Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2013

Launch of Ampersand 6-a journal of curated curiosities.

Hey, surprise:  Ampersand Magazine linked to my piece for the Emerging Writers Festival, with lots of lovely pics. It gives an account of the launch of their Issue #6 in May 2013 at 1000 Pound Bend .  What a cool place. What a great night. And what a lovely publication Ampersand is. Pre-launch: the bar at 1000 Pound Bend Pic Anna Sublet I am quite proud of this bit of writing and had a lot of fun putting it together with a tight deadline as part of the Emerging Writers Festival Blog Squad .  Strangely, the only reason I found this was that someone did a Google search with my name, and the first thing to come up was my work on Ampersand's site.  Nick Coyle launches it off. Pic Anna Sublet

Artistic vision takes us to The Kimberley.

Hunter G's exhibition ‘The Kimberley’ St Helier’s St Gallery at the Abbotsford Convent. We often tell our stories about land and our place in it with words. In his fight to raise awareness of the threats to The Kimberley region of Western Australia, Hunter G has told a story through photographs. It is an invitation to us all. In testament to the power of the visual, and the potency of art as protest, Hunter G's exhibition has made us aware of a far away beauty that words cannot describe. This year saw Hunter G pack his things into a two wheel drive Toyota Town Ace van, and trek diagonally across Australia in a campaign to raise awareness about what is under threat on the far west coast of our land. Along the way he blogged, wept, and wrote, whilst taking photographs of the land he passed through. He faced  50 degree heat, mozzies, road trains and road kill.  Oh, and he got bogged. It was

Ampersand Magazine Launch serves up more

One Little Room takes us beyond our selves... Ampersand . It’s such a great name for a magazine. Its offer of possibilities, its promise of more. And its f ormat-it’s gorgeous! A little flip book, filled with poems and stories and art essays and drawings. I cannot wait to read it. I couldn’t read it last night, because as I sat in the wonderful warehouse space of 1000 Bend in the dim light, I realised that, yeah, I probably really do need glasses. Last night saw the launch of  Ampersand ‘s  latest issue, One Little Room. Amp-er-sand. Reminds me of Lo-Li-ta, the way the rhythm stamps itself on a word. To get there, I hobbled down a cobble-stoned laneway, past dumpsters and stencils, turning back on myself to arrive. Turn around, look down the alley ways, sneak up the stairs, said Bill Henson later in the night – ‘seek out the weirdos.’ OK … The crowd here didn’t look like weirdos. Just a bunch of passionate readers and writers, damn happy to be celebrating a magazine l

Writing the Personal

Notes from the Emerging Writers' Festival, 2013 Sure, we all have something to say, but why would people want to read it? This Town Hall session discussed blogs, memoir and biography. Specifically, how to make writing about oneself interesting to others. Why do we want to read your travel stories, your disasters in love, your encounters with cancer, your intimate meanderings? Along with the crucial question: how does one avoid pissing off friends and family so much that they will no longer speak to you? The panel certainly had great credentials for writing the personal:   Fiona Wright, author of a collection of poems,  Knuckled ; Walter Mason, travel writer,  Destination Saigon ; Anna Poletti, author of  Intimate Ephemera-Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture  and Luke Ryan, comedy writer and author of soon to be published  You’re Only as Sick as you Feel. The session was hosted by blogger, Lily Mae Martin. She blogs at  Berlin Domestic,  where she pokes arou

Cutting it Short

The short form has hit the big time. Over the last month, two major literary prizes have been awarded to authors of short form fiction. Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International , for her body of short form work, and Maxine Beneba Clark won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her collection of short stories. Personally, I have fallen in love with ‘flash fiction’ like Josephine Rowe’s gorgeous collection, Tarcutta Wake . Some of these stories are less than a page long. This panel, Cutting it Short, explored the short stuff. Why do we read it, why do writers work with this form, will people buy it, will publishers take a punt on it? Chi Vu, Miles Vertigan, Ryan O'Neill and Jennifer Mills Cutting it Short, Emerging Writers' Festival, 2013 The panel addressed a packed room at the Town Hall last Saturday. The lighting was dim, but the chandeliers shone. Host Johannes Jakob, fiction editor at The Lifted Brow, started off

Ring the Bells

By Anna Sublet 2nd May, 2013 The Victorian Education Act allows for education which is free, compulsory and secular. So how do religious instructors, promoting specific faiths, have access to children within our state schools? At a State School near you It's nearly the end of the school day at a local state primary school. But for the next half hour, the teaching of the curriculum is suspended. Children are divided into groups based on their religion. These groups are then separated from each other. The classroom door opens to allow church volunteers, some with as little as ten hours of training, to take charge of each group. The teacher is made redundant, sidelined as a spectator in her own classroom. Welcome to supposedly secular education in Victoria. Image copyright Natalie Davey, used with permission Special Religious Instruction In primary schools across Victoria, children as young as 5 are being ministered to by religious volunteers from ACCESS Ministries. AC

God's invitation

by Anna Sublet May 2nd, 2013 When No does not mean No Kids love a party invitation. Coloured balloons, a personal message. But 6 year old Leah did not know what to think when she received a special message about God's love in the playground at school last week. This is one party to which her parents had already said no. So how did she come to be invited? You're special Leah’s parents chose for her to not take part in Special Religious Instruction classes at their local state school.  So, Lara and Mark were stunned when their daughter Leah said "Look what Zoe gave me!" on the way home from school. An invitation to learn of God's love. Photo supplied by Lara (sur name withheld) Spreading God's love Leah's parents  had requested that she not attend SRI sessions, but here they were receiving messages from children within the SRI class.  The 'invitation' prompted Leah to ask her parents about God.  They are angry that the