Published: Masters of the Universe in Love

Over the last 6 weeks I’ve had a series of photos published on the inestimable Instagramazine, an instagram account run by Gemma Mahadeo. The deal with Instagramazine is that it publishes flash fictions that people write in response to photos that they or others have taken.

The photos I took and the flashfics I wrote to accompany them are of my beloved Masters of the Universe action figure dollies catching a break from the humdrum of fighting and world-conquering and discovering and/or inventing pseudoscientific-cum-mystical weapons for fighting each other or conquering the world or preventing said fights and conquests and just hanging out with that certain special someone for a little while.

I had a lot of fun setting up these photos and writing the stories to accompany them. It was a genuinely neopulp experience that captured exactly the way I like to humanise, whimsify and sentimentificate the tropes of fantasy and science fiction.

The photos and stories are all over on Instagramazine, which you can check out even if you don’t have an IG account, using the #mastersoftheuniverseinlove tag. But if you do have an IG, I’d recommend following @ig_ezine. It’s a fun, sweet little account.

Published: One Weird Reason to Quit Your Novel Today

I have an “ideas piece” over on Writers Bloc today. It’s about a thing that happened in my brain about a month or two ago where I decided to finally stop writing the novel I’ve been working on for ten years. Here’s an extract:

…it was exciting being a novelist. A real, actual novelist. Good word, that. The kind of word you can say with pride at a dinner party without anticipating the need for clarification or worrying about killing the conversation.

“Novelist” is what people assume you mean when you say “I’m a writer”. Not “poet”. “I’m a writer,” you say. “That’s great,” people reply, putting you on a mental bookshelf next to Tim Winton and Joan London. “A poet, actually,” you might clarify, then clear your throat.

So there I was, a published poet and a published novelist in a world that by and large valued fiction much more highly than poetry. “I love reading,” someone might say to you, and pretty soon odds are you’ll be comparing favourite novelists. Never poets. Unless the person you’re speaking to is a poet, which is lovely, but that doesn’t happen much.

As a result of all this, I stopped thinking of myself as a poet and started thinking of myself as a writer instead.

You can read the rest of “One Weird Reason to Quit Your Novel Today” over at Writers Bloc.

Published: I Was Here

A couple weeks ago I submitted a short story to Chart Collective’s I Was Here project.

The deal was they were asking for anonymously submitted 300-character-max stories about real things that had happened in the Melbourne CBD. 50 stories would get picked and put onto posters that would be stuck up around the city as part of some This Public Life festival of landscape architecture or something.

So this week I was doing a bit of story stalking after being sent an email with a map pinpointing the 50 stories. Since the stories were anonymous nobody was contacted to be told if they got picked or not, so I was checking out the two posters placed in flinders lane, near where my story was set. I found the two posters, one on the notice board at the City Library:

And one in a shop window in the Nicholas Building:

Neither of them were mine, so I figured I hadn’t got in.

Published: Anti-RomCom Pop Song

This was a while ago but in the interests of full disclosure my anti-romcom poem, “Anti-RomCom Pop Song” came out in Australian Poetry Journal 5.1 back in July. Which was nice.

I wrote the poem after listening to a Wombats album on repeat for a day and discovering that, rather than being the whimsical and charming popsters they came across as when half-listening to them in the radio, they were rather more entitled young men smugly unaware of their male privilege than I’m comfortable with.

Anyway it was great to see it in print, and to be sharing pages with the likes of David McCooey’s meditations on Elvis and Joni Mitchell, Allis Hamilton’s retelling of the Pied Piper story, Chloe Wilson’s plague doctor poem and Jane Frank’s sobering yet forgiving take on middle age and domesticity.

You can buy a copy of APJ5.1 on the Australian Poetry website, or if you prefer you can read it online – the whole damn thing is also on the APJ site free for the taking ( including my contribution, which is here).

