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northerly The Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre Magazine

September-October 2015

JENNIFER CLEMENT · NEW CHINESE WRITING · E. L. DOCTOROW · ZANNI LOUISE SUSIE WARRICK YOUNG WRITERS AWARD WINNERS · POETRY · NEWS & REVIEWS

CONTENTS

>> THIS ISSUE

SEPOCT2015 002 Director & Editor’s notes 003 News

BBWF a hit with writers, NRWC and Hachette mentoring program, Grayling and Garrett events and more

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006 Susie Warrick Young Writers Award This year’s winning story and two runners-up

009 Vale E.L. Doctorow

A tribute to a giant of American literature

010 Literature of compassion

Interview with Mexican-American novelist and poet Jennifer Clement

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012 Asian century

A guide to the best in emerging Chinese writing

014 Writers’ Group

Ballina/Byron U3A Creative Writers’ Group

015 Rising

Q&A: Emerging author Jeremy Tager

016 Great fire, lost worlds

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September and October’s line-up of local ADFAS lectures

017 SCU showcase Poetry from SCU students Cassandra Duell and Paula Flynn

018 Picture perfect

Local children’s writer Zanni Louise on working with illustrators

019 Book Review

Dr. Lynda Hawryluk on Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman

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020 Learning Curve A guide to setting up an author website with Russell Kelly

021 Workshops 023 Competitions 024 Writers’ Groups & Member Discounts

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>>HELLO

DIRECTOR’S NOTE Festivals are a long time in the making and pass in a fleeting moment. They unfold scripted and unexpected conversations and ideas so rapidly, and ephemeral words and writing with such impact. At NRWC we believe passionately in the importance and power of literature in shaping our lives. And we know that, more and more, there is a need to cultivate and conjure community conversations about the issues that matter, and to explore the creative process. Byron Bay Writers Festival facilitates this conversation, enhancing the cultural life of regional residents in the Northern Rivers and beyond.

The 2015 Festival exceeded all expectations with record crowds, perfect winter weather and three days of storytelling, debate, and satire supplied by some of our foremost thinkers and writers that created a stimulating, memorable and happy Festival, generating the best box office and book sales in the Festival’s history.

Photo: Angela Kay

Those sales and audience anecdotes indicate that Mexican-based author Jennifer Clement, Nigerian Chigozie Obioma and self-published artist Joshua Yeldham were among the finds of the Festival. One Festival guest told me about Yeldham, “I bought Surrender yesterday and want to carry it around like a bible, my personal inspiration.”

Jennifer Byrne commented, “I always think of an interview as a kind of dance. You lead but it is they who must perform - and I thought all the authors I worked with danced beautifully.”

It’s such a striking description of the magic that can happen on stage – the entire weekend felt like a dance that we want to return to again and again.

As gratifying as it is for the Festival team to surpass all figures from last year, the main satisfaction undoubtedly comes from seeing the audience leave each day with hearts and minds filled with the ideas and extraordinary conversations they imbibed on site.

Mark August 5-7, 2016 in your diaries so that we can continue these conversations together in our twentieth year!

FROM THE EDITOR

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LOCATION/CONTACT Level 1 28 Jonson Street, Byron Bay P: 02 6685 5115 F: 02 6685 5166 E: info@nrwc.org.au W: www.nrwc.org.au POSTAL ADDRESS PO Box 1846 Byron Bay NSW 2481 EDITOR: Barnaby Smith, northerly@nrwc.org.au CONTRIBUTORS: Nick Couldwell, Nancy Crampton, Cassandra Duell, Paula Flynn, Lynda Hawryluk, Dave Haysom, Angela Kay, Russell Kelly, Jan Mulcahy, Julia Pannell, Celine Safajou, Thea Shields NRWC COMMITTEE CHAIRPERSON Chris Hanley VICE CHAIRPERSON Lynda Dean SECRETARY Russell Eldridge TREASURER Cheryl Bourne MEMBERS Jesse Blackadder, Kate Cameron, Marele Day, Lynda Hawryluk, Anneli Knight, Emerald Moon, Jennifer St George, Adam van Kempen, Teresa Walters.

LIFE MEMBERS Jean Bedford, Jeni Caffin, Gayle Cue, Robert Drewe, Jill Eddington, Chris Hanley, John Hertzberg, Fay Knight, Irene O’Brien, Jennifer Regan, Cherrie Sheldrick, Brenda Shero, Heather Wearne.

MAIL OUT DATES Magazines are sent in JANUARY, MARCH, MAY, JULY, SEPTEMBER and NOVEMBER MAGAZINE DESIGN Kaboo Media PRINTER Quality Plus Printers Ballina

Edwina Johnson Director, NRWC

Forty-eight. That is how many books I have read on the ‘100 Best Novels Written in English’ list recently published by the Guardian. It was more than I anticipated, yet there were a handful of novels that I admit to never having heard of. Such an exercise as this is designed to encourage debate and simply be an entertaining, provocative read, yet how useful are lists as a way to survey and critique literature (or for that matter, any work of art)?

Many, with justification, see lists as reductive, populist and subjective, demeaning literature by establishing the ignominy of a hierarchy (even if they are good fun). I thought list-making in the arts had petered out in the mid-noughties, its peak being around the time of the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (2000), starring John Cusack playing a record store owner and compulsive listmaker. Clearly that is nonsense: they are still very much with us.

northerly

northerly is the bi-monthly magazine of the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre. The Writers’ Centre is a resource and information base for writers and readers in the Northern Rivers region. We offer a year-round program of readings, workshops and writer visits as well as the annual production of the Byron Bay Writers Festival. The Centre is a non-profit, incorporated organisation receiving its core funding from Arts NSW.

And maybe they do have a function.

In the previous issue of northerly, author Emma Ashmere listed six Australian novels with gardens as a central theme; in this issue, we list six of the best emerging writers from China. For some, at least, they are an effective way of bringing new authors and works to readers’ attention.

And it’s the same with the Guardian’s list. If it helps readers discover the more obscure novels included (Party Going by Henry Green and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner were a couple that had previously eluded me), then it is a valuable project – one that took editor Robert McCrum two years to complete.

The highest (and only) Australian novel on the list? Patrick White’s Voss at seventyseven, sandwiched between On The Road and To Kill A Mockingbird.

Barnaby Smith Editor, northerly magazine

ADVERTISING We welcome advertising by members and relevant organisations. A range of ad sizes are available. The ad booking deadline for each issue is the first week of the month prior. Email northerly@nrwc.org.au.

DISCLAIMER The Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre presents northerly in good faith and accepts no responsibility for any misinformation or problems arising from any misinformation.

The views expressed by contributors and advertisers are not necessarily the views of the management committee or staff. We reserve the right to edit articles with regard to length. Copyright of the contributed articles is maintained by the named author and northerly.

CONNECT WITH US Visit www.nrwc.org.au. Sign up for a membership. Stay updated and join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. www.facebook.com/pages/ Northern-Rivers-Writers-Centre twitter.com/bbwritersfest Cover image: Cloud Control by Geoffrey Cotton Photo: Julia Pannell The Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre, Byron Bay Writers Festival and northerly magazine acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of this land.

Why festivals matter

>> NEWS

The ongoing vital role of literary festivals in Australia was emphasised with a typically diverse, intellectually vibrant and fantastically attended Byron Bay Writers Festival in August.

Writers’ festivals can never replace the actual acts of literature, that is, the reading and the writing of it. They are, inherently, events that can only circle around this essence with critique, debate and reflection. But increasingly, they are integral to the literary health of both local communities and the general Australian arts world, as proven by the nineteenth Byron Bay Writers Festival, held August 7-9.

Firstly, there is the fact that festivals are of course crucial from a commercial perspective. In an age where the books pages of national newspapers have dwindled and literary journals face an increasingly precarious existence, the festival is among the most effective ways of introducing readerships to new authors and works and indeed selling those wares – credit and thanks must therefore go to Mary Ryan’s Bookshop for their sterling efforts and their spectacularly decorated on-site store.

Another way festivals are a force for good can be found among the writers themselves. Writing is, obviously, an activity where solitude of some kind is both inevitable and required (though it was interesting to contrast Krissy Kneen

and Robyn Cadwallader who appeared on the panel Poetry: Inspiration or Perspiration on BBWF Saturday – the former can only write in public places such as libraries or cafes, while the latter is devoted to the privacy of her home study). This means that interaction and discussion with other writers can be a rare thing for some (for others, interaction with anyone is unusual).

There is also the fact that the concept of the literary scene or school, based in a certain city or region, seems a thing of the past thanks to such factors as the globalisation of culture and the internet.

Therefore, writers’ festivals offer an opportunity for authors to touch base and forge new relationships with their peers.

Richard McHugh, who appeared at BBWF this year on the back of his novel Charlie Anderson’s General Theory of Lying, said, “I always thought that when people say writing is an isolating life, that didn’t apply to me because I’m constantly surrounded by people in my day job [McHugh is a barrister]. What I never realised until this weekend was how completely isolated I had been from other writers. I just totally loved being

a part of this community that I didn’t realise I belonged to. I met a tonne of people who write all kinds of stuff whom I really liked. It made a huge difference to my confidence and to how I feel about writing.”

Ashley Hay, author of The Railwayman’s Wife, also enjoyed the instant creative community that she found herself a part of when she arrived in Byron that weekend.

“I think writers’ festivals are among the most astonishing and intense bouts of professional development that writers – usually out there on their own in their rooms – can access, in a kind of short, sharp, punchy hit,” she said.

There is plenty more to be said in support of writers’ festivals, and why they are so important in Australia.

Reflecting on his appearance at BBWF in 2014, journalist Anthony Loewenstein perhaps summed up their relevance most succinctly, writing, “We Australians feel connected to the wider world but are also insulated from its more brutal waves. Writers’ festivals are a unique way for us to briefly connect with each other during a time of global unease and insecurity.”

Byron Bay Writers Festival staff with former prime minister Julia Gillard, who was interviewed by Clare Wright on the Saturday. From left: Communications manager Joanna Trilling; Site manager and technical producer Mic Deacon; Program coordinator and schools and volunteer manager Penny Leonard; Julia Gillard; Director Edwina Johnson; Volunteers coordinator Finola Wennekes; Sponsorship manager Mouche Phillips; Operations manager Sarah Ma. Photo: Julia Pannell

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>> NEWS

Festival. The successful applicant will receive a fortnight’s accommodation in a self-contained apartment at The Lock-Up, a contemporary inner-city arts space in Newcastle’s East End, as well as a $1,400 stipend from the Festival – the resident will also have the opportunity to participate in the Festival.

The residency period is March 22 to April 4, 2016, with the Festival taking place April 1-3. Writers who have not had a book commercially published and who are working towards a fulllength work in any genre are invited to apply, while a regional area is defined by state and federal departments as areas outside Metropolitan centres, and excludes cities with populations of more than 100,000.

Submissions close on October 1, for more information and applications forms visit www.newcastlewritersfestival.org.au.

New writers’ centre for Gold Coast

Hachette and NRWC team up for mentoring program

The Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre is pleased to announce the inaugural Hachette Mentoring Program, which will provide one NRWC member with the opportunity to work with a Hachette publisher to raise the standard of their completed manuscript.

Applications open on September 17 and close at 2pm on October 15, with no fee required for submission. Writers must be members of NRWC and should submit a two-page letter describing their work and reasons for seeking a mentor, as well as the first 3,000 words of their manuscript. For full details of the application process and terms and conditions visit www. nrwc.org.au.

