Shepherdson
• Lucy Todd
• Corey Wakeling

The winner, whose work will be published in a limited edition chapbook in early 2012, will be announced before the end of September.

Whitmore Press, in an email announcement to entrants, said 116 entries in this year's competition had been received, and that the entries were "of a very high standard".

North of the Latte Line thinks this high standard might be due to the prize's novel approach to submissions, asking entrants to submit not an entire manuscript, but a poem or poems toatalling up to 150 lines, from that manuscript, and also asking entrants to be sure they had the entire manuscript ready for publication within a tight time-frame after the prize award announcement.

Three recent Whitmore Press publications – by Jamie King-Holden, David McCooey and Cameron Lowe – were featured ABC Radio National's Poetica, 3 September [2011] during National Poetry Week: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/stories/2011/3286639.htm

Short story writer Geoffrey Dean has died

Sadly, short story Geoffrey Dean died last week (19 August 2011). His funeral is on Friday 26 August at 12.30 at Turnbull's in Hobart.

Famous reporter editor Ralph Wessman has paid triubute to Geoff on his blog, Flowerdale, at http://www.walleahpress.com.au/flowerdale/?p=57 and I have put a tribute up on the Roaring Forties Press website at: http://www.roaring-40s-press.com/?p=227


Ralph Wessman ends his post:
"Possibly the degree to which you love someone is measured by the hole left in your heart when he or she is no longer around. You’ll be very much missed mate."

A friend told me today she's never liked the short story genre until I gave her a copy of Geoff's book The Literary Lunch. Today in a sympathy card she wrote: "Geoff: a remarkable, unique and talented man. His passing has left a void in many lives ... Thank you for introducing me to Geoff and his wonderful writings."

It was personal feedback like this that kept Geoff going during the times when recognition for his work was slow in coming. When we sold his book at Salamanca Market, it was the interaction with his readers that inspired him. We also had emails from abroad, from people who had read his early work, wanting more.

It is thanks to the Tasmanian Writers Centre's efforts in recent times that his reputation has grown, and I am pleased that in his lifetime, he was honoured not only by the prizes he won, but by being interviewed on The ABC in three separate programs in recent times.

Interviews:

* ABC TV Stateline Tasmania, feature story, on 3 June 2011 – view online
* 936 ABC Hobart, feature story, on 26 October 2010 (“Once a storyteller, always a storyteller’) – view online
* ABC Radio National’s Book Show, interview by Peter Mares on 17 August 2007 – see transcript, “The art of the short story”, reproduced on the Roaring Forties Press web site with permission.
* In 1994, Ralph Wessman interviewed Geoff for Famous Reporter.

Geoff: in the words of another avid reader of your stories, your passing is a major point in time for the Tasmanian writing scene.

Masterclass with Anne Kellas: June to November 2010

This is just a quick note to say that I shall be running a masterclass for about 6 to 8 poets later in the year through the Tasmanian Writers Centre. It will have the general format of a long course, with twice-monthly sessions from June to November. Keep an eye out for details in their newsletter, or call them on 03 6224 0029. Email: admin@tasmanianwriters.org Mondays to Thursdays 10 am to 4 pm are their core hours).

And talking of anthologies...

"Poets aren't always as generous as they should be. But as an editor [Peter Porter] was always immensely fair, and as editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, very inclusive. He was a wonderful poet." (John Tranter talking of Peter Porter who died last week. http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/tributes-flood-in-for-the-poet-with-a-rare-mind-20100425-tlnm.html

A review of the recent Australian poetry anthologies

Kris Hemensley, poet and manager of Collected Works bookshop in Melbourne, has written an interesting article on recent Australian poetry anthologies in his blog, Poetry and ideas. Here's the link; http://collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com.

Long course update

The long course in poetry is fully subscribed. If you wish to find out about future courses contact the Tasmanian Writers Centre, thanks.

(Hobart) Poetry alive: A long course in poetry with Anne Kellas

Poetry alive: A long course in poetry with Anne Kellas

Over a six-month period, develop a body of new work through this series of supportive monthly poetry workshops. Through the course material and the monthly workshops, you will find your poetry comes alive in a new way.

In the weeks between workshop sessions, you will be sustained by course material that will attempt to anticipate individual needs, tastes and interests, and this private work is at the heart of the course. While the group setting allows for times of sharing, the workshop sessions will focus primarily on individual learning, with participants working alone on tasks and themes set by the workshop facilitator. The workshop facilitator aims to structure group sessions so that new work is shared in an atmosphere of trust that is balanced and constructive for all participants.

