Continuum 8 Program
The Continuum 8 program is up, and I’m delighted to be part of some awesome panels and reading sessions. If you’re in Melbourne for the long weekend and are up for some Natcon excitement, swing past the Rydges on Swanston — Friday’s admission is a mere gold coin donation! Bargain!
In case any of you want to drop in and say ‘hi’, or if you want to avoid me altogether, my sessions are:
Friday, ‘Splicing Genres’ 16:00
with Jane Routley, Jenny Blackford, Lisa Hannett, Claire Corbett, Rjurik Davidson
Fantasy murder mysteries, horror spy novels, science fiction romance… do the best stories defy genre boundaries?
Friday, ‘Tales as old as time’ 18:00
with Angela Slatter, Lisa Hannett, Jenny Blackford, Kirstyn McDermott, Jane Routley
Fairytales are in vogue again, all over TV and movie screens and for years collected by Ellen Datlow in retold anthologies. Why are we so fascinated with these stories? And with so many retellings and versions out there how do writers make them new again?
Saturday, ‘Readings’ 16:00
with Claire Corbett, Angela Slatter, Lisa Hannett, Felicity Dowker
The program is packed with lots of excellent sessions, and though I haven’t yet had a chance to decide which panels I’ll attend (other than the ones I’ll be on, of course!) I will certainly be there to cheer everyone on at these events:
Friday, ‘Twelfth Planet Press Hour’ 19:00
Ever wondered how your favorite Twelve Planet collection would taste like in cupcake form? Then come along to the Twelfth Planet Cocktail hour, to celebrate the launch of the newest Twelve Planets, Through Splintered Walls, by Kaaron Warren, and Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan, plus the new TPP novella Salvage by Jason Nahrung and a surprise announcement! Each book will be lovingly interpreted as a cupcake by master baker, Terri Sellen. Your cocktail choice is entirely your own…
Saturday, ‘Ishtar Launch’ 14:00
Launch of Ishtar, edited by Amanda Pillar and KV Taylor (includes novellas by Deborah Biancotti, Cat Sparks, and Kaaron Warren)
Sunday, ‘Bread and Circuses Launch’ 16:00
Ticonderoga Publications launch of Bread and Circuses by Felicity Dowker
And of course the Ditmar / Chronos Awards on Sunday evening — I love a good awards show!
Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, Vol 2
Hooray! SO happy to see ‘Forever, Miss Tapekwa County’ on this awesome ToC! And the cover art for this volume is so pretty!!!
Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene have compiled 32 fantastic stories and poems first published in 2011, from New Zealand’s and Australia’s finest writers.
The contents are
- Peter M Ball “Briar Day” (Moonlight Tuber)
- Lee Battersby “Europe After The Rain” (After the Rain, Fablecroft Press)
- Deborah Biancotti “Bad Power” (Bad Power, Twelfth Planet Press)
- Jenny Blackford “The Head in the Goatskin Bag” (Kaleidotrope)
- Simon Brown “Thin Air” (Dead Red Heart, Ticonderoga Publications)
- David Conyers and David Kernot “Winds Of Nzambi” (Midnight Echo #6, AHWA)
- Stephen Dedman “More Matter, Less Art” (Midnight Echo #6, AHWA)
- Sara Douglass & Angela Slatter “The Hall of Lost Footsteps” (The Hall of Lost Footsteps, Ticonderoga Publications)
- Felicity Dowker “Berries & Incense” (More Scary Kisses, Ticonderoga Publications)
- Terry Dowling “Dark Me, Night You” (Midnight Echo #5, AHWA)
- Jason Fischer “Hunting Rufus” (Midnight Echo #5, AHWA)
- Christopher Green “Letters Of Love From The Once And Newly Dead” (Midnight Echo #5, AHWA)
- Paul Haines “The Past Is A Bridge Best Left Burnt” (The Last Days of Kali Yuga, Brimstone Press)
- Lisa L Hannett “Forever, Miss Tapekwa County” (Bluegrass Symphony, Ticonderoga Publications)
- Richard Harland “At The Top Of The Stairs” (Shadows and Tall Trees #2, Undertow Publications)
- John Harwood “Face To Face” (Ghosts by Gaslight, HarperCollins)
- Pete Kempshall “Someone Else To Play With” (Beauty Has Her Way, Dark Quest Books)
- Jo Langdon “Heaven” (After the Rain, Fablecroft Press)
- Maxine McArthur “The Soul of the Machine” (Winds of Change, CSFG)
- Ian McHugh “The Wishwriter’s Wife” (Daily Science Fiction)
- Andrew J McKiernan “Love Death” (Aurealis #45, Chimaera Publications)
- Kirstyn McDermott “Frostbitten” (More Scary Kisses, Ticonderoga Publications)
- Margaret Mahy “Wolf Night” (The Wilful Eye – Tales From the Tower #1, Allen & Unwin)
- Anne Mok “Interview with the Jiangshi” (Dead Red Heart, Ticonderoga Publications)
- Jason Nahrung “Wraiths” (Winds of Change, CSFG)
- Anthony Panegyres “Reading Coffee” (Overland, OL Society)
- Tansy Rayner Roberts “The Patrician” (Love and Romanpunk, Twelfth Planet Press)
- Angela Rega “Love In the Atacama or the Poetry of Fleas” (Crossed Genres, CGP)
- Angela Slatter “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
- Lucy Sussex “Thief of Lives” (Thief of Lies, Twelfth Planet Press)
- Kyla Ward “The Kite” (The Land of Bad Dreams, P’rea Press)
- Kaaron Warren “All You Can Do Is Breathe” (Blood and Other Cravings, Tor)
The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011 is scheduled for publication in July 2012 and can be pre-ordered at indiebooksonline.com. The anthology will be available in hardcover, ebook and trade editions.
