Category: Blog

Pip Smith,    Hello Slightly More Northern Southerly Readers, Though I am usually Sydney-based, this month I’m coming to you, mildly diseased and wind-ruffled, all the way from Melbourne. Here, Autumn is like a pick ‘n mix bag of summer and winter days, and you don’t know what you’re going to get until you’re five ks from home in a summer dress staring up at a wall of black cloud. Nowhere else in Australia have I had to buy gloves with penguins on them out of climate-inflicted necessity. For that, Melbourne, I thank you. My journey to Melbourne, though, was…

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Many thanks to our March guest, Kate Middleton. The next few weeks shall be turned over to Pip Smith, whose bio is below. Pip Smith runs the monthly short fiction night Penguin Plays Rough, and edited the group’s first book The Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories, launched at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2011. She has had her poems and stories published in Voiceworks, HEAT, Island Magazine, Pan Magazine and Going Down Swinging, and recently as part of Picaro Press’ Wagtail series. With the help of a Varuna Fellowship, she has a collection of poems forthcoming in 2012, and is currently a doctoral candidate at UWS. 2012 will see her…

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Kate Middleton In a recent edition of the New Yorker, television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about the television show The Good Wife. As television shows produced for the major free-to-air networks in the United States go, The Good Wife is remarkably grown-up: the adults act like adults, with nuanced, contradictory opinions and mannerisms, the parents behave like parents, and the few teenagers that appear on the show act maddeningly like teenagers. The search for the grown-up is not a new phenomenon in this time of teen-oriented media saturation: Virginia Woolf famously declared George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch “one of the few…

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Thanks to Kate Livett and Toby Fitch for a great start to the year. Our next guest posts will be from Kate Middleton. You can read her bio below.   Kate Middleton is the author of Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009), awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, and shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year in Poetry. From September 2011-September 2012 she is the inaugural Sydney City Poet. She completed her BA/BMus at the University of Melbourne, and also holds an MA from Georgetown University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she was won Hopwood Awards…

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Toby Fitch I’ve decided to compile a list of forthcoming Australian poetry titles to give readers and reviewers a gander at the goose that is 2012. It’s not exactly complete. Some publishers haven’t written back to me and others have been a bit peeky, too shy to bare all. And fair enough: they’re all independent. Not like those big publishing houses who don’t do poetry. Anyway, mine is a knee-length skirt of a list, covering new works by poets who haven’t released anything in a while, a few New & Selecteds and Collecteds, and some first books by emerging poets.…

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