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Atoms of language : reading Joseph Massey

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Pam Brown Sometimes when I start to read a new book of poems that immediately strike me as poems I’m going to love and most probably be influenced by, I can hardly continue reading the book. I have to close it straightaway and put it aside. I feel a mixture of ardour and mildly disconcerting anticipation where I’ve recognised an aesthetic disposition that seems uncannily aligned with my own. Then later, once I’ve recovered from this short shock, I return and read it like an addict absorbing an anodyne. It happened today when I opened Joseph Massey’s At the Point.…

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Mid-century women writers

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Mid-century women writers re-considers Australian women writing after the cataclysm of World War II, from within post-war culture; women demonstrating the agency of writing fiction before the formal politicisation of feminism. This issue assembles essays on numerous of these writers, presented in their shared historical context and through the rubrics and perspectives of the present. The issue includes essays on Eleanor Dark, Eve Langley, Jessica Anderson, Christina Stead, Dorothy Hewett, Thea Astley and Elizabeth Harrower. Some of the essays deal with the late works of established writers, such as Helen O’Reilly’s discussion of Eleanor Dark’s last published work, Lantana Lane and Elizabeth Treep’s…

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Please come to the launch of Southerly 72.1: Mid-century women writers

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After much anticipation, Southerly is finally able, and delighted to, invite you to the launch for its latest issue, 72.1: Mid-century women writers. There will be fabulous readings, delicious nibbles, and bohemian bonfemie. Please join us! When: Monday October 8th, 6 for 6:30pm Where: Woolley Common Room, John Woolley Building upstairs, University of Sydney Map: http://www.facilities.usyd.edu.au/oam/blaccess-r01.cfm?fld1=01 Mid-century women writers re-considers Australian women writing after the cataclysm of World War II, from within post-war culture; women demonstrating the agency of writing fiction before the formal politicisation of feminism. This issue assembles essays on numerous of these writers, presented in their shared historical context…

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October Monthly Blogger – Pam Brown

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Thank you, Belinda Castles, for your excellent posts. This month we have Pam Brown as our monthly blogger. Her bio is below: Pam Brown has published many books, including Authentic Local (Soi3 Modern Poets, 2010), an e-book The meh of z z z z (AhaDada, 2010), and, more recently, a booklet of six poems More than feuilleton (Little Esther Books, 2012). She was the poetry editor of ‘Overland’ for five years at the turn of the millennium. In 2011-12, she edited Fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia for ‘Jacket2’ where she is an associate editor. Pam blogs intermittently at thedeletions.blogspot.com.au. She lives in Alexandria, Sydney.

The creative writing racket

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Belinda Castles Funding writers through postgraduate creative writing qualifications…skews funding in favour of the gutless. Enrolling in a postgraduate writing course is a hedge against failure, costing thousands of dollars, for those who are too scared to take off a year to get on with it and write. It attracts those who are everything a good writer is not: compliant, institution bound and approval seeking. Lisa Pryor, 27 February 2010 I have a Masters in Novel Writing and am awaiting examiners’ reports on a Doctor of Creative Arts in writing. Only one of my three novels was written independently of…

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The story of that day

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Belinda Castles Just over five years ago, I decided to write a novel about my grandparents. Their names were Fay and Heinz (in the novel they became Hannah and Emil), and like so many caught up in the wars of the last century, their lives in those times were characterised by displacement and agonising separation. Heinz, a German veteran of the First World War and anti-Nazi socialist, escaped from Germany in 1933, fleeing tragedy and great personal danger. Having crossed the border into Holland and then Belgium, he met Fay, a translator, at the Maison du Peuples in Brussels, where…

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Stealing from Hilary Mantel

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Belinda Castles Hello Southerly readers. Pleased to meet you. This month’s blog entries are from No Going to London, a blog about writing, reading and not going to London. For an explanation of the title see here. Briefly, it is about the books I find helpful as a writer, and about the ongoing struggle with procrastination and distraction that is the writing life, for me. Recently I had the misfortune to finish reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, her second novel imagining the life of Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII. I put off the moment of finishing for several…

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September monthly blogger – Belinda Castles!

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A big thanks to Jill Jones for her fabulously interesting posts. This month we have Belinda Castles blogging for us: Belinda Castles is a writer and editor. Her most recent book is Hannah and Emil, a novel based on the lives of her grandparents. Her grandfather was a German anti-Nazi refugee who met her British-born grandmother when fleeing Germany in 1933. In 1940 he was arrested in Britain and sent to Australia on the infamous HMT Dunera. Belinda’s previous novel, The River Baptists, won the Australian/Vogel Award for Literature for 2006. In 2008 she was named one of the Sydney Morning…

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Sounds, Markings, Places

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Jill Jones I was at the Queensland Poetry Festival last weekend at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in ‘the Valley’. I had been thinking for a while about how place and poetry work together. I mean, more than usual, as place is important to my poetry. I am to teach into a course about writing and place next year, so there is a work-related imperative. I had also done a conference presentation on ‘Ken Bolton’s Adelaide’ earlier this year. Ken wrote in an email to me that his naming of certain places in poems was a way of…

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Homage and influence, naked and otherwise

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Jill Jones I was looking over some notes the day I wrote this post (Wednesday). They were towards a piece I had begun some time ago, not completed, about the Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. As well as reminding me about life’s unfinished projects, it got me thinking about homage, paying respects. I have a wonderful book by John Ashbery, Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University Press). In the introduction, Ashbery says he did not want to explain his poetry and chose to speak about poets “who have probably influenced me”. The word “probably” seems to be a…

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The present of books

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Jill Jones Just recently, I found myself receiving a number of books from different sources over a matter of a couple of days. They are all, of course, poetry books. Despite the fact that poetry publishing is not a best-seller type of enterprise, there’s plenty of us who buy or acquire and are interested in books of poetry. I’ve even noticed a welcome increase in poetry reviews in the newspapers. Not all the reviews are terribly well done, or maybe they were savaged by sub-editors (who knows?), but at least they are providing space for dialogues about poems, poetry and…

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