Tag: guest

H.P. Lovecraft’s Slim Purpose

30 May 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Phillip Ellis Winfield Townley Scott once made the following remark about H. P. Lovecraft’s verse: “To scare is a slim purpose in poetry.” This is true; there is more to weird verse, poetry of fantasy and horror, than shudder-mongering, and there is more to the genre of horror than refining the evocation of physical disgust and revulsion. Part of the problem is that so much of the Lovecraft’s weird verse feels stylistically deriviative of both Swinburne and Poe. It is only relatively rarely that Lovecraft achieves his own style, his own voice technically. One key example of this latter point is…

Autumn

25 May 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Phillip Ellis I won’t say that this thought has always struck me as evident, or even possible, but, for a long while, it seems to me that Brennan’s focus on the European seasons in his XXI Poems: Towards the Source and his Poems reflects a focus so intense on the absent beloved that all his terms of reference are to her and her world. This is a complicated way of saying that the lover is thinking solely of the beloved. She is his world, his point of departure, his Eden, and his point of return. Which makes the following all the more…

Form and Content

22 May 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Phillip Ellis Part of my poetic practice involves mastering as many poetic forms as I can. By being able to write as many as possible, without explicitly needing to concentrate on their demands, I find that my ability to write effective poetry is enhanced: I need not lose energy concentrating on the rules of a form, and can concentrate, instead, on the poem’s content. Part of this process involves the creation of new poetic forms, usually out of pre-existing elements. A case in point is one that I use for a series of pieces, each titled “Image”. The basis of…

New Monthly Blogger – Phillip Ellis

16 May 2011 SoutherlyNews

Southerly’s Monthly Blogger program has got off to a brilliant start, thanks to the thoughtful, engaging and inspiring posts from Tracy Ryan. Thank you, Tracy! Next in our program is Phillip Ellis. Here’s his bio: Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic and scholar, and his poetry collection, The Flayed Man, has been published by Gothic Press. Gothic Press will also edit a collection of essays on Ramsey Campbell, that he is editing with Gary William Crawford. He is working on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another collection has been accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also published his…

Worldplay and the Writer

13 May 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog5 Comments

Tracy Ryan What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, But I can be happy and building at home. (Robert Louis Stevenson, “Block City”) The imaginative nature of the writer’s life suggests intuitively that it’s linked to earlier play in childhood, and of course Freud makes this connection explicit in his famous if inevitably limited essay/speech, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” (1907). I say limited because Freud does not develop in it all the ideas he raises, and many of his points are arguable. Nevertheless,…

Novels about Writers: Lost Illusions

9 May 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Tracy Ryan Novels about writers are sometimes decried as running the risk of being boring, self-indulgent, or failing in imagination, as if their author was doing nothing more than lazily transcribing from his or her own life. And perhaps to some degree that risk is quite real, since the main activity of a writer is often solitary, quiet, assiduous, and looks dull from the outside… Planning, note-taking, researching, thinking, revising, scrapping and starting again – hardly the stuff of high drama. Maybe that’s why popular films about real-life, historic writers almost never show them actually writing – how static would…

Belated Reads

1 May 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog6 Comments

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…

Creative Collaboration

28 April 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog4 Comments

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…

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

19 April 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

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…

Repetition Compulsion: Reading Glen Duncan

14 April 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog6 Comments

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…

Our First Monthly Blogger: Tracy Ryan!

12 April 2011 SoutherlyNews1 Comment

Tracy Ryan is our first monthly blogger. A poet, activist, academic, and many other things besides, she begins her posts on all things literary from this Friday, April 15th. So keep logging on from this Friday, as her posts are sure to be scintillating, insightful and fun. You can check out more about her in these two links: http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/authors/309/Tracy+Ryan http://poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com/ Remember, you’re welcome to comment on her posts.

Hi! and Welcome to the Southerly monthly bloggers!

18 January 20116 November 2021 SoutherlyBlog

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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