NWF residency opportunity

Emerging writers from regional Australia are invited to apply for a two-week residency being offered at The Lock-Up in Newcastle, in the lead-up to next year’s Newcastle Writers

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A new readers’ and writers’ centre has opened on the Gold Coast. Writers Activation, as it is called, is run by the writer Helen Stubbs (pictured above), who was the recipient of a grant from Gold Coast City Council to make use of a space in Scarborough Street in Southport. The centre offers group writing sessions, workshops, seminars, opportunities for parents and children and readings. It will also facilitate meetings between writers and promote the books of local authors.

Writers Activation held its official launch on August 20, while the centre is also running a competition where members are invited to respond to any photograph in Graham Burstow’s photography exhibition at the Gold Coast City Gallery, Flesh: The Gold Coast In The 1960s, 70s and 80s. Submissions must be 600 words or less and can be fiction, non-fiction or poetry.

More information on both the centre’s activities and the competition can be found at www.writersactivation.com Grayling, Garrett heading to Northern Rivers

Byron Bay Writers’ Festival may be over for another year, but there are still events to come in 2015 to sate the appetite of the many bookish denizens of our region. First up is none-other than the prolific public intellectual and British philosopher A.C. Grayling, who will appear at Byron Theatre on Thursday September 10 to deliver a lecture entitled The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times.

>> NEWS

OBITUARIES HIROYUKI AGAWA Japanese writer; December 24, 1920 – August 3, 2015 ALAN CHEUSE American novelist and short story writer; January 23, 1940 – July 31, 2015 RAFAEL CHIRBES Spanish novelist; June 27, 1949 – August 15, 2015 T.T. CLOETE South African poet; May 31, 1924 – July 29, 2015 ROSEMARY DINNAGE British author and critic; January 17, 1928 – July 10, 2015 E.L. DOCTOROW American novelist; January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015 (see page nine)

Meanwhile, former cabinet minister, one-time singer with Midnight Oil and activist Peter Garrett will appear in conversation on Wednesday October 28 at the A&I Hall in Bangalow, discussing his highly anticipated forthcoming memoir, Big Blue Sky. Tickets for both events are $30 and can be booked at www.byronbaywritersfestival.com Tracks magazine seeks surf fiction

The surfing magazine Tracks is inviting submissions of short stories with a surf theme of up to 1,000 words in length.

Writers will be paid $200 for each published story. Email submissions to trackstales@tracksmag.com.au.

Poetry prize winners announced

The winner of the Dangerously Poetic Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize was announced at Byron Bay’s Lone Goat Gallery during this year’s Festival.

One hundred and seventy-eight entries were received from across Australia on the theme of ‘Change’, with the competition judged by Brisbane writer and poet Krissy Kneen. Port Macquarie’s Gill Goater won first prize with her poem ‘Gifts From My Father’ and received $500 and a three-day Festival pass. Second prize of $100 and a oneday pass went to Frances Oliver for her work ‘The Change’.

Morrissey’s novel to be published

Former singer with The Smiths and if you believe some fans, modernday Oscar Wilde, Morrissey, is set to publish his debut novel through Penguin at the end of September. List of the Lost comes two years on from his successful Autobiography, a bestseller that broke first-week records for music autobiography and which its author described as “more successful than any record I have ever released”. According to Morrissey’s fansite True To You, the novel will be available in Australia, though there are no details yet of an American release.

The singer first spoke publicly of the novel in January 2014 when he said he was halfway through it, though there is no indication at time of writing as to what the novel is about. Morrissey has suffered from various forms of ill health in recent times, which coupled with his ongoing disillusion with the music industry, may mean that a literary path may be something he persists with.

DAVID NOBBS British novelist and screenwriter; March 13, 1935 – August 9, 2015 THOMAS PICCIRILLI American novelist and short story writer; May 27, 1965 – July 11, 2015 SYBREN POLET Dutch writer and poet; June 19, 1924 – July 19, 2015 ANN RULE American true crime author; October 22, 1931 – July 26, 2015 FRANCO SCAGLIA Italian writer and journalist; March 27, 1944 – July 6, 2015 WILLIAM JAY SMITH American poet; April 22, 1918 – August 18, 2015 ANNE STRIEBER American thriller writer; August 25, 1945 – August 11, 2015 JAMES TATE American poet; December 8, 1943 – July 8, 2015 SEBASTIANO VASSALLI Italian novelist; October 24, 1941 – July 26, 2015 JOHN A. WILLIAMS American author, journalist and academic; December 5, 1925 – July 3, 2015

QUOTATION CORNER “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect – you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night northerly | 005

>> READ

Susie Warrick Young Writers Award

The Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre’s annual Susie Warrick Young Writers Award attracted its usual high calibre of entries in 2015, with judges whittling the selection down to three. The competition was open to local writers aged between 14 and 25, for stories of up to 1,000 words. Susie Warrick was a much-loved friend of NRWC and great supporter of local writers, who passed away in 2013.

The winner this year is Thea Shields for her story ‘Next Time’. Runners-up were Celine Safajou for ‘13’ and Nick Couldwell for ‘Dark Clouds’. Thea receives $1,250 towards skill and career development, while the award was presented at Byron Bay Writers Festival on August 8.

Congratulations from northerly to all three writers.

Next Time Thea Shields Susie Warrick Young Writers Short Story Competition – Winner The ferry groaned softly underfoot as rivulets of water slid down the fogged windscreen, fracturing his view of the dark, iron sea. Gently, Dougal McMillan steered the boat alongside the dock, his practised limbs deftly guiding the craft to a halt.

‘Night to ye then Dougal, thanks again.’ ‘Oh aye, and to you.’

Dougal watched the tourists and townspeople off the ferry as he moored it securely to the rusting pier.

‘Aye, you alright then, are ye?’ called a familiar voice, ‘... only you’ve been looking dead pale.’

‘It’s no worry, young Sven, just had a bad night of it, nothing more.’

‘Them nightmares again?’ Sven persisted, ‘I heard Mr Gillan from next door sayin’ you was calling out in ye sleep. What’s on your mind then?

Ye can tell me.’

‘Best be off to your mother. It’s late,’ Dougal muttered at the boy.

‘But—’ ‘Get going now.’

The sandy-haired youth was the last passenger off the boat, a trail of grime smeared in his wake across the deck. Dougal sighed and shuffled slowly to fetch the mop, then noticed the boy had left something else behind. A book, sandwiched between two of the wooden benches.

Reaching out his scarred and spotted hand, Dougal pulled it free. It wasn’t a big book, a slim paperback, its mildewed edges eliciting a musty odour. Turning it over, he scrutinised the title: An Anthology of Poems From the Western Front: Siegfried Sassoon on World War I. Dougal stared at the cursive inscription… From the Western Front.

World War I. His dream returned to him then, a pantomime of hell before his eyes. So long ago. Forty- seven years it was, yet his crippled foot and absent thumb reminded him every day — and almost every night. The paperback unfurled slightly, falling open at page 17: Exposure, Dougal read, Sassoon —1916: Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke.

Things seemed all right at first. We held their line...

Dougal saw himself at just eighteen and whole. When he had left wild Scotland for the bloodied trenches west of Ypres. Another world, that waking nightmare of mangled corpses and fruitless sacrifice. The old ferryman cringed, eyes tight shut as his pulse began that familiar dance.

Shut it out. Think about something else. But it was all here, all laid out in

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the poet’s sorry words. He squinted at the page: When hell’s last horror breaks them and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses – blind with blood.

The lines blurred together forming parapets and barbed wire. Dougal watched an inky figure open fire, then fall down and down. Bullets spat, he levelled his rifle. The artillery shell that’d left behind only ragged pieces of his friend, that boy from Glasgow who’d joined up by his side: Horror of wounds and anger at the foe, And loss of things desired; all these must pass.

Sassoon saw all this, Sassoon was there. He knew. Look at this... He wrote it, he has shared this story. They had lived and struggled in the same mud, seen that same blasted skyline. And now... to have found this small comfort, these words that told how it was. What it had been like. Simply to write it all down, just to hold the memories somewhere other than in his head. Then it could become part of a larger world, a world shared with others, substantial, instead of phantom forms that jeered from the darkness.

Dougal’s education had been lost amidst nations at war, never mourned or noticed. Literature and heavy tomes were for other lads, not him.

But these words...They could reveal it all so exactly. Clear as day, but somehow with a still hopeful air. A promise of Absolution — 1918: War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise, And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

Free. Yes; there was more here than former violence and dry old scars.

More than anxious silence: The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes Till beauty shines in all that we can see.

The loch was stilled and the ferry rocked only slightly as the old man rested his hands upon the railing. The book was stowed carefully in his coat pocket and Dougal gazed at his callused hands. Fingers barren of any ring. It wasn’t just an education that he had missed, he realised.

To think of all this time, such precious, fleeting time that had been burdened by his nameless fears. How hollow the many solitary nights had been, staring out at the water. Dougal noticed the moisture on his cheeks yet felt a heaviness leave him as he contemplated the night ahead.

Next time he would return the book to young Sven. Next time he would talk to the boy.

>> READ

13 Celine Safajou Susie Warrick Young Writers Short Story Competition – Runner-up

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It’s dark, a bird starts to chirp and a light switches on. Joshua’s head is visible in a single bed, the duvet tucked up under his chin and his eyes wide open. He leans over to his nightstand and flicks the lamp switch another twelve times then sighs in satisfaction. Joshua crawls out of bed, stretches and walks to his bathroom. With his toothpaste and brush in hand he begins his morning routine, thirteen brushes on the left and thirteen on the right. He bares his clean teeth in the mirror and observes himself. Baby face was what his mother used to call him because of his lack of facial hair and round cheeks. Long legged and armed, Joshua looks a lot like a boy just hitting puberty. He winks at himself and puffs up his chest; today is going to be a good day.

Everything is on point as he makes his lunch whilst whistling a tune his mother used to sing to him. He’s dressed like he usually is for work; a button up shirt, tie, dress pants, shiny leather shoes and a satchel strapped across his chest like a seatbelt. He hops down eleven stairs towards the front door but before he hits the ground; he walks back a step then down the last step again to create the sacred thirteen.

Outside Joshua inhales deeply, breathing in his surroundings. The morning seems to be smiling back at him, the sun shines on his face in greeting and the trees sway silently in the breeze. His feet crunch crisp fallen leaves as he walks towards his bus stop. Quickly checking his watch as the numbers 9:13 blink back at him in neon green, he taps his foot in anticipation. To Joshua’s relief the bus shows up right on cue and the rest of the day goes on without a hitch and exactly as it should be. He is undisturbed while eating his lunch; thirteen chews on the right, thirteen chews on the left. Only needing to reply back to thirteen e-mails and having a staff meeting last just less than thirteen minutes. As Joshua returns home he passes Marge, his retired neighbour gardening a once thriving assortment of flowers of lavender, daises and poppys.

‘Quite a beautiful day wasn’t it Joshua?’ Marge remarks while tending the soil. Joshua lifts his head to the pale afternoon sky, noticing dark thunderclouds roll in from the west.

‘It sure was,’ he replies politely. Joshua has never been one to intentionally engage in social interactions so he says his goodbyes and completes his stair routine. As Joshua lies in bed later that night he thinks of his mother in her red and white polka dot dress. He sighs solemnly and reaches over to turn off the light thirteen times.

It’s dark and the roar of construction work replaces the usual chirp of birds. Joshua frowns and leans over to flick the light switch thirteen times but it doesn’t light. Joshua shoots upright in his bed, furiously flicking the switch, on, off, on, off, on, off, with no result. He darts out of his bed and tries the other lights; nothing. As he looks out the open window he sees an electrical pole on the road. Confused and out of place Joshua begins his morning routine. He’s all over the place as he tries to eat breakfast, make his lunch and get dressed at once. As he scrambles down the stairs with a piece of toast in his mouth he jumps down the last few. He looks back, the urge to do thirteen comes over him but his watch blinks, 9:15. He groans in despair as he bursts out of the door and runs to the bus stop. He’s stumped by the amount of people eagerly waiting for their bus, checking their watches every few seconds.