This course will focus on the writing process, rather than on getting published. It will address specific questions about the music inherent in poetry, common errors with voice and tense, and questions about practice, such as:


• What do you do with a poem that is (still) not really finished after many months? And how do you know when a poem is complete?
• Why do good titles matter (and how do you find them)?
• How poems end.
• When is a poem a poem and not a piece of cut-up prose?
• When and how are reflective diary notes and journalling useful starting points for poems, and when are they distractions?
• Exercises, traditional forms, and finding your voice.
• How does the written poem use line endings, stanza breaks and white space effectively?
• How do other art forms (music, art) usefully influence a poet's practice?
• In what ways do readings of other poets help or hinder?
• What can re-start your creativity in times of drought?

At the end of the course, participants will hopefully come away not with “workshop poems” but with a new direction and energy for their writing life.

Requirements

This course is suitable for those who have already set off on the path of writing poetry rather than those who are at the beginning of the journey. It is hoped that intending participants will already have a store of unpublished poems or work in progress to bring to the first workshop, and will be committed and open to exploring the intensive workshop setting over six months to reinvigorate their writing.

About the facilitator

Anne Kellas ran a popular series of poetry workshops for TAFE in the early 90s and in 2007 for the Tasmanian Writers Centre. She grew up in South Africa and emigrated to Australia in the dark days of apartheid in the mid-80s. Her first book (Poems from Mt Moono, 1989) was published in South Africa. In 1993 she received Tasmanian arts funding for work on what later became her second book, Isolated States (2001), and more recent funding support from an Australia Council grant is currently sustaining her work on a third collection. She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BA in English and German. Though tempted by an academic career, she studied librarianship and later, teaching. After a career in youth studies, she now writes full-time.

Dates and times:
Poetry Alive will run as a monthly session of 2.5 hours, from May to November. This would be a total of six sessions. Sessions would be held on a Monday evening from 6.30 pm to 9 pm, on the first Monday of the month:

Monday 3 May

Monday 7 June

Monday 5 July

Monday 2 August

Monday 6 September

Monday 4 October

Venue: Tasmanian Writers' Centre, first floor, Salamanca Arts Centre.

Fee: $300 to members. There are 10 places in the course, which will only run if all places are filled. Payment must be received to secure your place.

Bookings: Contact the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, email: admin@tasmanianwriters.org or phone the centre on: (03) 6224 0029 to make a credit card payment.

Call for contributions to Trans-Tasman Poetry

HOME & AWAY 2010

PressPress chapbook award open for 2010

There is still time to enter the 2010 PressPress chapbook award.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~writerslink/PressPress/PressPress_Chapbook_Award.html

Scott-Patrick Mitchell wins the 2009 PressPress Chapbook Award

The judging of the 2009 PressPress Chapbook Award has been finalised.

The full shortlist is (in alphabetical order):

Mandy Beaumont Breaking Open The Night With Fire

Anne Elvey Claimed by Country

Kit Kelen The Whole Forest Dancing

Jeanina Leane Dark Secrets: After Dreaming (AD 1887 – 1961)

Scott-Patrick Mitchell songs for the ordinary mass

Barbara Orlowska-Westwood Firing Neurones

The entries for the 2009 PressPress Chapbook were of a very high standard with significant experimentation and originality. Entries came from Canada, China, New Zealand, the USA and all Australian states - with a significant contingent from Western Australia this year. There was one bi-lingual entry.

After some tough decision-making the judges chose Scott-Patrick Mitchell's songs for the ordinary mass as the winner of the 2009 Award.

Thank you for your entry. PressPress looks forward to reading more from you in the future.

With best wishes

Chris Mansell

PressPress

www.presspress.com.au

Call for haiku, short work

Part of Overload Poetry Festival 2009 [Australia]:

Hi everyone,

The 8th Overload Poetry Festival (4-13 September 2009) seeks submissions of short poetry for public display on the scrolling text tickers of the west-facing wall in Federation Square, corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets.

... Fed Square will let us feed poems up to these digital scrolling text screens over 10 days. This is one of the busiest intersections in Melbourne, a great opportunity to take your poetry to the people.

Send us haiku, one-line poems, short poems (up to 5 lines), short prose poems (up to 50 words) to submissions @ overloadpoetry.org by 31 July 2009. Payment: the joy of being read by hundreds of thousands of people.

In submitting, please be mindful of the medium and its public nature. Push the boundaries tastefully...

And please circulate this message among your networks.

Look forward to reading your gems,

Matt Hetherington and Luis Gonzalez Serrano

Revival of North of the Latte Line

For the past 3 weeks, I have been experimenting with Twitter. Then I went to a presentation by Ivan Herman and Mike(tm) Smith of the World Wide Web consortium's W3C (Web standards committee) and suddenly the world looks different.

