Published 14 April 2010 · Main Posts The bloggers are out tonight Maxine Beneba Clarke It was uni summer holidays when Y2K was supposedly going to hit. I was working full-time in the kitchen of a major New South Wales hospital. Hospital electricians were powering up generators in case the life support and other medical equipment went berserk, nurses filled up baths and sinks with water and reassured terrified patients, and down in the kitchen we had ordered enough food to plate cold meals for the next week in the absence of working ovens – and rostered on an extra ten staff for the following day in case the industrial dishwashers stopped working. Despite being an avid blogger, to me the hysteria being generated by ‘media commentators’ regarding the e-book’s ambitious plans to change our reading habits forever is the literary equivalent of the Y2K madness. So it’s with great pleasure that I find myself included in Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing #1. This print publication, which collects writing from thirty bloggers from around the country, is edited by Karen Andrews of Miscellaneous Press, and will be launched at Readings bookstore, Carlton at 6pm this evening. In a further challenge to the print-to-cyberspace trend, a number of blog writers including Alec Patric, Stu Hatton, Allison Browning and myself, will be reading aloud their inclusions in this groundbreaking new collection. What better reason to take a break from blog surfing for the night? Event: Launch of Australian Blog Writing #1 Date: Wednesday 14 April 2010 Time: 6:00pm–8:00pm Location: Readings Carlton, Lygon Street, Victoria Maxine Beneba Clarke Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her memoir, The Hate Race, her poetry collection Carrying the World, and her first children’s book, The Patchwork Bike, will be published by Hachette in late 2016. More by Maxine Beneba Clarke › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.