So you’re starting up a radical cultural space called Under The Hammer. The name comes from a quote from Mayakovsky (sometimes also attributed to Brecht), which reads, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it’. Can you briefly describe the aim of the space?

Sometimes I get so tired of words. They pour out of me. It is not words that I lack. It is the discipline to arrange the words in a way that best articulates what it is I am trying to say. I’m trying to tear down walls, layers and layers of walls.

You are invited to the launch of writer – and Overland blogger – SJ Finn’s new novel, This Too Shall Pass (Sleepers). To be launched by (and we quote) ‘writer, editor and sophisticate, Sophie Cunningham’. When: Thursday 3 March (tomorrow!) Time: 6pm for 6.30 start Place: St Kilda Bowling Club: 66 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda […]

With the closing ceremony of the Overload poetry festival at the Grace Darling Hotel on Sunday, I was disappointed poetry would once again retreat from the limelight. The experience I had this year, participating in the festival as a poet, was far more exciting than my role reviewing it here on Overland last year. Observing […]

From the doubts of conception through to the power of labour, and onto the magic and miseries of babies and children and mature awareness as daughters – 5 women wordsmiths share their perspectives to create a multi-voiced portrait of mothering in modern Australia. Performing on the night: Koraly Dimitriadis, Vicki Thornton, Amy Bodossian, Tiggy Johnson […]

Less than a fortnight ago in a small bookshop in Carlton, a small tidal wave crashed into the face of the current Australian literary landscape when Maxine Beneba Clarke’s first major poetry collection, Gil Scott Heron is on Parole, was launched. I don’t usually drag myself out of hiding for a book launch these days […]