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Southerly launches a new issue, A Nest of Bunyips

Bunyip: (say ‘bunyuhp) noun 1. an imaginary creature of Aboriginal legend, said to haunt rushy swamps and billabongs. 2. Obsolete a full-grown beast (def. 2) which has remain unbranded. 3. Obsolete an impostor. [Aborig.; Wathawurung] Bunyips, apparently, are nocturnal creatures known to haunt waterholes. It’s been suggested that there are more than a couple of Australian poets to whom this description might apply. This, certainly, is a rich poetry issue, a nest-full of the finest new writing, from Jennifer Maiden, John Kinsella, Maria Takolander, Michael Farrell, Craig Powell, Michael Sharkey, Kate Middleton and many others (several of them quite tee-totalling), plus essays by Kevin Hart on A.D. Hope, Lachlan Brown on…

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A Note or Two on the Storytelling Epidemic, and a Cursory Review of Rocket Clock Story Slam

Pip Smith Over the past few years, it seems many of the communities that tend to swarm around microphones – poetry slams, radio shows, comedy gigs, literary soirees – have become entranced by conversational, back-to-basics storytelling. In Sydney, we have Story Club at Hermann’s Bar, which sits more at the comedy end of the spectrum, and FBi Radio’s All the Best, which firmly models its content on the personal, narrative journalism heard on NPR’s This American Life, amongst others. The short story night I’ve curated since 2008 – Penguin Plays Rough – finds itself attracting interest from the literary community,…

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‘Rawshock’ by Toby Fitch — Book launch

Please join us for the launch of Rawshock, by our poetry reviews editor Toby Fitch, When: Sunday April 22 from 2pm Where: Brett Whiteley Studio, 2 Raper St, Surry Hills Using the Rorschach inkblots as metaphors, conjuring the wondrous and the monstrous in his poems, Toby Fitch brings a unique vision to Australian poetry. Old modes of expression—such as the mythic, the romantic, the symbolic and the surreal—are revived and reshaped in poems that mythologise love, anxiety, the self and city living, dovetailing inner and outer worlds with a healthy antipodean dose of absinthe and pattern poetry.

Melbourne

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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Our next guest writer, Pip Smith.

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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Icarus Downstage, Right: Writing Art

Kate Middleton This past week I gave a talk on ekphrasis and the ways in which pictures in themselves may tell stories. In part I wanted to give a little history, and so looked back to Homer’s description of Achille’s Shield, as well as to consider the ways in which, despite being saturated with images, we are less skilled in reading them now—simply because we are no longer accustomed to spending a lot of time with a single image.  The other aim of the talk was to discuss my own practice and think about the different ways I have approached…

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Guilty Pleasures (Lights Out! Meet in the kitchen in one hour for a Midnight Feast!)

Kate Middleton While I often deny the word “guilty” in relation to pleasures, I admit the phrase has its attractions and, yes, usefulness. A guilty pleasure has a little subversive thrill embedded, and is often something enjoyed when we feel we “should” be doing something else. That feeling of “should” could come from an awareness that we are procrastinating, but just as often I’m sure it comes from the idea that we could be spending our time on something with greater seriousness. One of my teachers and friends, the wonderful fiction and non-fiction writer Sugi Ganeshananthan, once said, “Guilt is…

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Brave New World: High-Tech Words

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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Errata 71.2, A Handful of Sand

We have been notified of a number of errors and omissions in Southerly 71.2 A Handful of Sand.  Please find the corrections below and accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience. Correction for Kerry Reed-Gilbert and bios for Jannali Jones and Brenda Saunders* Full text for Natalie Harkin, White Picket Fence Full text for Brenda Saunders, Looking for Bulin Bulin* *These items may have been lost when our site went down in 2021. We are endeavouring to relocate missing files and return them to where they belong. Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have a copy you previously…

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The Lives of Other Writers

Kate Middleton While our literary commentators are often pronouncing the forthcoming obsolescence of the novel or poetry (Can Poetry Matter? Dana Gioia asks and everyone wrings their hands again…), one form that seems to be in no danger is the biography. We never get tired of talking about the way we live, and wondering if it’s the right way. Many of us turn to biographies for examples of right and wrong turns, as well as for a particularized vision of an era or a milieu that interests us: they make very palatable history lessons. The genres of biography and memoir…

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Our next guest blogger, Kate Middleton!

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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Poetry Titillations Part 2

Toby Fitch Here are some more forthcoming Australian poetry titles to get into a state about. It’s difficult to be comprehensive when compiling a list about the future, especially when that future is poetic, and extra-especially given that poetry publishers, thankfully, aren’t as media-hungry as politicians. So, there are more books in the works without titles or funding yet, but they’ll be a nice surprise when they flash us later in the year. NB: If any publishers want to add to this list, feel free to contact me or use the comments field below. Australian Poetry: Mathew Abbott — wild…

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