The Week That Was: In Pictures and Words
It’s fair to say that I’ve been a hermit since the Year of the Grant began. January and February have flown by in a whirl of words, chapters, stories… and very little else. Sure, I’ve emerged from the oubliette once or twice — for provisions, say, or to reassure my friends that I’m still alive — but I think I’ve been storing up my energy all these months, stockpiling my non-writing time, so that I could spend it all in one massive exciting hit this week. My computer has grown mighty lonely since Adelaide’s festival season began, and this is why…
Last Friday, we spent the evening outside in Elder Park with Ennio Morricone and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. The show started right before sunset (see pic on the left) and because I’d booked the tickets about six months ago, we had excellent seats. The weather was glorious — in fact, the breeze was in tune with Morricone’s outstanding music: early on in the concert, when the orchestra was thrilling us with pieces from The Untouchables and Once Upon a Time in America, the wind would gust just as the violins crescendoed, catching the ladies’ hair and tossing it about dramatically in time with the chorus. At least, that’s how it seemed…
Night fell slowly, dropping a luminous navy curtain behind the stage in increments, the clouds hanging low and beautiful above the white dome. Morricone led the orchestra through pieces from Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dynamite, and when the first breathy notes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly sounded, the audience broke convention, whooping and clapping long before the end of the set. It’s mean of me to say that you had to be there to appreciate how magical the night was, how perfect the setting, how memorable and moving the performance… How, when ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ from The Mission began playing, people wept. But there you have it.
Saturday morning kicked off Adelaide Writers Week, which ran until Thursday, and I can honestly say that this was the best Writers Week we’ve seen in years. The program was under new direction this year, and it showed: the tents in the Pioneer Women’s Garden were new, the venue’s layout updated, and the guests included a healthy smattering of genre authors — Kelly Link, Robert Shearman, Margo Lanagan (to whom the entire week was dedicated), Garth Nix, not to mention authors of crime fiction, such as Jo Nesbø and Megan Abbott. (more…)
Evil Children in Art (and other tabs I need to close)
I have a terrible habit of leaving about 40 tabs open on my browser at once. Whenever I find something interesting, worth revisiting, or just plain cool, I leave the tab open so that I can look at it again and again throughout the day. Or over the next couple of days. Sometimes over a week. Or more.
Sure, I could bookmark the page, but let’s face it: I’ll click that little star, close the page, and then forget about it. So to ensure that my latest obsessions don’t get obliterated in the Never-Neverland of Lost Tabs, I thought I’d share a few of them with all of you.
First, from Flavorwire, a survey of evil children in art (click ‘view as a single page’ for the best effect). This one has remained open since February 1st because of Ray Caesar’s wonderfully bizarre images:
One day, when there is less writing to do and more time for dilly-dallying on the internetz, I’ll Google him and find out what other treasures he has in store for me, but for now these will have to suffice.
An Introduction to Australian Horror
In honour of Australia Day, I was asked to write an article about Australian horror for This Is Horror in the UK — and it’s now up! The article surveys some of the standout horror published in the past two years by Australian independent presses: so much to talk about, so much incredible talent!
Australia is a land of extremes. One minute the country is ravaged by drought and bushfires, the next it’s drowning in devastating floods. The continent is a combination of enormous red deserts meeting sprawling metropolises meeting ancient tropical rainforests meeting endless coastlines. Some of the largest — and tiniest — deadly predators on the planet are hidden out in the wilds, but are also unearthed in suburban backyards. Over it all, the harsh Australian sun beats down. Casting the longest, darkest shadows.
And right there — right where the glaring light gives way to shade — a population of Australian horror writers thrives. It’s a great position to be in. Looking at stories published by independent presses in the past two years, we find that Australian horror can plunge wholly into the black, even more tragic and disturbing by contrast to the brightness left behind; it can be light-hearted but nuanced, love and joy limned in darkness; or it can tread both worlds, supernatural and terrifying and endearing all at once…
Read the rest here — and enjoy!
