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How dumb luck got me published

Morris Gleitzman once said that every successful writer he knew could look back to one incident of good fortune that lifted them above the crowd. I think I’ve just had mine.

I’ve always loved those stories about the serendipity of some unlikely twist of fate that has led to a publisher discovering a manuscript. Let’s face it, luck and publishing go hand in hand. Having recently acquired a good luck story of my very own (more on that in a moment) it seemed like a good excuse to interview a bunch of talented local authors about how luck has played a part in their own fortunes. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 21-12-2011, No comments

My first year as Overland fiction editor

A new issue of Overland (205) is out this week and marks the end of my first year as its fiction editor. So I thought it would be a good moment to reflect on this year of fiction, especially in light of the debates last year about the possibility of ‘politically engaged fiction’, which I said was the sort of fiction I was hoping to publish in Overland.

At the time I made it clear that by this phrase I didn’t mean social realism. I gave a few examples of the sort of fiction I did mean, including Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Zamyatin’s We, The Master and Margarita, 100 Years of Solitude, Brave New World, 1984. Other examples that spring to mind are Animal Farm, Catch-22, Vonnegut Jr’s Slaughterhouse-5 and Player Piano, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe. These are among my all-time favourite novels. I think of them as ‘politically engaged fiction’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 7-12-2011, 10 user comments

Meanland: Editors, trolls and lovers

Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be.

In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and publishers work with authors the way they always have: commissioning, editing and publishing work. At the other end of the spectrum is self-publishing including web pages, blogs, twitter etc

Written by Catherine Moffat on 5-12-2011, 3 user comments

Meanland: The death of the book, and other utopian fantasies

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book.

Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within the next five years, thanks, in part, to the (supposed) explosion of online sales of ebooks. In a less dramatic and more considered register, Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, pontificated on the ABC television’s Jennifer Byrne Presents, that the advent of ebooks and e-readers was disrupting ‘the underpinning supply chains that are currently supporting modern publishing’. ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 29-06-2011, 7 user comments

Do you want myself or do you want my song? Poetry & truth

While I was pregnant with my (now four-month-old) daughter, I was performing a feature poetry set in Melbourne and during the break a woman came up to me and said: Congratulations! I’m so glad to see you’re expecting. That poem about your son dying is so sad, it makes my heart break.

gilscotth-677x1024My response was to stare at her blankly. I thought she’d probably confused me with someone else, and asked whether she had. She looked a little confused. You just performed that poem – the one about your son being shot. I looked at her again, blankly. The poem you JUST read, she insisted, it’s in your book! I wracked my brain and realised she meant the poem ‘mali’, which appears in my book Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (Picaro Press, 2010). The poem is about the anxiety of carrying a black child in the womb, with the mother (myself) imagining all of the things that could go wrong: ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 2-02-2011, 9 user comments

Partly about Donalds and zombies

Last year, due to a series of personal catastrophes and unheralded disasters, all unrelated and all of which happened at once, I was able to take a year off. What I wanted to do with that year was – well, a whole lot of things, none of which would be interesting to hard-headed Overland readers. The most relevant one, to this discussion, was to write.

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Written by Stephen Wright on 1-11-2010, 1 user comment

Meanland: When does print matter?

NewspapersPicking up where I left off… though not with Nicholas Carr (at least, not immediately).

At the Wheeler Centre’s weekly lunchtime soapbox event Anna Krien addressed the question of whether newspapers still matter in the digital era. Krien’s central argument was that print newspapers needed to recognise and mobilise the features that make them unique and play to their strengths, rather than playing catch up with their online competition. Print newspapers can make a virtue of their relative slowness; can devote resources to research; can provide in-depth analysis and long-form reportage; can deliver a product that is worth the paper it is printed on (i.e. is worth its cover price and is worth whatever effort it takes to carry it from breakfast table to briefcase to beachside). In so doing, newspapers can leave the speedy work of ‘news coverage’ to the web. Printed papers, with their research, analysis and critique, can be the roughage in our media diet, giving us something to chew on: slow-to-digest information that complements the news snacks we get online. ... read more

Written by Caroline Hamilton on 29-10-2010, 2 user comments

Meanland: Publish Your Self

Last night I had the fortune to hear writer Simmone Howell talk about her novels, writing processes and her brief spell as a publisher. Vandal Press, co-founded by Howell during her days in RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing course, ran from the late 90s to 2002. Howell described scribbling short stories in one class, working on layout and design in another, before topping it off with a cheap print run.

The reason for this foray into publishing? The founders of Vandal felt that as young writers, the established literary gatekeepers ignored them; the industry was a fortress without a drawbridge.

Howell writes:

People tend to frown on self-publishing but for me it was a good thing. At the very least it meant I was doing something. I had a book I could hold in my hand; I could send it off to snooty literary editors to say, Who am I? I can WRITE! After Vandal I started sending stories off willy-nilly. I wrote my way around the world.

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Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 15-10-2010, 1 user comment

The literary scene sexist? Well, call me Betty Draper.