A teenager holds up his phone and calls everyone’s attention, ‘Hey! I just read on Twitter that all the bus drivers have gone on strike!’

Everyone groans in unison but Joshua stamps his foot and resists throwing a tantrum. By the time he gets to work via taxi he has over twenty e-mails to respond to and is not allowed his lunch break due to his tardiness. His boss gives him a lecture on work ethic and he has to work overtime. By the time Joshua arrives home, dragging his feet, the sun had set and darkness settled in the sky. Marge sits on her doorstep, sees Joshua and rushes over to him.

‘Oh Joshua, I’ve been worried sick. Where have you been? Never mind that, today has been just awful…’ As Marge continues to speak about her horrible day, which turned out to be just like his, a memory flashes through his mind; a gravestone, Beloved Mother, died January 13th 2013, ‘With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts’ – Eleanor Roosevelt. As Joshua comes back to the present, Marge is still complaining about her day, but relief washes over him. He thinks of his thirteen routines and how he had been carrying this sacred number for his mother for so long. Joshua looks down at Marge and says, ‘With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.’ Marge stares back at him, smiles, pats his shoulder and says, ‘Welcome back dear.’

As she walks back towards her front door Joshua looks up to the starlit sky, closes his eyes and pictures his mother dancing in her polka dot dress, a wide grin spread across her face.

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>>READ

Dark Clouds Nick Couldwell Susie Warrick Young Writers Short Story Competition – Runner-up The bus snakes through the small town, jolting my shoulder against hers. I feel her feeble bones pressing through her shirt material, and it’s this closeness that gives me a sense of calm, a sense of reassurance that watching my bus stop slip past is a good idea, the right idea.

Her feet, they are dirty. Mottled with grime and welted by sandals that once bit in at the heel, they dangle above the bus floor, pale and unmoving like a drowned person washed upon a deserted beach. She stares outside towards the hills and meadows beyond the rooftops of town, transfixed like the horizon is on fire. As the bus turns a corner, the late afternoon sun creeps through the alleys and spills into our faces. She grunts and spins towards me, showering her hair across my face like the sun will somehow show her in a different light. The greasy strands tickle my lips like swaying palm fronds. As I peer through her hair, I smell the week-old scent of dirt, cinnamon and I wonder why she is here.

They seem so tender, so fragile, almost out of place. The chipped nail polish, the age lines embedded in the skin like a map, they do not belong here. They need broken shells and stale seaweed, not broken bottles and worn tar. She whispers behind the curtain of her hair and tells me how she once walked the shores of some far off coastal town, sifting through washed up debris with her very hands. I close my eyes and imagine her feet buried with tangled fishing line and blackened seaweed. I try to picture her dress billowing in the easterly winds, the butterflies and flowers actually moving like they are in an open field. I hold the image of her silhouette against that angry sky bending down to pick up a weathered piece of glass. As she fondles the newfound treasure, I imagine it to be featureless and plane. She rolls it in her palm like a dice, her back to the wind. I can feel it in my own hand; its seamless corners cool against my skin; its emerald intestines, so deep and eternal, almost flawless except for the bubbles of light trapped inside. As I mold it in my hand and feel its contours, I notice through the gaps of my fingers the tide marching itself over my feet. Wet sand and cinnamon hang on the air. She is there, crouching in the damp shoreline ahead, her tangled locks fighting the oncoming wind. She is smiling.

The bus rattles on through the industrial part of town, the piece of glass still in my palm. She says she found it after a storm. She stares straight

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ahead and I can’t help but gaze at the dark clouds gathering around her busted eye. When she feels my eyes on her, she turns to me. I can’t take that sort of intimacy just yet, so I look away.

With my jaw set harder than a block of wood, I eventually ask her what happened. This time when she looks at me, I hold my breath and don’t turn away. I need to hear it. I need to know. She doesn’t answer, just stares at me blankly. Her eye struggles to fully open due to the swelling, the tears more noticeable because of the bluebottle colour of her skin.

My own silence startles me and suddenly I wish I had said something.

Anything.

The factory lights pass and the buildings begin to get smaller and become less metallic. Mill workers start to fill the seats, red-nosed and wide-eyed, thinking of their take-away dinners waiting on cluttered bench tops in the next valley.

At the next stop I watch a cat slinking beneath a car motor, eyes burning like cigarette ends as it tries to lick the dripping radiator. Beside me, she opens her mouth like she’s about to speak, like a secret is about to be told. Porch lights glow in the distance and I quickly realise how late it is. She stands up and I ask her if this is her stop. I sound uncertain, like it’s laced with something else, maybe betrayal. Insects swarm the streetlights and I can almost feel the flickering light through the glass.

I stiffen my guts and turn to do it, to find out what happened, to say anything to halt the ocean rising beneath the seats, but she’s already gone.

The window tingles my forehead. Through the night her feet sparkle as they skip barefoot down the road. Her dress balloons open with the beat of wind and darkness, the flowers and butterflies expanding with every gust. The bus heaves forward with a clank of gears. She’s almost out of sight, invisible other than a flicker, a tiny white gleam of dancing feet, smooth and edgeless like a weathered piece of glass. I feel the dull bottle fragment and clench it in my fist. With the brakes churning, dogs howling, I jump out of the open doors into the shapeless night. Still squeezing the piece of glass, I run headlong into the blackness chasing those lost feet from behind. The very world hums. Somewhere far away someone laughs. A gate, or a swing, shifts in the dress-lifting breeze.

Vale E.L. Doctorow

>> TRIBUTE

The author of the some of the most devastating politically-fuelled novels of the twentieth century, E.L. Doctorow was among American fiction’s most socially engaged and civic-principled authors. Barnaby Smith salutes a writer who redefined the historical novel.

E

dgar Lawrence Doctorow, who died at the age of 84 on July 21, was American literature’s master of exploring the intimate private lives of fictional individuals as they are swept up in realworld historical events. His treatment of his often-doomed characters is poetic, deeply sensitive and highly ideological as they negotiate the limits of their own agency whilst buffeted by social and political momentum. Because of this, many critics observed that Doctorow was “America’s Dickens”, which is no hyperbole: Doctorow’s most potent works that depict citizens caught up in larger melees (such as The Book of Daniel and particularly Ragtime) are certainly worthy of comparison with the likes of Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities.

Of Russian-Jewish extraction, Doctorow was born in New York in 1931.

His first novel, Welcome To Hard Times, was published in 1960 (the title of which proving that the Dickensian spirit was clearly with him even then) and for the rest of that decade he worked as an editor with Dial Press, working with authors including Norman Mailer and James Baldwin.

Leaving the publishing world behind, he published the extraordinary The Book of Daniel in 1971, a fictionalisation of the infamous Rosenberg trials of 1951 that charged, convicted and ultimately executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the grounds of supplying United States secrets to the Soviet Union. The equally dazzling yet stylistically different Ragtime followed in 1975, after which came the perennially underrated Loon Lake in 1980. Major works since then included Billy Bathgate (1989), The March (2005) and Homer & Langley (2009).

Photo: Nancy Crampton

I first encountered Doctorow’s work at university when taking a module named Innovation and Experiment in New York, 1945-1995. The Book of Daniel was a set text alongside such influential works as William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Don DeLillo’s Mao II, Susan Sontag’s Death Kit and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. To this day, whenever I hear or read the word ‘blistering’ I immediately think of Ellison’s remarkable book, yet it serves as an equally appropriate descriptor for The Book of Daniel, which positively burns along, charged with a pervasive sense of injustice and protest, and featuring some of the most unbearably upsetting yet exquisitely written scenes in Doctorow’s entire oeuvre.

It would be unfair, however, to regard Doctorow’s books as merely socio-historical analyses – even if to read Doctorow for the first time is to actually be politicised, as it was for me. As well as capable of spectacularly emotional scenes, he was something of a formal innovator too. The Book of Daniel freely oscillates between narrative voices (and features an amazing passage that offers an enigmatic, cryptic linguistic game that plays with the phonetic and semiotic contrasts between the sacred chant of ‘om’ and the electrical measurement of ‘ohm’), while Loon Lake contains whole chapters made up of (deliberately) bad poetry and is full of dreamy interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness prose that for some makes this novel his most challenging. Of his style,

he said playfully in 2010, “I like commas. I detest semi-colons – I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were flyspecks on the page. If you’re doing it right the reader will know who’s talking.”

He was also, as he had to be given the gravitas of his subject matter, a dab hand with comedy – the drunken, fat poet character in Loon Lake is something of an absurd comic creation while in Ragtime there is a scene of graphic sexual slapstick involving a fictionalised version of early twentieth-century socialite Evelyn Nesbit.

As well as employing fictional characters in the context of actual historical events, another of Doctorow’s signature devices was to imagine fictional personas for real ‘celebrities’, such as Nesbit. Others in Ragtime, the novel widely regarded as his masterpiece, include Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, JP Morgan, Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman and Booker T. Washington.

When asked once how writers can manage this delicate trick of fictionalising real historical figures, Doctorow said, “I treat them like my characters. The way portrait painters create interpretations of their subjects, that is more or less what I do too.”

This approach reflects Doctorow’s strong influence from modernism, further born out by the distinctly Joyce-esque tone of his more experimental novels. His flavour of Americana is also heavily indebted to the novels of John Dos Passos, who, Doctorow once told the Washington Post, “enlarged the possibilities of the novel for all of us who came after”. The mix of a fluid, malleable modernism-influenced style with Dickensian social engagement goes part of the way to explaining Doctorow’s ongoing appeal.

As well as his twelve novels, Doctorow published short stories, plays and essays in a literary career that spanned more than fifty years. However, as he got older, his view of contemporary literature became bleaker, bemoaning a perceived over-emphasis on the domestic and the psychological. In 1988 he said, “I don’t believe we’re doing work equivalent to our nineteenth-century or even to some of our early twentieth-century novelists… We have given up the realm of public discourse and the political and social novel to an extent that we may mot have realised. We tend to be miniaturists more than we used to be… I think it’s true that we’ve constricted our field of vision. We have come into the house, closed the door, and pulled the shade.”

In many ways, Doctorow’s novels can be regarded as tributes or elegies for those brave enough to participate, even as he depicts their failure or tragedy. The canon of American fiction is all the richer for his contribution, which is summed up best by the critic Frederick Jameson: “E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past… no one with left sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present.”

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>> INTERVIEW

The novel as protest

Spectacularly demonstrating the power of literature to give a voice to the oppressed, MexicanAmerican author Jennifer Clement’s remarkable novel Prayers For The Stolen has brought to light crimes that had previously been ignored. In the wake of her appearance at Byron Bay Writers Festival, she spoke to Barnaby Smith about her eclectic literary output.

“I didn’t have any political agenda at all,” says Jennifer Clement of her novel Prayers For The Stolen. “I was just so taken by the image of these little girls hiding in holes in the ground.”

Despite the fact that Clement had no political intention with this immensely acclaimed novel, one that wilfully blurs the lines between fact and fiction and between journalism and magical realism, it has nevertheless brought international attention to one of Mexico’s most heartbreaking but largely unknown problems.

Prayers For The Stolen addresses the abduction and trafficking of young girls in rural Mexico, where lives are ruled and ruined by the extraordinarily wide-reaching drug trade. Hiding in miniature graves in the ground, as Clement describes, is one means of girls avoiding being taken away from their families. The book was a decade in the research, and saw Clement exposed to some of the most tragic and threatening elements of Mexican society.

