Category: Blog

Abstract extracts from my travel journal: June to August 2011

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Angela Meyer This post is partly a peek into my process. If you read more of my writing you may notice thoughts, imagery, themes popping up that originated from this trip and my recordings. But I like to think these carefully chosen ‘abstract extracts’ – deliberately taken out of context – form a little narrative of their own. Paris Cars and motorbikes honk, a man vomits into the bin and hobbles away. We are halfway around the world, we desperately need showers and we are happy. …the best part of the day, I think, was all the stairs and the…

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Reviewing Books

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Angela Meyer I thought, for this post, that I would share some of my own personal mantras/guidelines for reviewing books. I’ve been reviewing books for about 4.5 years. That means, really, I’m still pretty new at it. I started out with LiteraryMinded and mini-reviews in Bookseller+Publisher magazine. I have now reviewed for a range of publications, including Australian Book Review, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, Bookslut, Cordite, Mascara and the Australian. After reading this you might also understand why I called the thoughts in my previous Southerly post ‘non-reviews’ as opposed to reviews. They were more off-hand, less structured…

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Recently read: non-reviews of The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, Flying with Paper Wings, The Cook

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Angela Meyer The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll, UQP (Aus), 9780702238468, July 2011 (paperback) This book has been near the top of my pile since July and I finally picked it up to start reading on a flight to Sydney recently. I am an animal lover but have barely read any books on animals! What seduced me about this book was the pictures and descriptions of the resident chimps of Fauna Sanctuary in the middle of the book, ie. under the picture of Binky: ‘Binky may look tough, but he’s actually a very sensitive and loving chimpanzee as well as…

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Tempeh matters: the launch of Janet De Neefe’s Bali: The Food of My Island Home

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Angela Meyer Recently I attended the launch of Janet De Neefe’s new cookbook Bali: The Food of My Island Home. De Neefe moved to Bali 26 years ago after falling in love with the place and with a local man. She has founded two restaurants in Ubud: Casa Luna and Indus. She also founded the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which I have attended twice: once as an audience member, once as a guest of the festival. Her large and lavish launch brought a bit of the Ubud Writers and Readers Fest to Melbourne. We sampled tempeh, arancini balls, beef…

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Last 2011 monthly blogger – Angela Meyer!

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Thank you, Andrew Burke, for your excellent posts. Please don’t forget to check out his blog: http://hispirits.blogspot.com/ For our final monthly blogger for 2011, we have the ever-fabulous Angela Meyer of Literary Minded! Her bio is below: Angela Meyer is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer. Her stories and criticism have been published widely, including in The Lifted Brow, Wet Ink, Seizure, Cordite, AntiTHESIS, Bookslut, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian. For Southerly, she once interviewed author Cate Kennedy. She is a former acting editor of Bookseller+Publisher – the Australian book industry magazine – and runs a popular blog…

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Collaboration – Best with a Little Stir

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Andrew Burke Recently I posted here about Collaborative poetry, citing examples by renga poets, a ‘mock’ poet, and an award-winning Canadian poet, Phil Hall, and myself. As usual, I stepped in blindly, and started writing before I had done the research. This is the creative side of me: I’m just an excitable boy, as some pop song said years ago. When I was a university lecturer, I warned students off relying on Wikipedia for their research. It was early days for the online encyclopaedia; many of the entries were biased and incomplete. I still believe Wiki has to be used…

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Collaboration

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Andrew Burke hey cuckoo– are you scolding the loafer? – Issa, 1813 Friend and fellow poet, Canadian Phil Hall, has just won the prestigious Governor General’s Poetry Award for 2011. His winning book was Killdeer, published by Bookthug. You can read more here.I’ve been procrastinating for days about writing this. I have no idea why, but events have caught up with me and now is the time. Being only human, I tend to pay more attention to the books and poems of the poets I know personally, so I’ve been reading and, frankly, puzzling over a lot of Phil’s work…

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Flight Log – Poetry with Wings

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Andrew Burke Boarding cards were the ultimate bookmarks – you were issued one before you left and when you woke somewhere between here and Frankfurt they reminded you at bleary breakfast that Fiona had just been cornered in a grimy basement and you were winging now over Romania and would be free in two hours. From an unpublished poem Vanishing Species by Andrew Taylor. This poem is a wonderful example of a new breed of poem which has grown up since the Wright Brothers took to the air. When people say there is nothing new for poetry to say –…

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Day One

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Andrew Burke Today, I read a sign which said, ‘When you write your life story, don’t let anybody else’s hand on the pen’. Now, that feels so right to me when I apply it to poetry – but then … there’s a multi-handed force directing my hands called ‘influence’. We all have them, no matter how we try to ditch them along the way. Even Tranter with his tricky manoeuvres – they’re learnt from Oulipo and his influence from Ashbery is well documented. Or the poets who murmur Sylvia Plath poems to their pillows and write their shadow texts at…

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Hair

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Ali Cobby Eckermann Head hair has important value in Aboriginal culture. In my language it is called mangka. In old family photos, many men and women wore dreadlocks.This would have resulted from living ‘close to the earth’, often a windswept landscape. Human hair was woven, as was dog fur, to make puturu, ‘hair string’, an effective type of rope. The hair was rolled on the thigh, to make strands.These strands were then plaited, to make a stronger rope. Sometimes the women utilised traditional methods of spinning; a hand held spindle was used. String belts would be used to carry bush…

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Bias

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  Ali Cobby Eckermann She had to suffer and survive a long painful journey, for the privilege to stand proud and tell people who her family was, and where they come from. The changes this brought to her life made it all worthwhile. Memories began to heal, and fade away like unimportant dreams. Or do they? She has one friend who tells everybody “I knew her when she was white.” (lots of smiles and laughter). She don’t care; he’s her friend and he has proven that over many years. But it upsets other friends of hers. “Why do you let him…

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Home

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Ali Cobby Eckermann The door slams. Someone’s here. I’ll just lie here and wait. Maybe it’s Audrey. I know a Nana shouldn’t have her favourites, but she is mine. Reminds me so much of myself when I was her age. But I never had the courage she has for her passions. Jeffro enters my bedroom. “How are you, Mum?” he asks. “Get me a cuppa tea,” I say as I begin the uncomfortable struggle out of bed. These winter mornings are getting worse! I hate the arthritis! Don’t reckon I deserve it, really. Never had a cigarette or a sip…

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