Betty DraperBack in May I attended a panel discussion at the Sydney Writers’ Festival entitled, ‘No Country for Young Women’ which sought to answer the question: ‘Can a young women thrive in our newly retro Mad Men world?’ The panel consisted of Kirstin Tranter, Emily Maguire and Karen Hitchcock and was chaired by Susan (Lionheart) Maushart. The answer they reached, rather swiftly was, ‘Of course!’ Followed by, ‘Since when is our world “newly retro”? I mean, I like mid-century modernist furniture as much as the next person, but seriously, what the?’ (Okay, I embellished that a little, but you get the drift.) ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 13-10-2010, 24 user comments

The Overland line

Over on his blog, Emmett Stinson comments on my article on creative writing courses in the university, ‘Liberated Zone or Pure Commodification?’ There is much to agree with in Stinson’s post, though his defence of creative writing courses is rather tendentious.

Still, there were several points that attracted my attention. In particular, Stinson critiques my argument for an engaged literature. He writes:

Davidson’s piece is ultimately interesting and even-handed, although it runs what currently seems to be Overland’s party line on what literature should be, which is ‘a literature that takes us back into the world – that thinks about the issues that surround and affect us – rather than away from it: a culture of engagement rather than escapism, of reflection rather than consolation’. As I’ve noted elsewhere, an extremely problematic set of assumptions underpins this notion of literature (and more on this below).

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Written by Rjurik Davidson on 29-09-2010, 11 user comments

Meanland: Putting the community back in culture (and not a moment too soon)

The last few Meanland posts have focused on the nature of copyright and how it works and affects reading, writing and publishing in our new settlements on the digital frontier.

Many people feel a distinct sense of impending doom, as though creative and financial control have been wrested from the hands of writers, artists and musicians and let loose on the infinite and unpoliced data cables across the world. But copyright, by its very nature, is extraordinarily restrictive. Currently, for your typical, non-full-time creator, there is no means of saying to another artist, ‘Can I use your work?’ Rather we rely on ‘permission culture’, in which cultural products are monitored and controlled by corporations.

Contrary to what copyright culture and modern capitalism would have us believe, the sharing of culture is the norm for individuals, for artists and for society as a whole. In mediaeval Europe, say, someone would tell a rip-roaring (and doubtless violent and bloody) story that you remembered and retold when you travelled to your next village. And maybe you retold it with some slight embellishments. From its earliest days, human cultural history was dependent on the oral tradition, which transferred culture between generations and communities. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 23-09-2010, No comments

The perils of blogging

My name is Mark William Jackson and I was a compulsive blogger. It has been eight weeks since my last post. At my worst I would spend up to two hours per evening posting, responding to comments and checking statistics. If I wasn’t in my dashboard I was checking my email to see if anyone had left a comment. I was obsessed and I had to stop. I started blogging as a way of promoting my poetry but the blog is a wicked beast in the hands of an addict – by the end I was writing poetry to support the blog.

It has been well documented (usually by bloggers) that a blog, along with facebook and twitter, are essential tools for the aspiring writer. Blogs are a cheap and easy way to get your work out to millions of potential readers. Start a blog and scream ‘death to the publisher infidels, we don’t need you anymore’. But, herein lies the danger, when the blog becomes the product instead of the marketing tool. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 20-09-2010, 20 user comments

The power of self-delusion

Young Emerging Writers Night at the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival


Steve ToltzMuch is being made at the moment about the number of students enrolling in creative writing courses across our fair land. In fact, it is fair to say that in the next decade Australia’s biggest challenge won’t be overpopulation; it will be a severe skills shortage due to the fact everyone is chucking in their jobs and going off to ‘learn’ how to be a writer. If you want to read about the way this may or may not be impacting on Australia’s literary culture, I strongly recommend reading Rjurik Davidson’s article ‘Liberated zone or pure commodification?’ in the current issue of Overland. (I would happily cut and paste it right here, but appropriation hasn’t really taken off in the literary community the way it has in visual arts.) Suffice to say, there are a lot of folk out there tapping away on their keyboards in the hope that one day they will make it into print. Or to use an animal metaphor (which regular readers will know I am rather fond of) there are a lot of hungry caterpillars out there wondering how they can help themselves emerge from their cocoons as beautiful butterflies rather than dusty brown moths – squashed under a pile of rejection slips. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 10-09-2010, 4 user comments

Bookless shelves

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. – Tom Robbins

Martin Hughes and Zoe Dattner interviewed Richard Nash at the Wheeler Centre and replayed the interview on RRR’s Max Headroom on 22 July 2010. Due to the miracle of modern technology, I listened to it the other day. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 8-09-2010, No comments

Meanland: Doctorow on Copyright vs Creativity

Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow spoke in Melbourne on Thursday night as part of the Meanland and Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Big Ideas’ lecture series. For those unable to attend, I have transcribed below as much as I could from my indecipherable notes on the lecture, ‘Copyright vs creativity’.

Rule number 1: If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 6-09-2010, No comments