Clement was born in the USA but grew up in Mexico. She studied at New York University in the early eighties, where she fell in with a crowd that included Andy Warhol and, importantly, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose long-term partner Susanne Mallouk’s story is told in Clement’s first book, the non-fiction tome Widow Basquiat. Other novels include A True Story Based On Lies and The Poison That Fascinates, while she has also published volumes of poetry and is a former president of PEN Mexico.

One of the most versatile writers to appear at Byron Bay Writers Festival in 2015, Clement’s work is in some ways in the tradition of Truman Capote with its journalistic, minimalist tone, yet also benefits from flights of imagination rich with imagery and symbolism. The innovation on display in her style and the injustice exposed through her subject matter make Clement an important figure in contemporary world literature.

You said during your interview with Jennifer Byrne at the Festival that you were fascinated by drug culture. How and why did you first become interested in that world?

I’m also an anthropologist – at university I did two degrees, anthropology and English literature, so as part of my interest in anything I have the anthropologist’s point of view. Drug culture in Mexico is really interesting to me because, for example, of the things that drug traffickers do that would be akin to maybe the knights in King Arthur’s time – like putting jewels on their guns. There are all

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kinds of things like that that fascinate me, another is their complete adoration of cars. Another is the mausoleums – cemeteries with extraordinary mausoleums that are like houses, with running water, as if people were really going to live there after they died. We also know of cases where cars have been buried in cemeteries, like perhaps in the olden days when someone might have been buried with their horse.

It’s also the enormous quantities of money; they don’t know what to do with it, so it’s fascinating to see what they’re spending it on, how they get rid of it and how they launder it.

You also mentioned that while you never felt in danger when speaking with the women and girls that informed Prayers For The Stolen, you did feel some danger carrying out other aspects of research. What form did that danger take?

During my ten years of research there were three years where I was president of PEN Mexico, so for those three years I had to really concentrate on the problem of the killing of journalists. Even though maybe I didn’t realise it, this was feeding the book, because I was going to rural areas and talking to journalists and their families.

That was the only time I felt danger, when I was president of PEN. For example, twice I had all my tyres slashed on my car and the telephone and internet wires cut to my house with a knife – things that might seem like petty crime, but that didn’t happen before or since and was very obviously a warning. I also had phone calls telling me to stop what I was doing.

It made me realise that no one really cared that I was talking to mothers and little girls that were scared, because those people aren’t important, whereas journalists are very important. Journalists are very threatening to corrupt politicians or criminals because unfortunately, especially in a country like Mexico, the journalists also become the police and the detective, and the journalist is very unprotected in those situations.

It was interesting to hear you describe Prayers For The Stolen as a protest novel. What qualifies it as such?

I think there’s a canon of novels of protest, novels like Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre, the novels of Victor Hugo or Emile Zola on the miners. The novel is quite a modern form, it’s not an ancient form, and it has been a place of protest. I hadn’t really realised that

>> INTERVIEW

Photo: Julia Pannell

was what I had done until I won a humanitarian award [The Sara Curry Humanitarian Award]. I’m so honoured by that and it was a huge surprise to be given a humanitarian award for a novel, so it made me reflect on what I had done. Also, the book has been sold all over the world – so even though my girls are Mexican girls, this is happening to girls all over the world. There was a great identification with the book that I didn’t expect at all.

Turning to Widow Basquiat, what moral or aesthetic lessons can we take from Basquiat’s work that are helpful to our understanding of art today?

A lot of Basquiat’s art was a protest against racism, and I think he did it really well. His art is so extraordinary because even though he had no formal training he really did create a new language, and I think that’s what makes him so completely original. When you see a Basquiat you know it’s a Basquiat, you’re not confused.

Sadly most of his work is in private collections so most people don’t get a chance to appreciate it. And the truth is he’s really the only black artist who’s made it huge in the United States, and yet there’s not that much on him, and I don’t know why that is except for the fact he died from an overdose of heroin, and maybe the schools and textbooks feel he’s not exactly the best role model for young black artists.

You collaborated with the Mexican artist Gustavo Monroy on the art book A Salamander-Child. Can you describe the relationship between the visual arts and your own writing, which is obviously very strong?

I certainly have a huge relationship with the visual arts, and this may be due to the fact that my mother is a painter. I was raised with painters, including one of Mexico’s most famous painters, Diego Rivera, the husband of Frida Kahlo. I grew up with his grandchildren and I lived on the same street as them – what is now his museum was their house and I’d spend all my time in that house, so I’ve always been surrounded by painting.

I wrote the story ‘The Salamander-Child’, which is about Lord Byron’s daughter who he had with his half-sister Augusta. I won a prize for it, and wanted to talk to Gustavo Monroy, a very important Mexican painter, about doing something. He ended up getting so excited that he did all these oil painting and drawings of Byron’s

daughter and now there’s a beautiful art book. I like to collaborate with painters and I’d like to do more of that.

You also discussed your poetry at the Festival. In Australian poetry in recent times there has been a fairly testy standoff between formalists or traditionalists on one hand and a mostly younger generation experimenting with more obscure, language-based styles on the other. Does poetry still have to make sense in 2015?

To me it’s very important, I don’t think that poetry should lose its ability to communicate and to show us what makes us human and I think if poetry is too obscure you lose your reader. I think it’s important that the reader can access the idea of the poem.

And how important is how a poem looks on a page to you?

I guess it’s not that important to me. I do write with a lot of music and alliteration and games and assonance, but I’m not writing formal poetry, I’m writing free verse most of the time. But I do try and make sure I don’t have one great long line, I make it intentional, things don’t happen by accident.

I think what I’m most interested in with poetry is ideas. So if you don’t understand what the poet is writing, for me it’s not that interesting. I’m most interested in intellectual poetry where I’m told something that I didn’t understand before. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in mystery, I do agree with what Coleridge said about poetry being at its best when it’s not completely understood. So there has to be a bit of mystery, but it has to be the kind of mystery that we have with faith, or with the divine, or when we look at the stars, when we’re filled with mystery and we don’t understand. But it can’t be mystery out of laziness.

Poetry seems to be the form that you value the most.

It is, and when I do research I am looking for the poetic experience in the research. I’m looking for the metaphor, the symbol, so even when I’m doing my research I’m not looking for the facts from a journalistic point of you – I want to see what colour the wall is, that’s what I’m looking for.

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>> FEATURE

A taste of China As proven by the Byron Bay Writers Festival discussion New Asia: The Best Young Writers In Asia Today, Asian literature is currently experiencing a vibrant, experimental and socially aware generation of authors. China in particular is producing a number of emerging writers making their mark overseas through translations into English, and here are six of the most exciting according to Dave Haysom, joint managing editor of Pathlight, an English-language magazine of new Chinese writing.

T

his article was originally written at the beginning of the year, looking ahead to 2015 and introducing the writers who I thought were likely to make an international impact. In one sense, this was a relatively straightforward task: writers can’t find an English language readership if they’re not being published in translation, so a list of forthcoming titles was the obvious place to start. But just because a writer doesn’t have a book coming out this calendar year, it doesn’t mean they’re not worth paying attention to. Once you broaden the parameters, however, you discover there is virtually no writer who you can’t find some pretext to include, if you look hard enough. And whittling a longlist of dozens down to just six names proves to be a considerably challenging task. What this ultimately resulted in is a list that is far, far from exhaustive, and also somewhat subjective. I didn’t include any authors whose work I don’t personally admire – but there are plenty of other writers I love who had to be left out.

We’re now already well on our way to 2016. A Perfect Crime has been released, delighting (and disturbing) readers and reviewers. Wu Ming-yi’s The Man With the Compound Eyes continues its remarkable journey around the world, with the recent announcement of a forthcoming translation into Amharic for release in Ethiopia. It looks like we might have to wait until 2016 for Ge Fei’s novel to arrive, but there have been plenty of other publications in the meantime. Amazon Crossings, for example, has been stealthily releasing several novels by established authors like Feng Tang and Lu Nei who have been missing from English bookshelves for far too long.

Yan Ge may seem like an isolated figure on my embarrassingly maleheavy list, but this certainly does not mean China is short on exciting female writers. The sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld has published several translations of Xia Jia’s mythology-infused fables; Sheng Keyi continues to push boundaries with the powerful Death Fugue; Jeremy Tiang has translated two volumes of Zhang Yueran’s dark, erotically charged fiction (though you will have to order them from Singapore); and Annelise Finegan Wasmoen won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for Can Xue’s surreal masterpiece The Last Lover. And there are many, many more who have not found their way into translation… yet.

This article was commissioned and a previous version originally published by CREATIVE ASIA (creative-asia.net) - an online platform connecting global audiences with the vibrant world of China’s contemporary arts.

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>> FEATURE

A Yi (b. 1976, Jiangxi)

Sun Yisheng (b. 1986, Shandong)

Fortunes are swiftly made and lost; brutal murders occur and punishments are meted out – but in the claustrophobically intense confines of A Yi’s fictional universe the connections between cause and effect are twisted and almost impossible to trace. Over the last few years the unrepentantly unsympathetic characters of his short stories have peopled the pages of the Guardian, Granta, and Pathlight, and now his novel A Perfect Crime (translated by Anna Holmwood) is on the shelves.

Sun Yisheng is in the unusual position of having already had several of his stories translated into English (in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and World of Chinese) before he has even had his first book published in China. A devotee of William Faulkner, he is slowly forging his own unique idiom from fragments of classical Chinese, rural dialects, and the whisperings of his own imagination.

The influence of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo also lingers in his powerfully impressionistic tales.

Cao Wenxuan (b. 1954, Jiangsu)

Wu Ming-Yi (b. 1971, Taiwan)

Well known within China both for his writing and his passionate advocacy for the fantasy genre (and the need for writers to figure out ways to respond to the colossal impact of franchises such as Harry Potter), Cao Wenxuan has become a much more familiar name in the English-reading world over the last year. His children’s novel Bronze and Sunflower, set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, was published in April (translated by Helen Wang); The Amber Tiles, a YA fantasy title, will be following later in the year.

Many writers end up succumbing to didacticism when they attempt to address the topic of the environment through fiction.

The Man With the Compound Eyes (translated by Darryl Sterk) is written with force and conviction, as well as expertise (Wu Ming-Yi is also a noted ecological activist) – but above all it is an outstanding novel, not a treatise. His next novel, The Magician on the Skywalk (as yet untranslated) is a nostalgic collection of intertwined stories, clustered around a single location, Taipei’s Chung Hwa market, in a way that recalls Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual.

Ge Fei (b. 1964, Jiangsu)

Yan Ge (b. 1984, Sichuan)

Right now the select catalogue of New York Review Books Classics contains no titles by living Chinese authors – with the forthcoming publication of Canaan Morse’s translation of The Invisibility Cloak, Ge Fei is set to become the first. While the premise – the story of how a Beijing hi-fi specialist finds his life interweaving with the fringes of the criminal underworld – might sound like a thriller, Ge Fei writes with the same understated subtlety he brought to previous Pathlight stories ‘Mona Lisa’s Smile’ and ‘Song of Liangzhou’.

Though Yan Ge’s recent work still contains the occasional glimmer of the fantasy style that typified her earlier YA-slanted writing, for the last few years she has mostly been concentrating on fiction in a more realistic setting. This gives her room to write to her strengths: keen characterisation and well-honed dialogue – especially when focalising young protagonists like the narrator of last year’s novella White Horse (translated by Nicky Harman). A translation of her novel The Chilli Bean Paste Clan (an excerpt of which was published in the December 2011 issue of Chutzpah! magazine) is now in the works.

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>> WRITERS’ GROUPS

Ballina/Byron U3A Creative Writers Group The University of the Third Age (U3A) is an international network of individuals in their post-employment years devoted to learning for learning’s sake. The Ballina/Byron U3A Creative Writers Group is a thriving community of scribes who draw on a vast range of life experiences for fiction, memoir and poetry that is often published in their own anthologies. The group is facilitated and guided by Jan Mulcahy, who explains the appeal of one of the region’s more unique writers’ groups.

cut their clichés, tautologies and passive descriptions sitting like icebergs blocking the flow? Many old hands decided editing was akin to tooth extraction and they were out – my class halved.

