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

Comments

A morning too early, a morning too late

Sensing the future It was our last morning in New York City. It was a morning too early to be leaving, and as it turned out, a morning too late. Dad was on his final lap of life, and we were making a dash home to cheer him along as he hit the home straight . I went down to breakfast with a heavy heart. The bar was buzzing. Halloween scenes were already playing out in the streets. A kind waiter asked me 'have you got your costume sorted for tonight?' To which I stumbled, 'no...I I I have to go home. My dad's sick...' and began to cry. The dear boy was shocked, 'Oh, I'm so sooorreeee. Do you wanna hug?' I could barely breathe. NO, I managed. I ate cereal alone, and had grapefruit juice. Dad loved grapefruit. I packed the last of my things, and stumbled out through the lobby, past glamorous girls in fabulous costumes. Mark had already run off to explore the neighbourhood after checking out of the hotel early. It didn't seem...

Coming of Age

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked, my brother and I and the neighbourhood boys. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the train station platform across the road, and the street lights pooled at the corner. Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation. The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. One day, my mum greeted me at...

Weaving my own way

In my first weeks of University life, I unzipped a heavy blue bag and found myself bent over a skinny cadaver with a scalpel in my hand. Smelling the formaldehyde. Over the course of the next year, we carved flesh from his buttocks, separated muscle from cartilage, and pulled and probed his ligaments. Lab sessions with the stiffs were fascinating, but I didn’t really want to be doing Medicine. I had never liked biology and was not at all interested in seeing patients with medical needs. So how did I get to be there? Surgery days, pic Anna Sublet It was always expected in our family that we would attend University, preferably to do medicine or law. Coming from a family of parents and grandparents who valued tertiary education, who had been lawyers, doctors, engineers and inventors, this was an unquestioned path. Of course, at the Catholic school, there was also the option of becoming a wife and mother, something seemingly so appalling to me that I rejected such a notion for ...

Notes of Substance

Search This Blog