Importantly, it looks do-able. The problems of disparate web documents, creating pages, managing different web spaces and trying to keep it all together, will be – I think – a thing of the past one of these days; the difficulties dissipate as I slowly understand how the world of the web is undergoing yet another evolution. That evolution brings new technologies and for me they seem as groundbreaking as the mid-90s, as the days of the early browsers, the days of the browser wars ...

The ones I am watching are:

• Twitter
• Twine
  
• Faviki, and
• well, there is more ... but that's enough for now!
  

Let's see how all this helps revitalise work on The Write Stuff!

Follow The Write Stuff on Twitter

While The Write Stuff figures out how to re-invent itself with the Semantic Web, which has been described as mashups on steroids, follow the Write Stuff on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TWS_TAS

Our Digital Island will be archiving The Write Stuff

Our Digital Island will be archiving this site. To ensure long term access to the content on The Write Stuff, North of the Latte Line and Roaring Forties Press, I have asked the State Library to include those sites in their project, Our Digital Island. The first "capture" of those sites will be taking place shortly. Regards, Anne.

The Write Stuff

I cannot maintain this blog and for The Write Stuff any longer.

As you will appreciate, creating and uploading new content takes time, a lot of time. Imagine trying to maintain the 40 sections of the Showcase of Tasmanian poetry and to update them with new content, edit the aged content and to create new poet pages into eternity. Over the years, it turned me into a web site provider for 40 poets, providing, in most cases, their only web presence. Most of them need an update to their section, showing their new prizes, new, books etc.

Over the years, one of the services I provided via that Showcase was postman – very often, lazy visitors who couldn't be bothered to use a telephone book or write to a writer's centre would write in saying they wanted to get in touch with one of the poets they met in the year dot and wanted to say hi. In some cases, it was a publisher who urgently needed to contact their author: that happened at least twice. I don't mind, but the sheer volume of the site has taken its toll.

When our younger son died almost three years ago, I came to a halt. The site came to a halt.

There have been a few volunteers helping with this blog over the years, but there have been no helpers with The Write Stuff (apart from volunteered help with our competitions in 2004/2005).

I have done all that web work alone. I simply cannot do it anymore, not without my own writing time evaporating altogether into thin air. I cannot keep The Write Stuff current and I cannot bear seeing it age with neglect.

So I have decided to retire from all my external web work commitments, altogether. I plan to archive The Write Stuff's content permanently elsewhere (publicly available); I will keep the site alive, and provide links from The Write Stuff to those archived pages. Keeping the site alive has its own financial cost but I am prepared to pay that.

If a miracle happens and I get offers of support for the site (practical, active and sustainable support) who knows, it might be able to be continued, and I have ideas for how it could be continued, as a wiki for easy author contributions perhaps ...

In the meantime: Having the site online as it is, with gaps and lapses, is painful to me: There are poets I have not had time to put online due to my own life's personal tragedy and lack of time, poets who are more than deserving of a place alongside others on that showcase, like Jane Williams for instance.

So. Rather than present an uneven collection, this is my plan: to find an archive at the State library and provide links from the site to that content.

I wish everyone well and thank you for your support and feedback over the years.
Regards
Anne.

Christopher Bantick on Tasmanian publishing

Once again, reviewer Christopher Bantick has had a bit of a go at the publishing scene in Tasmania, in today's edition of The Sunday Tasmanian.

I have heard of ABS statistics that Tasmania is home to more self-published authors than any other state. His comments about quality and the need to employ an editor before rushing into print are well worth heeding.

As a place that "bakes its own curtains and weaves its own bread" (Frank Moorhouse's quip), Tasmania is also home to more than a few "properly" published authors, and many of these are themselves owners or operators of small literary presses.

In defence of those small presses, it is worth saying that, by and large, the overwhelming proportion of their titles are works by other authors, not the owner-author – a signature of the generosity of spirit that operates down here.

The small literary presses all know about the need to hire a distributor, and all know the hideous costs of doing so. The mainland distributor I hire does his best and the Tasmanian-based distributor I have attempted to hire maintains a mysterious silence.

The alternative to offering one's title to a distributor at a prohibitive 60% or 70% discount is to work alone, as I did. For two years I sold my author's books at Salamanca Market (averaging 5 sales per Saturday most of the year and up to 20 sales per Saturday over the Christmas holiday season) operating a casual stall.

Buyers were mostly tourists and interstate or international visitors, and sales were superior to those at any Tasmanian bookshop.