The new year welcomed back six women and one man who were brave enough to accept my demands and 2013 saw several new members defected from other writing groups eager to see their words not only edited but published. Our anthology, Write Impressions was published by Dragonwick Publishing and printed by Lismore Printery.

Ten authors submitted short pieces of fiction, travel, family history, school, biography, poetry and romance. One of the best contributions came from Ann Neal who assisted the editing process. She wrote a gripping tale about Douglas Mawson. I wrote the foreword.

After being headhunted in December 2011 by the President of Ballina/Byron U3A, I turned up at Fripp Sports Oval in Ballina for my first class in February 2012. Armed with a wirebound scrapbook, I faced a huge group of sixteen members.

The group had been in existence for about twelve years and there were six new members. Nobody brought anything to read so I started with individual introductions and outlined the guidelines for a free write about their Christmas activities.

Because of size, there was not enough time to hear all the results of the twenty-minute free write. Actually, for some it was only a ten-minute writing effort and I was concerned that two ladies could not even put pen to paper and went into the kitchen and made a cuppa, soon joined by the early finishers who muttered quietly until the rest put their pens down.

After the tea break I instructed them to take their writing home, edit it and rewrite it in approximately five hundred words onto their computer.

A fortnight later twelve turned up – six read from their scrapbooks while the other half read from a typed version, and had written at least eight hundred or so words about chaotic parties or equally gripping holidays that went wrong. Lots of laughter… we were off!

During that first year I introduced my writing guidelines (now three pages) to improve their expression and only occasionally a short free write. By the end of the year I realised it worked better to have them read their work aloud and I would give them a subject, genre, tense and voice to kick off the writing for the next fortnight’s class.

Editing their stories caused massive resistance. How dare I

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We had a lot of dramas surrounding the financing of the anthology after U3A refused to support our request for $1,000.

So we chipped in and bought our copies prior to printing and we all got our money back and went out to lunch for a Christmas party.

Ann Neal, a school teacher, has travelled the world and settled in Alaska for 10 years. She is often called upon to take the class if I am unavailable. I am also helped in this way by Mandy Waring who has a background in counselling. Nonie Kennedy has a degree in English literature. Gerda Lehave was born in a small town in Holland before the Second World War. As a schoolgirl her town was occupied by German soldiers and her tale of her father keeping a distillery in the attic and selling sly grog to the German officers is hilarious. Gerda is often overcome by emotion telling of her escape from the town she loved. We sit on the edge of our seats as the story unfolds and someone takes over the reading for her.

Several members in the group were teachers and nurses so we are an informed group who need this stimulation and social interaction. We all travel and read a lot and keep journals. We appreciate the challenge of the writing process and the sharing of personal, often quite harrowing life experiences. We trust the process of growth that ensues from participation, so important for our wellbeing. It stretches our imagination, gives our memories a good workout and we appreciate having each other and U3A offering the venue and free tuition. Members pay an annual fee, all tutors volunteer their services.

I now do the editing anonymously with an end-of-term mini-workshop. This way of teaching also means we have a stash of edited stories ready to go into our next anthology.

For more information email janmulcahy@bigpond.com.

Jeremy Tager

>> RISING

In this new section, northerly will hear from a series of emerging writers who have had some publishing success but whose voices and styles are still coming into being. Some will come from the Northern Rivers, some will come from further afield – either way, each will be an exciting nascent talent.

Jeremy Tager has degrees in literature and law and for the last twenty-five years has been an environmental activist.

This has included work protecting the Great Barrier Reef and threatened species, stopping the trade in illegal timber, litigating against coal port expansion and pushing for action on climate change. He has worked for both the Federal Democrats and Greens as an environment advisor and more recently for Greenpeace on GMO issues and as head of their political unit. He is now working for Friends of the Earth on their emerging technology project. He loves being in the bush or snorkelling and never ceases to be amazed at the complexity and mysteriousness of wild places. He plays cello and guitar and has broad interests in science, philosophy, ecology and law. He has been living in northern NSW for only three years but it is already home.

Can you describe your own work in terms of style, practice and form?

To date I have been writing in the first person. I like shifting between narrative, dialogue and internal landscapes and have found first person the most comfortable in that regard.

I am currently working on a manuscript in the third person and trying to get used to the powers and limitations of that perspective. I feel as though I’m driving a machine where nothing is in the same place and the controls are incredibly touchy and weird!

I would call my style both introspective and political.

Environmental themes are integral to my writing, but it’s not really that simple – environment is both a character and a setting in which human dilemmas and conflicts play out.

When and how were you first drawn to literature and a desire to be an author?

My first degree was in literature and I have been writing since I was a young teen, but the desire to be an author is more recent. It was about seven years ago that I started writing with a seriousness and intent that I’d never previously had. The ‘how’ is kind of strange to me. My partner left me suddenly and I suddenly turned to writing. I have no idea of the thought or emotional processes that led me there, but it literally saved me.

Which writers have influenced you most?

So many! The biggest current influences on me are both stylistic and thematic influences – writers particularly who combine the personal and the political such as Richard Powers, Orhan

Pamuk and Barbara Kingsolver. I love a variety of writers for very different styles – Marquez and the whole world of magical realism and some of the works of European writers like Italo Calvino who combine a probing and broad intelligence with almost boundless imagination. Kafka remains an important writer in my life, but his direct influence on me is somewhat nebulous. Richard Flanagan and Kate Grenville have been recent Australian influences and I love Tim Winton’s skill with voice.

What is the most important piece of writing advice you have been given?

At a recent mentoring week with Marele Day, I learned to rewrite through particular filters. Probably the most important filter for me was asking ‘what does this scene or chapter add to the whole?’ It has made being ruthless – even with scenes I really like – much easier.

Are there enough opportunities for writers like yourself in Australia?

I really have no point of reference. I have only recently begun to face the process of becoming a published author and have found there are some wonderful opportunities. That said, I know that becoming and being an author in Australia isn’t easy and having a primary career as an author is pretty rare. As a long-time participant and observer of politics and political realities, I do assume that the opportunities in writing provided through grants and government programs are much fewer than they should be.

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>> ADFAS

Raging infernos, lost worlds The lectures from ADFAS Byron Bay will in the next two months cover the seventeenth-century conflagration that devastated Britain’s capital, and a lost Cambodian society only relatively recently rediscovered.

The Great Fire of London by Franco-British artist Philip James de Loutherbourg, circa 1797.

Yasha Beresiner was born in Turkey of Russian and Greek parents. He enjoys British and Israeli citizenship, and has spent much of his working life in Latin America. He qualified as a lawyer from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before settling in England in 1968. Yasha is a Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, he has lectured extensively worldwide and he is the author of eleven books on various aspects of collecting. He won the British Library Best Reference Book Award in 1989. He is also a qualified City of London Guide.

The Great Fire of London An illustrated lecture by Yasha Beresiner, Monday September 14.

It all began at a baker’s house in London’s Pudding Lane on Saturday, September 2, 1666. Thomas Farynor, the king’s baker, had left his oven on and within four short days, 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and innumerable buildings including St Paul’s Cathedral, Customs House and the Guildhall, were razed to the ground.

The cause of the extent of the fire was the combination of an ill-blowing wind from the east and the nature of the construction of the wood and pitch houses, which were dangerously flammable, and which reclined towards each other in the narrow streets of medieval London. The apathy of the authorities was also to blame. The standard procedure to stop a fire from spreading had always been to destroy the houses in the path of the flames, creating ‘firebreaks’, to deprive a fire from fuel. The lord mayor, however, was hesitant, worrying about the cost of rebuilding. By the time a royal command came down, the fire was too out of control to stop. Ultimately 100,000 people were left homeless. The repercussions and accusations continued for years to follow. But of course, the city survived and went on to become the vibrant city it is today, one universally recognised as the financial capital of the world.

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The Bayon temple in Cambodia is thought to date from the twelfth century.

The Lost Civilisation of Cambodia An illustrated lecture by Hugh Ellwood, Monday October 19.

This is the story of a lost civilisation, influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism, that disappeared some eight hundred years ago, leaving behind an incredible

array of buildings and sculpture. These were only re-discovered in the nineteenth century. Cambodia’s religious, royal and written traditions stemmed from India and coalesced as a Cambodian tradition from about the first century AD. The people of Cambodia were the Khmer, united in the eighth century by a god-king. Their religion was Hinduism. In the twelfth century, Buddhism was introduced and both religions existed side by side. Between these centuries, huge complexes of palaces and temples were built, the most famous being Angkor Wat. The Bayon temple at Angkor contains over a kilometre of bas-relief carving in stone and sculptures, depicting historical events and scenes from the everyday life of the Angkorian Khmer.

The huge public works, temples and other religious buildings put such a strain on the economy that they probably precipitated the fall of the kingdom to the Thai people in 1431, and the buildings themselves were overcome by the jungle to lie hidden for four centuries.

Hugh Ellwood was educated in the classics. He studied philosophy in Rome, followed by a degree in architecture at the University of Manchester. Hugh practised as an architect and was a partner with Building Design Partnership, the largest multi-discipline design organisation in the UK, for over twenty years. He was for some years an external examiner in architecture at the University of Manchester and also a visiting lecturer in the history of art and architecture at the University of Central Lancashire. Hugh is an artist, and has also lectured extensively on various aspects of the history of European art and architecture.

Both presentations are held at the A&I Hall on Station Street, Bangalow. Presentations begin at 6:30pm, with doors opening at 6pm for welcome drinks. Guests are welcome at $25 per person, including drinks and a light snack. www.adfas.org.au

>> SCU PAGE

A showcase of SCU student work, compiled by Dr Lynda Hawryluk Disappearing

Her gait shuffled; Tipped forward, Peering into the abyss as she teeters

Paula Flynn

On the edge of reality.

Who is this woman,

Angry skin black and green,

With the unrecognisable face

Bloated broken fingers from falls

Staring vacantly from the mirror?

That no-one saw.

The once beautiful features

I wasn’t there to catch her.

Collapse into each other, Like an imploding block of derelict flats.

Originally from Liverpool, UK, Paula travelled to Australia in 1987 and now chooses to live a quiet life in northern NSW. She writes, sculpts and has a much-loved menagerie of rescue animals. In a nod to her Vogue magazine days, she rides her tractor wearing a tiara.

A downward turn of mouth Continually leaks into the tissue Permanently clenched against a flushed cheek.

Counting Blessings (no. 19) Cassandra Duell

The sky is a benevolent god, beaming blue With outstretched arms.

Washing is pegged on the line as an offering; A ceremony of garments Resurrected again and immaculate as angels, if Only for one day.

Palms flutter with a promise of peace-be-with-you.

A trusty lawnmower, Sunday stalwart, Chants in the distance. This is what Alleluia tastes like.

Petals fall like tiny bodies from the Magnolia tree. A Fistful of precious.

Plump little Buddha, with his gummy smile, Worships at the altar of painted feet And claps along.

Journaling along The Way! It’s inspiring to walk to Santiago de Compostela!

Our 10-day guided Camino tour includes: ±

Journal workshops led by a writing professional

±

Small group - maximum 14 participants

±

Flexible walking distances

±

Luggage transfers/comfortable accommodation

Dates: 9 - 18 May 2016, $3,290 p/p twin-share

W a l k w i t h

T R A V E L E N R I C H E D p: 0404 417 485 | e: dm.travelenriched@me.com w: www.travelenriched.com.au

Cassandra Duell is a teacher and writer; she has also been working towards a PhD on Australian mainstage theatre directors. Her writing has been published in Coastlines and Australasian Drama Studies. When not imparting the delights of literature and theatre practice to secondary school students, she writes while her children sleep.

