Jen Saunders wins IWD Award

Jen Saunders accepting an IWD award for service to the arts in the Shoalhaven.

Slow Skipping launch

Links for www.blusterhead.com

Blusterhead (http://www.blusterhead.com) is an information site with a lot of useful links and bits of information which I originally put up for my writing students and then it got out of hand.

I'll be checking all the links, updating and adding more shortly. So, if your magazine has a site, your book has a site, or you have a personal site which is writing-related email me at info@blusterhead.com or writerslink@gmail.com and I'll look at it with a view to putting it in. Not everything will get in probably but I'll try. (It's free btw.)

The What's on will be disabled because I update irregularly.

If you have ideas that would be good for a different info section to replace What's on which doesn't change every ten minutes, let me know. All writing-related of course.

I must be insane to keep this going.

PressPress Chapbook Award

It's hot where I am - though I've been getting news of those struggling with the snow elsewhere - and it looks as though the chapbook award is hotting up too. The entries are flowing in. This is good, rather than having a lot of administration at the last minute as people, naturally, fling things over the deadline (end of May 09).

It's exciting but all the entries have to wait so that they can go through the judging process together to allow fair comparison (they're all judged 'blind' ie without identifying the poet on the manuscript itself).





Response to Carolyn Fisher's winning chapbook has been very positive. She's organised a number of launches in Tasmania which I get reports about. After Carolyn's was published the long-awaited chapbook from Alison Thompson Slow Skipping came out.

Alison is from my own locality (ie boondocks) so I was very pleased about that. It's rare. Half of the titles originate from the Northern Territory or Tasmania.

In fact, one of the runners up for the Chapbook Award was also published - and was from the Northern Territory. This was Jennifer Mills with Treading Earth. I love this book. It has the qualities of the landscape it was written in. Have a look.

The next title will be different and is posing some production problems which might delay it. We shall overcome. There will also be another exciting opportunity in the second half of the year - but first, let us survive the 2009 Chapbook Award!

New PressPress title out now!

Have a look at Jennifer Mills' Treading Earth - the newest chapbook from PressPress.

6th 6x6 Exhibition

The sixth annual art shindig. It's easy to
remember: 6pm, 6th Dec, 6th year, 6 works each
by 6 artists.

cheryl scowen
nick powell
suzi krawczyk
jen saunders
andrea lofthouse
kaye johnston

Where?
Cambewarra Hall, Cambewarra (Shoalhaven)

This is a heap of fun. I been every year so far. Mostly I buy something. Red dots everywhere.

TSP: David Malouf Wins the Groundbreaking Australia-Asia Literary Award

TSP: David Malouf Wins the Groundbreaking Australia-Asia Literary Award

Exile and Place

I have been a subscriber to American Poetry Review, I'm astonished to discover, almost as long as it's been around. For some of that time, when it arrived I'd remind myself, that I only bought it for the articles. But not recently.

The current issue (v37 no6) has poems by Mahmoud Darwish (trs by Fady Joudah) and an article called 'The Architecture of Loneliness' by Kazim Ali which are worth a look.

Ali's thoughts on exile are framed by a meditation of the cathedral inside the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Or rather the mosque with the cathedal inside.


Speaking about Darwish: "…if a place is to be made into metaphor, the wanderer has a shot of keeping his home alive and in his pocket" he compares this with the experience of Cristina Peri Rossi, Mehmedinovic and Yannis Ritsos. And asks: What is important - the place or the exile from the place?

When in the Great Mosque:

...I haven't uttered prayers in years but neither have I ever decided I wasn’t a Muslim There in that space, where prayer is expressly forbidden, I – who am myself in a certain fashion forbidden – found myself in the most curious position: it wasn't that that I should pray, obligated by my faith, but in that place, vexed and altered, was perhaps the only place I could …That vexed place, the once-mosque now very stridently Not-a-mosque for me became the only possible mosque, and exile in a structure of loss and loneliness, [like] a Jew at the remaining wall, the site of my very faith an interrupted, displaced, transposed place.

As he says elsewhere: Exile is a condition of the heart.

And later

No one knows a country like those exiled from it, and no one knows god like those expelled from paradise. …the primary condition of a person excluded from history or paradise is loneliness. it is not loneliness for the country or god left behind, because the very fact of exile convinced you that it was never yours to begin with. Rather one realises a deeper loneliness, profound, that lives in the heart of the human and cannot be succoured.