Tag: Nic Low

December Monthly Blogger – Best Southerly Blogs of 2016

SoutherlyBlog, News

Many thanks to Nic Low for a fantastic month of blogging. To see out 2016, this month we’re featuring some of our most visited blogs posts of the year. We’ll be back in January 2017 with more great blogs and bloggers, beginning with Roanna Gonsalves author of The Permanent Resident.    2016 in review: Luke Beesley, ‘Poets in Cars, An Interview with Nicholas Powell‘ Eileen Chong, ‘Eileen Chong Interviews Eileen Chong‘ Kate Fagan, ‘Into the Interior‘ Liam Ferney, ‘10 outrageous things that happened in poetry in 2015. You won’t believe what number 6 is!‘ Nic Low, ‘The secret history of Australia’s…

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The secret history of Australia’s unpublished literature

SoutherlyBlog

Nic Low For five of us over the last week, life’s been defined by the chug-and-whir of digital copiers sucking in page after page of reject literature. With the support of the State Library of Victoria’s Storage and Digital Collection Services, a small group of volunteers has been digitising a portion of the archive relating to Australian literary magazines. Edmund La Touche Armstrong, Chief Librarian from 1896-1925 after working his way up from junior assistant, championed a policy of archiving unofficial as well as official culture. His vision meant that from the 1940s until the late 1990s, the SLV stored…

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Iceberg Theory: rules on style from the New Writing for the Real Australia Manifesto

SoutherlyBlog

Nic Low After long weeks of open-ended writing, I crave concrete tasks. Out at my house in the national park north of Castlemaine, if a chapter ending’s giving me grief I might head into the garden of an evening to pick slugs off the basil. If I can’t pin down a character or find the rhythm for my prose, I might take a break and dig a hole. It’s always a purposeful hole – a flat area for a new watertank; stairs up to the outside toilet – but the digging is really the point. It gives a sense of…

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New Writing for the Real Australia

SoutherlyBlog

Nic Low   Last week I mentioned the State Library of Victoria’s archives relating to Australian literary magazines. I’ve since learned that their existence is well-known among literary scholars, and several studies of individual magazines have drawn on the material. But I think the original point stands: it’d be valuable to look at that body of rejected work collectively, as an expression of Australia’s literary unconscious. A week of fruitful conversations with various editors and archival staff means we’ve come up with a method for analysing what’s there. More on that in a moment, but for now, the manifesto I…

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Lessons from the State Library of Victoria

SoutherlyBlog

Nic Low I spend a lot of my time writing in a cottage in the bush. As an antidote to isolation, when in Melbourne I work out of the State Library of Victoria. I love the atmosphere beneath the reading room dome: readers deep in their cups, students flirting in echoing whispers, security guards watching like snipers from the galleries above. I’ve become fond of some of the guards over the years, particularly the eastern-European woman with short blonde hair, and the older caucasian bloke with a big white moustache. They never remember me. Anyone who’s worked in the dome…

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