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>> INTERVIEW

Picture this

The illustrations in a children’s book can bring stories to life in ways that surprises even the book’s author, leaving an impression than can stay with a young reader for life. Northern Rivers-based children’s author Zanni Louise is celebrating the launch of her first book, Too Busy Sleeping, published

by Little Hare. Here she offers a first-hand account of working with an illustrator for the first time.

How was the illustrator for Too Busy Sleeping, Anna Pignataro, identified by your publisher and what was your role in the process?

Little Hare work with a number of illustrators. When they receive a manuscript, the words usually lend themselves to a particular visual. After the manuscript for Too Busy Sleeping was edited, the publisher contacted Anna Pignataro to see if she was interested.

Anna’s most recent book with Little Hare at that stage was B Is For Bedtime by Margaret Hamilton. It was the first time Anna had worked in watercolour and collage. Little Hare thought this style would be suitable for Too Busy Sleeping too. Thankfully, Anna liked the story, and agreed to illustrate it. My role was to step back and wait for it all to unfurl.

How close were her illustrations of the characters to what you pictured in your head as you were writing the book?

I don’t think I had any preconceived visuals, which is interesting, as I draw and paint myself. I had abstract notions of visuals for the story, but nothing finite. When I received the first image from the book, which happens to be the last page in the story, I was blown away with how gorgeous the main character, Eleanor, was. The image was absolutely delightful. Although I was familiar with Anna’s work, I had not expected just how beautiful she would be. And she was blonde! I think somewhere in my mind she was brunette – but that initial image quickly evaporated, as Anna’s Eleanor is the real Eleanor.

How closely did you work with Anna as she was developing her illustrations?

Not at all! After I had written the manuscript, and made suggested changes, my job was done. From there, it was Anna’s role to create a whole new element to the story, and bring it to life. We have very separate roles. I asked for Anna’s email address though, because I wanted to connect. She is very lovely, and we have become friends since the book has been illustrated. We are planning a few promotional events together in September, including the launch in Melbourne on the fifth at The Little Bookroom.

What were the biggest challenges the pair of you encountered in getting the illustrations right?

That was all really up to Anna, the designer and the publisher. I happened to adore the illustrations, but I am not sure what the process would have been like if I hadn’t liked them. I think my role is to leave that all up to the illustrator. From what I hear from the designer and the publisher though, the look and feel of the book – particularly its cover – was a very seamless process.

It fell together quite easily.

The illustrations in Too Busy Sleeping seem reminiscent of British children’s author Shirley Hughes’s Lucy and Tom books – they have a beautifully old-fashioned, classic sort of feel.

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Would you agree, and is that the flavour you hoped for when you started working with Anna?

Yes, they certainly have a vintage feel, and that was Anna’s intention. She collected vintage bits and bobs, like fabric and crochet, and these were used in the collage, and used to inspire the images. The book designer also picked up on the vintage feel, and the soft pastels of the background have a vintage feel too.

I really had no preconceptions about the look and feel, other than knowing Anna worked in watercolour. I use watercolour myself, and like its whimsical, soft feeling. The final look and feel of the book blew me away, though.

Funnily enough, people who know me who’ve seen the book say how much it suits me. So although Anna didn’t know anything about me when she illustrated the book – she only had the story – we are very well matched.

How have your own children – and other children – responded to the illustrations?

My two girls Elka and Eve Rose are now five and two. Elka can remember when I first wrote the story and sent it away, and remembers how excited we all were about publication. The girls talked about the ‘Eleanor story’, as they called it, long before it arrived, having seen Anna’s illustrations through email, and then the proof.

The day the book arrived in hardcover was fairly indescribable.

The girls were so rapt. We sat down together, the three of us, and read the story. When we got to the end, they both immediately asked me to read it again. And again. They love Eleanor and cute little Reuben, the baby in his hessian onesie. And they ask the same questions on each page every time we read, like, ‘Why is she cranky?’ and ‘Where is the mum?’ I love that they never seem to get sick of it. The book is colourful. Children love colour! But it is also soft and homely, so feels quite peaceful.

In future books, will you seek to work with Anna again? How important is it for you for illustration style to be consistent over a children’s author’s oeuvre?

That’s all up to the publisher, but yes, it would be lovely to work with Anna again, and I know she’s keen to work with me too.

Yes, consistency is important I think. Most picture book authors and illustrators would do at least a few books together, like Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Readers come to expect a certain pairing. It’s entirely possible to work with other illustrators too at some point, but for now, I hope to build up something with Anna.

Zanni Louise is a children’s author from North Coast NSW. She has two small children, who keep her very busy, but also fill her life with inspiration. When not writing children’s stories, she writes educational material for training institutions. She provides individual and group blog coaching. Her most recent workshop was Blogging for Writers at the Byron Bay Writers Festival. Her first book for children, Too Busy Sleeping, is illustrated by award-winning illustrator Anna Pignataro, and published by Little Hare, an imprint of Hardie Grant Egmont. Too Busy Sleeping is a sweet, homely story about a baby’s first day at home from his older sister’s perspective. www.zannilouise.com

A delicious mystery

>> BOOK REVIEW

GO SET A Watchman

By Harper lee Review by Dr. Lynda Hawryluk

The discussion in anticipation of the release of Go Set a Watchman, imbued as it was with elder abuse allegations and contradictory stories about Harper Lee’s involvement in the publication of this long-lost book, completely overwhelmed crucial information about the book itself. That is, that the novel Harper Lee wrote in 1957 is a draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, and not a sequel, as it has been widely reported and even publicised by (American) publisher Harper Collins.

Harper Lee was advised to make significant changes in 1957 to Go Set a Watchman, which was reborn as a novel called Atticus, then revised again to become the best-selling To Kill a Mockingbird, and this knowledge is useful to remember when reading this ‘new’ publication.

The spectre of To Kill a Mockingbird hangs over Go Set a Watchman, as one would expect from being Lee’s only previous work, and the subject of so much attention in the lead-up to the publication of only her second book in fifty-five years. Media reports and initial reviews have clouded the reader from noticing important differences in plot, and instead focussed on what appears to be a vast change in the character of the much-loved lawyer father Atticus Finch. As widely reported, in Go Set a Watchman Atticus Finch is seventy-two and no less prejudiced than any other man in the South in that era would be. Underscoring this version of Atticus Finch is the knowledge that to the fervent fan of To Kill a Mockingbird this is the Atticus Finch, the beloved defender of Tom Robinson, a wrongly accused black man. In that shift, from heroic lawyer to what his daughter and modern readers will recognise as a bigot, lies the main complaint about the merits of this alternative universe companion to To Kill a Mockingbird.

However, to merely focus on the apparent ‘change’ in Atticus Finch’s approach to race relations is to seriously undervalue Watchman as a novel on its own merits and ignores the fact this version of Atticus was written before To Kill a Mockingbird.

Focusing only on the character of Atticus Finch detracts from a close reading of a novel in progress, which offers a fascinating glimpse into the development of a writer and her canonical novel.

It also ignores how much can be read into Go Set a Watchman as a bildungsroman from a clearly talented writer.

The character of Jean Louise, twenty-six years old and home from her new life in New York City, mirrors Lee’s life in those years, and reflects her changing attitude to the South and its entrenched racism. Early scenes evoke the timelessness of the South and Lee’s obvious fondness for her home state of Alabama, and are rich with description of the kind found in the opening pages of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a satisfying return home for readers of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The narrative voice offers the key difference of a first-person perspective from not only an older Scout, but one who has been away living the life of an independent woman in a large

progressive city. This leads to expected clashes with her beau and her cantankerous traditionalist aunt, providing some of the most amusing scenes in the book. So too, Jean Louise’s retelling of scenes from her childhood are in part hilarious and then poignant, due to the absence of both Jem and Dill from the present day narrative. They provide insight into what editor Tay Hohoff correctly identified as the strongest element of the story, and what eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird: the world of the South as told through the eyes of its children, caught between tradition and progress. This is evident in Go Set a Watchman and demonstrates vividly Lee’s ability to capture this world.

Less successful are the reflections of Scout becoming Jean Louise, simply because there seems to be very little attention paid to her development as an adolescent. There’s a lot unsaid in these scenes which may have shed more light on Harper Lee herself, and mirror the societal norms of the time, where anything slightly going against the grain in terms of gender norms and expectations was strictly verboten. The process of unshackling oneself from the taunt of tomboy is a difficult process that is not described in any real depth, and the scenes of Scout becoming Jean Louise are not delivered with any real insight.

Inevitably, the focus of the novel turns to Jean Louise’s somewhat fractured relationship with her father, or the memory she has of him, and this is an expression of Lee’s relationship with the South she loves and admires as much as it is about one man. The character of Atticus Finch is closely modelled on her own father, A.C. Lee, a lawyer, member of the State Legislature and newspaper publisher. In To Kill a Mockingbird the rendering of Atticus Finch is through the eyes of a child. Go Set a Watchman shows the man as his twenty-six-year-old daughter sees him, through the lens of the still independent and feisty Scout, but now grown up and knowledgeable of the world as Jean-Louise.

The novel is disjointed in parts, echoing the tumultuous return home by Jean Louise who is everything we should have expected Scout to grow into; a spirited tomboy railing against injustice wherever it appears. This draft shows great promise of what eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird, but also demonstrates the benefits of an excellent editorial guide.

It’s a fascinating insight into the writing process of Harper Lee, an acclaimed writer about whom so little is known. Long regarded by even her close friends as a ‘delicious mystery’, Lee has offered barely a glimpse at her life since the publication and overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird, despite many attempts to coax her out into the limelight. Stubborn like Scout and reserved like the shy Boo Radley, her published works are our only insight into her life. Go Set a Watchman offers another glimpse and as much of a memoir of Harper Lee as curious fans are ever going to get.

William Heinemann / 278pp / RRP $45

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>> LEARNING CURVE

Creating an author website

For any author, a well-designed, practical and engaging website is essential, whether you’re self-publishing or going with the more traditional publishing route.

Ahead of the launch of his debut novel Only The Empty Sky, NRWC member and former editor of Island magazine Russell Kelly offers insight into what your priorities should be when establishing an online hub for your writing.

Like any good organic system, publishing is continuously evolving.

The enormous change in reading habits means challenges for authors too. Never has there been so much choice and competition for a reader’s attention. Take a moment to survey the media channels available today. Books are just one avenue for authors to speak with readers. There’s always been newsletters, television, movies and advertising but now there are new social networks, blogs, games, and of course, websites.

I’m told publishers used to do the marketing for new authors, although I suspect authors have always had to spruik their wares. It is the same for musicians and painters too. Publishers expect new authors to already have a following and a product to sell. The initial risk of publication is increasingly out-sourced to the creator.

I’ve recently been down this road. I’m very excited because my first novel Only the Empty Sky is being published in September by Balboa Press. It’s set on Lord Howe Island and I wrote much of it on the island, and in the Northern Rivers, where I lived for eight beautiful years. It is self-published, and I must say I’m grateful to a friend who read the finished work and wanted it to see the light of day.

Balboa Press is a publishing arm of Hay House Publishing, one of the largest self-publishers in the world.

They very helpfully made a number of suggestions. Of the dozens of marketing suggestions I’ve received, the most important seems to be to create a website.

I could give a list of all the activities required before this step – and after – but if there was one tip that seemed next in order of importance after actually writing the book itself, then it is to have an author website.

It is the marketing bedrock. Once you have a website you can sell your own e-copies. This may be especially useful if you are still waiting for a publisher to take an interest. Some self-published authors eschew publishers altogether – why settle for ten-percent royalties through the traditional method if you can sell via your own print-on-demand service and keep up to seventy percent of the proceeds.