Tuesday Therapy: A Word to Remember
A new year has dawned, which has inevitably led to a deluge of resolutions being bandied about the internetz: this year I will write X; I will publish Y; I will conquer the publishing world… Many resolutions focus on the end result, which tends to overlook all the hard work that goes into reaching that outcome. Today’s Tuesday Therapy, brought to you care of Jason Nahrung, reminds us that there may be a tough slog ahead — but hard work is part of the reward.
And when it comes to working hard and coming up with the goods, Jason is an expert. He has worked as a newspaper journalist for more than 20 years, and is also the editor for Queensland Writers Centre’s magazine Writing Queensland. He has served as Director of the Aurealis Awards and has also been a judge on various awards panels — and all this while writing gorgeously dark fiction! His novel The Darkness Within was published by Hachette Australia in 2007 and his latest novella, Salvage, is being published by Twelfth Planet Press later this year. (The image pictured on the left is Salvage‘s beautiful cover art!)
I haven’t been able to think of a nifty quote, says Jason, but how about a word: perseverance.
A carrot or two about writing as capital ‘A’ Art…
A while ago, Lee Battersby emailed to say he was running a series of posts about Art over at the Battersblog, and asked me to contribute to the Treacherous Carrot discussion. And, lo. Contribute I did.
Art and beauty and writing — I could’ve talked about this topic for ages…
In February 1880, William Morris delivered a lecture before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, which was later published in a book called Hopes and Fears for Art. It was during this public lecture, Morris’s first, that the philosophy driving the Arts & Crafts movement was famously summarised. “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody,” Morris declared, “this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
Replace ‘houses’ with ‘writing’ and now read that sentence aloud.
What you’ve just heard is the mantra that whispers through my mind every time I start writing a story — and which bludgeons me when I go to read one.
Gobsmacked.
Jason Nahrung has reviewed Bluegrass Symphony over at ASiF, and whoa. I’m gobsmacked.
It’s hard to single out a ‘taster’ to post here because, well, the whole thing is incredible.
For example… ‘Down the Hollow’ resonated with memories of another great short, Margo Lanagan’s ‘Singing My Sister Down’: here is a ritual involving farewell, horrible to the reader, commonplace to the characters, offering insight into the familiar-yet-foreign society while evoking such strong empathy for its powerless narrator. Hannett shares an enviable trait with both of these lauded writers, in that she relies on the story to do the work. The characters are living their lives; they don’t feel the need to fill in the blanks for the reader. And the reader never doubts that they can trust the writer to tell them what they need to know, when they need to know it – no asides or footnotes or info dumps required.
That faith is borne out in ‘Depot to Depot’, one of my favourites, in which the inexplicable is made clear only in the last scene. In ‘Commonplace Sacrifices’, the narrator is never named nor its nature explained: the situation simply is, and it is beautiful. Such assuredness in the storytelling is what helps makes the world of Bluegrass Symphony so palpable. Words are Hannett’s friends here, too. She knows when the story allows her to show her mettle with poetic description and when such language would be obtrusive. Restraint is not always the virtue of the debut writer, but Hannett understands its power, both in plot and prose.
Like I said. Whoa.
You can read the whole review here, and visit Jason’s personal website here.
Dead Red Heart: Australian Vampire Tales
Ticonderoga Publications has announced the ToC for their massive book of Australian vampire stories, Dead Red Heart:
“The Tide”, Martin Livings and friends
“Mutiny on the Scarborough”, Shona Husk
“Sun Falls”, Angela Slatter
“Such is Life”, Jeremy Sadler
“Apolotoi”, Chris Lawson
“Punishment of the Sun”, Alan Baxter
“Red Delicious”, Felicity Dowker
“Just a Matter of Economics”, Yvonne Eve Walus
“Quarantine”, Patty Jansen
“Out of the Grave”, Amanda Pillar
“Desert Blood”, Marty Young
“Thin Air”, Simon Brown
“Kissed by the Sun”, Jodi Cleghorn
“Black Heart”, Joanna Fay
“Renfield’s Wife”, Damon Cavalcini
“Listening to Tracy”, Jen White
“Breaking the Drought”, Jay Caselberg
“Children of the Cane”, Jason Nahrung
“The Sea at Night”, Joanne Anderton
“Sky in the Morning”, Sonia Marcon
“Taking it for the Team”, Tracie McBride
“All that Glisters”, Pete Kempshall
“The Rider”, Martin Livings
“Vitality”, George Ivanoff
“Coming Home”, Kathryn Hore
“The Little Red Man”, Ray Gates
“Deathborn Light”, Helen Stubbs
“The Life Stealer”, Donna Maree Hanson
“Behind the Black Mask”, Jacob Edwards
“Interview with the Jiangshi”, Anne Mok
“White and Red in the Black”, Lisa L Hannett
“Lady Yang’s Lament”, Penelope Love
Australian settings/themes; vampires and blood; a veritable HEAP of Aussie authors — it’s so much fun being a part of this project!
The book is being released in April 2011, so we won’t have to wait long to get our hands on a copy! (I resisted the obvious pun there. Couldn’t bring myself to do it…)