Reviews of the book which I published The Literary Lunch (by Australian author Geoff Dean) were mostly in interstate papers and journals (The Age, The Courier Mail, and four others) and the author also made it onto Ramona Koval's Book Show a year ago for a half-hour interview with Peter Mares (due to my efforts and those of his other publisher, poet Edith Speers of Esperance Press).

Another alternative is for the small literary presses to work together to form some kind of consortium and share costs and expertise. Before establishing Roaring Forties Press, I tried to do so and invited no less than four other small presses to join me, but each was wary and preferred to work alone.

I also worked with another small press, the excellent Pardalote Press, at trying to set up a model for distributing Tasmanian literary titles here, but one way and another we were thwarted.

The photograph accompanying Bantick's article today is of Tasmanian Book Fair stall holders at the 2006 event, central aisle from foreground to the back: Quintus Publishing, operated by author David Owen at the University of Tasmania; myself; poet Peter Macrow (of Blue Giraffe) and in the far distance, Ralph Wessman of Walleah Press.

So there we are, isolated and fair game for a slow day at The Muck. We'll never know what bits from Bantick's article ended up on the cuttingroom floor, or why a 2006 photograph accompanied the article, but so what. In the end, people do what they like.

And in Tasmania, it just so happens that a lot of people like publishing, just as they like bottling fruit (again, ABS stats show we do more of that kind of thing than any other state) and making their own jam.

Which reminds me, I have lots of apricots. Anyone want some?

While I intend publishing more books, I am not making jam anymore.
Anne Kellas.

"Varuna conversations" (prose)

From Varuna's page,
http://www.varuna.com.au/newsdiary.html

BLUE MOUNTAINS COMMUNITY WRITING PROGRAM - VARUNA CONVERSATIONS

"Varuna is committed to offering the local community of readers and writers an opportunity to engage with visiting writers in residence at Varuna.

"Beginning in January 2009, we will have an occasional series of conversations, where we will run an afternoon session with a visiting writer. They will do a short discussion on their work and reading and then take questions from the audience. It's a chance to enjoy the ambience of Varuna and hear different writers read their work, from a diverse range of genres.

"To be kept in the loop about these and other occasional events, you need to send your email address to varuna@varuna.com.au to be put on to the Varuna Community Mailing List. We'll give you as much advance notice as possible. "

"Varuna conversations" for poetry are currently on the drawing board. Watch this space for details.

The Guardian Poetry workshop for January 2009: the elegy

Update to The Guardian Poetry workshop

This month, The Guardian's poetry workshop is all about the elegy.

Most months of the year, The Guardian asks a prominent poet to set an exercise, and choose the most interesting responses from readers with an appraisal of the poems.

The January 2009 poet is David Constantine, an award-winning poet and translator.

"His collections include the award-winning Watching for Dolphins, The Pelt of Wasps and Something for the Ghosts; Bloodaxe published his Collected Poems in 2004, and he has been shortlisted for both the Whitbread and Forward poetry prizes. He has translated the work of, among others, Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, and Michaux, and was awarded the Corneliu M Popescu prize for European poetry in translation in 2003. His latest collection, Nine Fathom Deep, comes out this month [January 2009]". (The Guardian, 21 January 2009.)

Write in Your Face: Grants for projects supporting writing practices by young people

Write in Your Face
Closing date: 24 April, 2009.
Grants (up to $5000) available for projects supporting writing practices by young people.

Express Media is proud to present Write in Your Face, a program devolved to Express Media by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. Write in Your Face supports emerging forms of writing practice by young writers, or organisations working with young writers. We invite proposals from people who are using language in innovative ways. This may involve writing for zines, e-zines, comics, multimedia, multi-artforms or cross-media works, websites, live performances and spoken word.

Download the application form and Frequently Asked Questions from http://www.expressmedia.org.au/projects.php

Contact: Bel Schenk
Artistic Director
Express Media
247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000
Ph: 03 9663 4155, Fax: 03 9663 4544, www.expressmedia.org.au

Call for Poems: Blue Velvet

CALL FOR POEMS

'I can't figure out if you're a detective or a pervert.'

Seeking poems that explore the twisted world of David Lynch's Blue Velvet for The Private Press's next chapbook anthology.

Deadline: 28 February 2009. Payment: One copy of the chapbook.

Visit http://zoo.f2s.com/privatepress/callforpoems.html

Poems accepted via online contribution form ONLY.

Tim Thorne describes The Private Press's chapbooks as "stylishly produced" in his review, published in Famous Reporter: http://is.gd/57Oi

WILDCARE TASMANIA 2009 Nature Writing Prize

WILDCARE TASMANIA 2009 Nature Writing Prize:
Download the entry form from one of these links:

Entry form has all the details.

The PDF can also be downloaded from Ralph Wessman's blog posting dated 7 Dec. 2008