Here are the major steps involved with setting up a website, and remember, your website should be ideally launched at least six months before your book is published, to allow it to really drive publicity and pre-sales. Most print-on-demand publishers will also arrange an ebook and traditional IBSN.

Get a domain name as an author or for the book If you are new to owning a website, then the first thing you need is your own domain dame. You can check out what’s available through a variety of web name services. There’s not really an ‘official’ one – any provider will check for you. Then you have to decide if you want it to be for the individual book, or for yourself as an author. Tip: if you plan on writing several books, an author site may be best. If it’s a how-to book, perhaps a website just with the name of the book is best.

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Get a designer Here my advice is to get a professional designer to build your website. There are many platforms for building websites – Wordpress and Weebly are popular. You can set it up yourself of course, but having worked for many years in marketing, my observation is that it is better to leave design to designers. I value their skills highly. I am very fortunate that the gifted illustrator Tim Squires is also a web designer. I asked him to do both my book cover and to set up a website and I am thrilled with the results and getting positive feedback. The web designer can set up the initial page and make sure the bones of the site work correctly, including security.

Include dynamic content The internet is made for two-way traffic. Not only are attention spans notoriously short, but visitors to a webpage want to see something they can interact with. For my website, I’ve opted for a blog, in which I will be offering insights on my upcoming novel, while trying to maintain a sense of intrigue. After all, I want to turn website visitors into readers, right? And I’m focussed on ‘less is more’. What’s the point of boring visitors with a wall of words?

That’s not what the medium is for. The internet is about short-term visits, lots of change, and keeping visitors coming back.

Collect names The world of self-publishing is also the world of self-marketing.

I have included a MailChimp function on my website to collect contacts. I hope to send out posts when my website is set up, alerting readers to changes and news about me and my books. I recognise that joining a mailing list is a big ask when frankly we all get far too many emails. However, I’ll be interacting with those on the list closely. They have made the step to connect with me, and I’ll be making sure I reciprocate.

Call to action Marketing is about building involvement. Your website is a shop-front, but you want visitors to come inside and get involved.

That can mean buying the book, or signing up to something. On my website from the very first second, it was designed to build a relationship with visitors so that they became interested in my work. They are invited to purchase my book, or read my blog and comment on it, or sign up to my mailing list, or learn more about the causes that are inspired by the book.

At the end, it’s a privilege to be a writer, to seek to bring something beautiful into the world, and to have it affect people deeply. That’s an awesome gift, and I’ve tried to make my website also be a conduit for capturing the kindness of readers and joining it up with some greater good in the world. www.russellkelly.net

>> BBWF 2015

VOLUNTEER POETRY COMPETITION WINNER In recent years, local poet Louise Moriarty has encouraged Byron Bay Writers Festival volunteers to put pen to paper and write poems, and submit them to an in-house competition that she judges. This year she asked volunteers to write poems inspired by the experience of volunteering at the festival.

Uplift Jenni Cargill-Strong

There are little nubs growing where my shoulder blades should be Little nubs and upon them hang wings; transluscent, tremelous, wet, wrinkled, folded.

As I walk here, the crunch of gravel beneath my boots the story of the earth reverberates up my legs and yet how I long to fly Words here float freely through the air through radio waves through cyberspace I hear golden threads of words, stories that flow from ear to mouth, from old to young and young to old As I walk those shimmering threads of words weave themselves into the fabric of my wings Words have peeled off my coat that cumbersome heavy black one (do you have one too?) words have swept it off my shoulders it lies discarded, unravelled at my feet revealing my wings naked to the kiss of sun and the gentle caress of the breeze The updraft of words, ideas, inspiration, grows strong and I long to fly a bit too high like Icarus yet I am forewarned Respect the Sun; beware your hubris There are little nubs, where my shoulder blades should be, Upon them hang wings: delicate, intricate, beautiful, magnificent and ready for the updraft ready to soar a little too high. northerly | 021

>> WORKSHOPS

WORKSHOPS & COMPETITIONS

Photo: Russell Shakespeare

NRWC WORKSHOP CREATIVE NON-FICTION: BRINGING REAL LIFE TO THE PAGE

This workshop focuses on anything from memoir to travel to general non-fiction, contemporary or historical. It will be aimed at all writers – those who might not have yet committed a word to paper, through to those who might have a substantial portion of their manuscript completed.

The workshop will cover: • Technical issues, like identifying a potential or existing work’s structure, voice, and narrative point of view to ensure the writer is on the right track from the outset. Too often writers are blocked because they have not pinpointed the right voice or structure to suit the narrative.

In addition, we’ll look at matters of revision and editing to make your manuscript the best it can be.

• Practical issues, such as work methods, tricks of the trade to keep the writing flowing, and ways to get writers excited and enthusiastic about their manuscripts.

• The life of the writer. We’ll workshop the whole gamut, from conceiving of an idea and completing a manuscript, to the best ways to get published.

We’ll also discuss the demands of the craft, and how to organise your time to actually complete a project rather

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than keeping it in the bottom drawer.

• Exercises. The workshop will offer some simple writing exercises that will instruct students on the infinite ways to observe and think like writers about their own lives and the world around them.

• If time permits, we’ll open up the workshop to questions and debate. Some students will have very specific problems that can potentially be unravelled with communal discussion.

That may be anything from lack of plot progression to poor time management to a lack of confidence in their work.

• Students will leave the workshop with, hopefully, a renewed enthusiasm for their project, and a clearer vision on the ultimate goal – to get their manuscripts completed, or revised to publication standard.

The ultimate outcome is to give writers the confidence and validation to return to their manuscripts with vigour and with a simple set of skills to see their books or stories to completion.

Presenter: Matthew Condon When: Saturday September 19, 10am - 1pm Where: Byron Community College, 107 Jonson St, Byron Bay

Cost: $45 NRWC members or $55 non-members

COMPETITIONS

prose category must be Australianthemed fiction or memoir based on family history, maximum 2,500 words. The poetry category is for any form or style on an Australian theme, maximum 80 lines. Entries close September 25, $10 per entry, $500 first prize in each section. For more information visit www.mrl.nsw.gov.au/ WhatsOn/rolf-boldrewood.

SOUTHERN CROSS LITERARY COMPETITION 2015

Ballarat Writers Inc is inviting Australia-based writers to enter the 2015 Southern Cross Literary Competition. Submissions should be short stories of up to 3,000 words, with first prize winning $1,500. Two stories will be highly commended. The judge is author Tony Birch, with the winners announced at a function in Ballarat on November. Closing date is October 16, entry fee is $20 per story. For more information and entry form visit www.ballaratwriters.com.

BANJO PATERSON AUSTRALIAN POETRY COMPETITION 2016

This competition is open to all poets to recite their original poetry on Saturday, February 20, 2016 as a signature event during the Banjo Paterson Australian Poetry Festival in Orange, NSW. There are four classes for entrants: Open (individual contestants); Novice (individual contestants who have not won first prize in a poetry recital competition); Junior (for individual contestants of sixteen years and under) and Group (for groups of two or more contestant performing together). Prizes range from $50 to $600, and entry fees apply.

For more information visit www.rotarycluboforange.org.au.

2015 ROLF BOLDREWOOD LITERARY AWARDS

THE EXAMINER LITERATURE AWARDS 2015

The Macquarie Regional Library invites entries for these awards, which aim to foster the writing of prose and poetry with Australian content. The

Judges are calling for entries of short stories of up to $2,000 on any theme for The Port Stephens Examiner Literature Awards 2015. Prize money

>>COMPETITIONS

COMPETITIONS

totals $1,100. Entry fee is $5 with submissions closing on September 30. For more information and entry requirements go to www.tilligerry.com ODYSSEY HOUSE VICTORIA ANNUAL SHORT STORY COMPETITION

Odyssey House Victoria’s fifth Annual Short Story Competition is open to submissions of no more than 1,500 words on the theme of ‘The choices we make’. Stories must reference alcohol and/or drugs. There is a limit of three entries per person, with an entry fee of $10 per story. First prize is $1,000 and a one-year membership of Writers Victoria; second prize is $100 and third prize $50. Entries close on November 6, for more information visit www.odyssey.org.au.

QUALITY LIVING OPTIONS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2015

Writers are invited to submit short stories of up to 1,500 words addressing the theme of ‘The solution’ to the Quality Living Options Short Story Prize 2015. First prize is $1,000, while entry fee is $15 with a limit of two entries per person – competition is open to all writers aged sixteen or older. Submissions close on October 16, with the winner announced on December 12. For more information visit www.qlo.org.au.

FAWQ POETRY COMPETITION 2015

The FAWQ Poetry Competition 2015 is open to entries of up to forty lines, with fees of $5 per entry or $12 for three. This year’s judge is Rob Morris, with the deadline for submissions being September 30. First prize is $250 and second prize $100. For more information go to fawq.net.

PATRICK WHITE INDIGENOUS WRITERS AWARDS

Open to all Indigenous Australian students from kindergarten through to year twelve, the Patrick White Indigenous Writers Awards this year has the themes of ‘Water’, ‘The door slowly opened…’ and ‘This belongs to me’. A major prize and two encouragement awards will be presented for a short story, play or poem for writers from each school year. The competition also offers a group section, offered to support Aboriginal students working together to produce a story, poem or play.

Closing date is September 18. For full details go to www.aec.org.au/awards/ pwhite.htm GAVIN MOONEY MEMORIAL ESSAY COMPETITION

This competition welcomes essay entries relating to a theme around equity and social justice with this year’s topic being ‘In the digital era, whose voices are being heard?’ The prize was established as a joint project of the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, the public health blog Croakey and Inside Story, an online current affairs publication from the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. Entries close on October 1, with the winner announced by the end of November. The winner receives $5,000 and publication at Inside Story. Entry is open to anyone, anywhere. For more information visit www.blogs.crikey.com.au/croakey/ information-and-entry-forms-forthe-gavin-mooney-memorial-essaycompetition/ ROBYN MATHISON INAUGURAL POETRY COMPETITION

Run by The Society of Women Writers

Tasmania, the Robyn Mathison Inaugural Poetry Competition is open to all poets of all nationalities living anywhere. Poems can be on any subject and up to forty lines in length.

Entry is $5 per poem. First prize is $200, with second prize $50. Entries close on September 30, for more information go to www.swwtstylus. weebly.com ANDY GRIFFITHS KIDS’ WRITING COMPETITION

Each year Dymocks and Pan Macmillan invite Australian kids to enter a writing competition that is judged by the acclaimed children’s author Andy Griffiths. To celebrate the publication of Griffiths’ new book The 65-Storey Treehouse, the two publishers are seeking entries of short stories for the Andy Griffiths Kids’ Writing Competition. The theme is ‘Living in a treehouse’. The winner will have their story illustrated by Griffiths’ illustrator Terry Denton, with the top ten entries receiving a 15-piece book pack. The competition is open to primary school students aged six to twelve, residing in Australia. Deadline is October 20, full details are at: www.dymocks.com.au/andy-griffithskids-writing-competition.

NEEDLE IN THE HAY MAJOR SHORT STORY CONTEST

Needle In The Hay is seeking short story entries for their competition along the theme of ‘Giving new meaning to our understanding of love’.