Published: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Don’t Feel So Fine)

So apparently there’s this thing called cli-fi. Climate Change Fiction. It’s totally a thing. And I wrote an article about it for Australian Author. It’s an overview of this emergent genre coupled with interviews with the amazingly talented Ellen van Neerven, James Bradley and Jane Rawson. It also has a fantastic illustration by the superb Nicki Greenberg.

Here’s a snippet:

It’s not surprising that climate change has resonance for Australian authors. Australia’s persistent climate-contrarianism, at least in terms of government policy, in the face of rising popular discontent with such a policy stance, would seem fertile ground for stories about humanity’s negative impact on global climate.

You can read the rest of the article in Australian Author, if you’re a member of the Australian Society of Authors, or you can buy the article as a single (aka .pdf) for $A1.40.

Published: Who’s Looking Out for Male Writers?

I have a polemic on the Overland blog today, about my incredulity with respect to a forthcoming all-men anthology from Black Inc. It’s called Where There’s Smoke. Here’s a bit of what I say in said polemic:

The single worst way to follow up an anthology celebrating the cream of Australia’s women writers is to turn right around and publish an all-men book less than six months later. Why would anyone even do that? Is it some kind of attempt to ‘balance things out’ – to make sure that in all the focussing on women’s writing we don’t overlook men’s writing?

The rest of it is here.

June. July. Just Read.

And speaking of Jane Rawson, for the next two months I’ve signed up to read for charity as part of her JustRead fundraiser.

The idea is that I read things and people donate money to the incredibly important and valuable Indigenous Literacy Foundation. It’s a sort of MS Readathon for grown-ups, if you like that kind of “like X but with Y” high-concept stuff.

I’ve written a guest blog post for the JustRead blog, outlining the particular way that I’m going to approach this reading project, at the same time as confessing to a childhood crime, which you can read here.

If you can’t be bothered clicking links, though, the short version is I’m going to close-read (and maybe also analyse) two poems a day for two months, blog about it every week, and ask you to help out by donating to my Everyday Hero page.

Congratulations and thanks to Jane for not only coming up with the idea, but for making it happen, and thanks to you for taking the time to consider this invitation to donate.

More soon.

Published: How Bendy Bendigo Came to Be

The lovely folks at vox bendigo, the official blog of the Bendigo Writers Festival, were kind enough to agree to post my wee meditiation on the naming of Bendigo the other day – the one that appears in Jutchy Ya Ya #48, that is.

Seeing as how deep that town’s ties are to the scribe-god of Babylon, it seemed to me perfect for a blog about Bendigo and writing. Happily they agreed.

Anyway, here’s the link.

Published: The Bone House is Worn by the Fight

So a while back those crazy kids at if:book Australia were running this remix project called Lost in Track Changes where five writers were asked to write something and then also remix or respond to the things the other five writers wrote.

They also ran a little side-project called Open Changes where Emily Craven from if:book wrote a thing and then anyone who wanted to could remix it and submit it in the comments on that story. The best four things would then be posted online to be used as prompts in the following week by anyone who wanted to join in, and then the best four of those things would be used as prompts in the following week, and so on for eight weeks.

Anyway, long story short: I wrote a thing for Open Changes in the last week of the project, and it got picked. Given that there was no week nine, it didn’t get posted and remixed, but it did get included in the final iteration of Open Changes, which was a big-arse poster that featured the things that all the successful writers wrote, all designed to look like a tree and shit.

No, really – check it out:

Why Do You Write Poetry? – John Tranter

Hot on the heels of the last of last year’s WDYWP answers, here’s the first for fourteen in the form of a seven-part answer from none other than Mister John Tranter himself (Yes, that John Tranter. I’m gonna call this a coup. Because I can.).

Mr. Tranter’s segmented answer ably covers a lot of ground that is at turns mystical, practical, historical and ironic. Here’s a sample:

“Jesus, this is better than farming!” I cried, and I wrote poetry furiously from then on.

For the whole seven instalments, head to The Blue Corner forthwith. Which means now.