Category: Blog

Belated Reads

Tracy Ryan We probably all have our list of favourites from early in life, but what about the books it took us a lifetime to get to, the ones we’d heard about but never got around to reading, or that had never crossed our path, till much later? Sometimes these belated reads can come like a bolt out of the blue, just when you thought your reading tastes had either stagnated or at least settled into the shape they were always likely to take. For me the first of these bolts from the blue was the French novelist and general…

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Creative Collaboration

Tracy Ryan Though I happily work as part of a team at other things, as a writer, I am not naturally collaborative. I’m one of those (antisocially?) private writers who does not like even to show what I’m working on – or sometimes even the fact that I’m working. I can’t stand noise, input or suggestion – and prefer to be shut away by myself, preferably in a small space, which makes me focus. It’s not that my process has no spontaneous element; rather that I prefer the spontaneous to happen when there’s no one else around! So it came…

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Willing Suspense: Simenon, Highsmith, Rendell – and Others?

Tracy Ryan Over the last decade or so I’ve become increasingly interested in suspense fiction. Though “suspense” is an element in most fiction, I mean the sort where it’s the main engine or driver of the work. Suspense is a crucial factor in, say, detective stories and thrillers, but even those are not exactly what I mean, though there’s some overlap. At fourteen I was an Agatha Christie addict – and I still admire the skill with which her books are constructed, as well as those written by many others in the genre, or those who have innovated within the…

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Repetition Compulsion: Reading Glen Duncan

by Tracy Ryan When it comes to reading fiction, I’m not averse to the single isolated encounter. It may be because the author only wrote one novel (Emily Brontë), or because there’s only one that appeals. It’s not the writer that’s in question, it’s the individual work. And after all, you can read that one book again and again – and again, with different outcomes at various stages in your life. But what I really love is finding a whole oeuvre to binge on, especially by a contemporary author where there’s likely more to come. “Prolific” is sometimes said with…

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South Countries: John Kinsella, J.S. Harry

It is cold, deepest cold, the lake frozen as far as the eye can see, which is not so far because there is also mist, low and heavy, a twilight mist, swept, as if it came from an endless plain, a vast tundra, by an icy blast, constantly changing, constantly the same. And semi-darkness. Hardly a soul in sight, if you can call them souls, although there is perhaps nothing else that they can be called. The sense of them, rather than the presence, a track worn by footsteps across a ridge of ice, mud mixed into it, making the…

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An Editor Out of Hiding.

Firstly, welcome to the Southerly blog, and a Southerly that is going from strength to strength.  Thanks to our on-line component, The Long Paddock, we are publishing more material than ever. Despite the Global Financial Crisis, which has hit publishing badly and literary magazines very badly indeed, our subscription list is growing. And our social network is thriving. Our Facebook friends list has gone from zero to over two thousand in a matter of weeks. We are now accepting emailed submissions. We are now, thanks to Facebook, able to let our friends know in advance the themes of forthcoming issues.…

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Hi! and Welcome to the Southerly monthly bloggers!

Our blog has been up for a couple of months now, but so far we’ve only been using it to let you now about our new issues. However this is all about to change. In 2011 we are starting our Southerly monthly bloggers program. The way it works is this: every month a different writer will host the monthly bloggers program. They will post about their adventures in literature, writing, publishing, words… the content is open and free, the only proviso is that they post about writing. As Southerly is a journal of Australian literature, all our bloggers will be…

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