Stories should be 800 words or less, with first prize receiving $1,000. Final date for submissions is December 31, with the shortlist announced in February and the winner in March. A single entry is $10, while two or three is $20. For more information visit www.needleinthehay.net

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>> WRITERS’ GROUPS >> Alstonville Plateau Writers Group

Meets second Friday of each month, 10am – 12pm. All genres welcome, contact Christine 66288364 or Kerry 66285662

>> Ballina/Byron U3A Creative Writing

Meets every second Wednesday at 12pm, Fripp Oval, Ballina. Contact Jan on 0404007586 or janmulcahy@bigpond.com

NORTHERN RIVERS WRITERS’ CENTRE 2015 MEMBERSHIP DISCOUNTS BOOK WAREHOUSE 107-109 Keen Street Lismore 02 6621 4204

>> Ballina Creative Writers

BOOK WAREHOUSE 26 Harbour Drive Coffs Harbour 02 6651 9077

>> Bangalow Writers Group

BOOK WAREHOUSE

Workshops meet third Thursday of each month at 10am -12:20pm at Richmond Hill. Focus is on personal development and spirituality. Contact 0404007586 or janmulcahy@bigpond.com Meets Thursdays at 9:15am at Bangalow Scout Hall. Contact Simone on 0407749288

>> Bellingen Writers Group

Meets at Bellingen Golf Club on the fourth Monday of the month at 2pm. All welcome, contact Joanne on 6655 9246 or email jothirsk@restnet.com.au

Shop 6 Ballina Fair Ballina 02 6686 0917 BOOK WAREHOUSE 70 Prince Street Grafton 02 6642 6355

>> Casino Writers Group

BOOK WAREHOUSE Settlement City Port Macquarie 02 6584 9788

>> Cloudcatchers

BOOK WAREHOUSE Yamba Fair, Treelands Drive Yamba 02 6646 8662

>> Coffs Harbour Writers Group

BYRON BAY LONGBOARDS 1/89 Jonson Street Byron Bay 02 6685 5244

Meets every third Thursday of the month at 4pm at Casino Library. Contact Brian on 0266282636 or email briancostin129@hotmail.com For Haiku enthusiasts. A ginko (haiku walk) is undertaken according to group agreement. Contact Quendryth on 66533256 or email quendrythyoung@bigpond.com Meets 1st Wednesday of the month 10.30am to 12.30pm. Contact Lorraine Penn on 66533256 or 0404163136, email: lmproject@bigpond.com. www.coffsharbourwriters.com

>> Coffs Harbour Memoir Writers Group

CLIX COMPUTER CENTRE 3/3 Marvel Street Byron Bay 02 6680 9166

Share your memoir writing for critique. Monthly meetings, contact 0409824803 or email costalmermaid@gmail.com

COLLINS BOOK SELLERS Unit 3. 9 Lawson Street Byron Bay 02 6685 7820

>> Cru3a River Poets

CO-OP BOOKSHOP Southern Cross University Lismore 02 6621 4484

>> Dangerously Poetic Writing Circle

CO-OP BOOKSHOP Coffs Harbour Education Campus, Hogbin Drive Coffs Harbour 02 6659 3225

>> Dorrigo Writers Group

DOLPHIN OFFICE CHOICE www.officechoice.com.au Cnr Fletcher & Marvel Streets Byron Bay 02 6685 7097

>> Dunoon Writers Group

DRAGONWICK PUBLISHING www.dragonwick.com 02 6624 1933

>> Federal Writers Group

EARTH CAR RENTALS 18 Fletcher Street Byron Bay 02 6685 7472

>> FAW Port Macquarie-Hastings Regional

EBOOKS NEED EDITORS www.ebooksneededitors.com 15% discount to NRWC members Call 02 6689 5897 for further details

Meets every Thursday at 10:30am, venue varies, mainly in Yamba. Contact Pauline on 66458715 or email kitesway@westnet.com.au Meets second Wednesday or each month, 2pm-4pm at Brunswick Valley Community Centre.

Contact Laura on 66801976 or visit www.dangerouslypoetic.com Meets every second Wednesday from 10am-2pm. Contact Iris on 66575274 or email an_lomall@bigpond.com or contact Nell on 66574089 Writers on the Block. Meets second Tuesday of each month, 6:30pm – 8:30pm at Dunoon Sports Club.

Contact Helga on 66202994 (W), 0401405178 (M) or email heg.j@telstra.com Meets first Saturday of each month at 1.30pm at Federal. Contact Susanna Freymark on 6688 4457 or susannafreymark@gmail.com Meets 1pm on last Saturday of each month, Maritime Museum, Port Macquarie.

Contact Joie on 65843520 or email Bessie on befrank@tsn.cc

>> Gold Coast Writers Association

HUMBLE PIES Pacific Highway Billinudgel 02 6680 1082

>> Kyogle Writers

KEEN STREET COMMUNICATIONS www.keenstreet.com.au 50 Bulmers Rd Hogarth Range 02 6664 7361

>> Memoir Writing Group

MARY RYAN’S BOOKSTORE Shop 5, 21 -25 Fletcher Street Byron Bay 02 6685 8183

>> Nambucca Valley Writers Group

NORPA www.norpa.org.au PO Box 225 Lismore 02 6621 5600

>> Poets and Writers on the Tweed

PAGES BOOKSHOP Park Beach Plaza Coffs Harbour 02 6652 2588

Meets third Saturday of each month, 1:30pm for 2pm start, at Fradgley Hall, Burleigh Heads Library, Park Avenue, Burleigh Heads. Contact 0431443385 or email info@goldcoast-writers.org.au Meets first Tuesday of each month, 10:30am at Kyogle Bowling Club. Contact Brian on 66242636 or email briancostin129@hotmail.com Meets each month at Sunrise Beach, Byron Bay. Contact Diana on 66855387 or 0420282938 or email diana.burstall@gmail.com Meets fourth Saturday of each month, 1:30pm, Nambucca. Contact 65689648 or nambuccawriters@gmail.com Meets weekly at Tweed Heads Library, Tuesdays 1:30pm – 3pm. Poets, novelists, playwrights, short story writers all welcome. Fun group meets for discussion, support and constructive criticism. Free membership.

Phone Lorraine 0755909395

>> Taree-Manning River Scribblers

Meets second Wednesday of the month, 9am-11:30am, Taree. Call first to check venue. Contact Bob Winston on 65532829 or email rrw1939@hotmail.com

>> WordsFlow Writing

Group meets Fridays during school term, 12:30pm-3pm, Pottsville Beach Neighbourhood Centre, 12a Elizabeth St, Pottsville Beach. Contact Cheryl on 0412455707 or visit www.wordsflowwriters.blogspot.com

024 | northerly

THE BOOKSHOP MULLUMBIMBY 39 Burringbar Street Mullumbimby 02 6684 1413 THERE’S ALWAYS MORE HAIRDRESSING Shop 5, 14 Middleton Byron Bay 02 6680 7922

A huge thanks to all the volunteers who helped to make this year’s Festival a success.

Kristen Ableson Jan Aitken Bruce Aldeen Nicola Apps Victoria Armstrong Val Audran Janelle Barram Annie Barrett Barbara Barrett Penny Beaumont Lynne Beclu Kate Benecke Anna Bisset Kathryn Boorman Karen Border Dujardin Isabel Borrelli Hannah Brooks Wendy Broome Jan Brownlow Emily Brugman Shantha Bunyan Cathy Caldwell Jenni Cargill-Strong Tricia Carney Bray Maria Castles Shien Chee Myrchela Cheri Cate Clancy Wendy Coates Richard Cottam Sue Cram Lisa Crane David Cross HeeLing Dean Michael Dean Peter Dickson Ellen Doolan Jenny Dreise Sahaj Dumpleton Sandra Eaton Janice Edwards Les Einhorn

Susanna Evington Nancy Falcone Irene Feuz Elspeth Findlay Peta Fitzsimmons Paul Francis Reinhard Freise Helen Fry Wendy Gilmour Fay Goodchild Pamela Gornall Gabrielle Griffin Dale Hamlyn Monique Hartman Sally Hatton Andrew Hauserman Richard Heazlewood-Ross Jennie Hicks David Hickson Pauline Hunter Graeme Innes Linda Jackson Rod Johnston Bruce Kaldor Jacqueline Kane Lenna Kelson Angela Kirin Michele Lacroix Kate Lavender Melva Macaulay Karen Macdonald Steve Macdonal Meg Main Shamana Marshall Christy McAlister Liz McCall Trish McCarthy Lucy McCormack

Diana Mepsted Colin Milanes Ralph Moore Louise Moriarty Denise Napier Bonnie O’Reilly Denni Pearson Susan Perrow Catherine Perversi Kaya Polster Christine Priestly Danielle Purcell Kay Quemard Dave Quemard Mark Reif Christopher Regan Rennae Reilly Mike Russo Marion Russo Alicia Savelloni Heather Scott Melissa Scott Kate Semken Kai Sheldrick Anne Shepperson Sharron Short Annabelle Sinclair Louise Sommer Jacqui Sosnowski Sam Sosnowski

Ray Sporne Carolyn Stafford Deirdre Stewart Paul Stewart Coralie Tapper Colin Tarbox Dayle Tara Tracey Tervenski Anne-Marie Thompson Colin Thornton Oceana Valentine Catherine Volkov Tara Walker Sharon Wasley Amie Weekes Shane Weekes Kate Wells Jemima Welsh Kate Westberg Ron White Alexandra Williams Emma Wilsher Leah Wright Elvie Yates Megan Young Ben Zammit

The Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre offers a wide and varied range of literary activities, special interest workshops and reading programs on all aspects of writing as well as the annual Byron Bay Writers Festival. Membership of the Northern Rivers Writers Centre is open to all individuals, non-profit organisations and corporations whose interests are in accordance with the objectives of the Centre.

Most of our members reside in the NSW Northern Rivers, but membership is open to all.

BECOME A MEMBER TODAY INDIVIDUAL

For individual writers, readers and anyone interested in literature and the arts.

Concession rates are available for concession cardholders and students with valid ID. $60 adult $50 pensioner concession $40 student concession

FAMILY

Family membership represents extraordinary value and is available for two adults and up to three children under 18 years from the same family.

The family receives one issue of northerly per edition and multiple discounts for workshops and festival tickets.

Postal Address _________________________________________________________ Male Female 7-16 17-30 31-45 46-64 65+ I identify as an Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander I am from a non-English speaking background I do not want my details passed onto other arts organisations I am interested in volunteering at Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre I am interested in volunteering at Byron Bay Writers Festival

MEMBERSHIP CHOICE $60 Individual $50 Concession (Govt Pension cards only) CRN# $40 Student (requires ID) $90 Family $120 Organisation Eco Option: Enjoy all the usual NRWC benefits, but opt to receive your copy of northerly electronically (rather than a print copy), help care for the planet AND receive a $10 membership discount.

PAYMENT DETAILS Total Amount Payable $_______ Payment Method Cheque* Cash Mastercard Visa Card no. __________________________________ Expiry date ________/_________ Name on card _________________________ Signature ________________________ Send completed form and payment to: PO Box 1846, Byron Bay NSW 2481 *Please make cheques payable to Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre

For businesses, writers groups and arts organisations.

Each organisation receives five issues of northerly and reduced admission prices for five members per project or workshop. $120

$90

Organisation Name (if applicable) __________________________________________ First Name ______________________ Surname ______________________________ Phone ____________________________ Mobile _____________________________

Are you: Age:

ORGANISATION

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS • northerly magazine posted every two months

• Access to resources and services from the Centre and guidance from Centre staff • Discounts on workshops, seminars, and Byron Bay Writers Festival tickets, as well as priority copy of Festival program and invitation to program launch • Access to a year-round mentorship program with industry professionals and the opportunity to apply to the annual Residential Membership • Borrowing rights to the Centre library and access to reference materials, wi-fi and reading area • Voting rights at AGM • Discounts at nominated local businesses and subscriber rates to NORPA shows All memberships are valid for 12 months from date of payment

JOIN ONLINE AT WWW.NRWC.ORG.AU OR CALL 02 6685 5115 FOR MORE INFORMATION