photo credit: bernat…

The folks at

dotdotdash held an excellent series of events last week as part of their Subscribeathon, and if you are a writer or a reader, you should totally go to their subscriptions page and jump on board. It’s only $35 for four issues and you get to act smug and say “That? Oh, that’s dotdotdash, it’s a literary magazine, you know, like what smart people read?” when they point to it on your coffee table. Anyway, the marvellous man that is S. J. Finch (who, after having comprehensively beaten me at Super Smash Bros., departed from running the mag to work on his Ph.D.) invited me to speak at the ‘Home’ themed event, asking that I write something about my childhood home, and childhood in general. I found it again this morning, and it went down well enough with the crowd to think that maybe others might like to read it. Anyway, here you go.

———

While preparing for tonight I foolishly asked Twitter how I should go about writing something about home and childhood without falling into a giant pit of nostalgia. I got two responses, one of which was “Make sure you had a terrible childhood”, while the other was “Write about someone else’s” [Edit: that advice coming from Sam Twyford-Moore and Steph Convery, respectively.]. As I am ever a slave to the Internet, I decided to follow the advice of my somewhat cynical friends.

So the first thing I had to do was weigh up whether or not I had a terrible childhood. And while rummaging through the pile of dirty laundry that is my memories, I realised that the moments I remember of my childhood are somewhat unfairly dominated by my father. The reason for that being that my parents split when I was six, after my father essentially walked out on us. But we did still see him regularly at the insistence of Mum, and so my time was split between my home and a succession of houses, units, and apartments that my Dad occupied in the years following the split. My father was quite an angry man during that time, and that anger resulted in a number of incidents throughout my childhood which are still affecting my siblings and I to this day. And my feelings regarding him are the subject of a few of my stories and memoir-ish pieces, one of which you’ll find in the upcoming Gambit issue. Which is why, tonight, I don’t really want to talk about that side of my childhood. Because I think that while the days that we spent with him were damaging and awful, it shouldn’t eclipse the fact that, at the same time, I had a wonderful, loving environment created by my Mum at what I considered to be my true home. So instead of going over the bad stuff, I wanted to celebrate that place: 12 Priory Road, out in a suburb called Maida Vale.

I think I’m in the statistical minority in that throughout my childhood I lived in the same house. My siblings and I all went to the same primary school and high school, a fact that wasn’t lost on teachers who would take every opportunity to compare me to my predecessors. My brother and I played on the same sports teams at the same club five minutes down the road, and we have known all of our neighbours to varying degrees–one of whom spent a very determined afternoon trying to play kiss-chasy with me. So we grew up having a very well-defined sense of community and place, which I think may be a rare thing nowadays anywhere that isn’t a country town. My Mum actually still lives there, which means she’s been in that house for about 35 years. If you were to visit, you’d see a white wooden-clad house, built up on stumps that keep the insects out and provide cover for the occasional wandering echidna. You’d see the front half of a garden that she spends most of her weekends nurturing, while around the back there’s a wide strip of lawn that we spent most of our weekends destroying. Almost every bit of green on the property belongs to native plants, whose gleefully shed pollen never failed to make me hate them for what they did to my sinuses.

Once inside, you’d immediately be aware of one of the main reasons why I always felt, and still do feel, safe and loved in that house; and it’s something that I believe comes from my Dutch ancestry. My mother is Dutch, she emigrated to Melbourne with her parents when she was quite young, and moved over to northern W.A. and then Perth once she’d completed her nursing training. So despite having lived here for most of her life she does still keep up the Dutch habits, and one of my favourite ones is the fact that Dutch houses are typically filled with a carefully curated collection of crafts and knick-knacks. Shelving overflows with seashells, daggy photographs, books from all stages of our reading careers, lolly tins, unironically decorative cutlery and crockery, framed embroidery, handmade runners and bowls, every woodwork or metalwork project that my siblings and I ever completed, wooden sculptures from overseas trips, and so on and so forth. There are no clean lines, no brushed steel, and certainly no minimalism: at last count there were five different clocks in the living room alone. Up until very recently above the kitchen bench there hung a cardboard fish coloured in with pastel crayons that my sister made when she was in grade two. My sister is now 32, and insisted that Mum finally cut the damn thing down when the kitchen got renovated [Edit: I have since discovered that it is still up in the house, it's just moved to my old bedroom.].

If you were to open up any of the drawers you’d find exercise books from every primary school class we ever had, along with yearbook photos and newspaper cuttings from our occasional excursions into local fame. It sounds redundant to say this, but it’s a very homely home. You know how you go to some people’s places and it feels almost like a hotel? Mum’s isn’t like that. The whole place just so perfectly represents the way that our Mum loves and lives for us kids. If there hadn’t been that feeling of warmth and safety that my home provided after visits with my Dad, I don’t think that I would have turned out nearly as well-adjusted as I have. And while my definition of home has changed over the years to encompass my girlfriend and a certain feeling to a place, I know that 12 Priory Road will always be my first home.

So after all that I think I can safely say that I had a pretty good life growing up, with only the occasional terrible-ness sprinkled on like chunks of licorice on an otherwise perfectly baked childhood cake [Edit: I interrupted myself during the night to declare this an absolutely abhorrent metaphor, and so it is]. And I think that, having reminded myself of that fact, it’s helped me to realise that I do have a tendency to cling on the bad stuff and relegate the good stuff to the background. So I’d like to thank the dotdotdash folks for prompting me to appreciate how lucky I really am.

Anyway, still following the advice of my Internet buddies, I am now going to play a game of a ‘Who Am I?’ with someone else’s childhood, and I’m challenging you guys to yell out when you think you know who it is that I am describing.

I was born by immaculate conception into slavery in the desert. It was a very hard life, but I made myself indispensible to the slave masters by quickly picking up the finer details of machinery. By age nine I was a gifted engineer, building engines and machines out of spare parts and eventually earning my freedom in a race [Edit: it was at this point that Liz Tan yelled out the answer, she's sharp that one!]. Recognising my ability, a wizard came to visit me, asking that I come with him to the city of wizards, so that I could be trained in their ways. With an automaton of my own creation by my side, I left my mother and travelled with the wizard to where the others of his kind lived. But when I finally got there, they refused me on the advice of a fortune teller within their ranks, who saw my future to be a dark one. However, when an army invaded, I proved my worth to the wizards by using my engineering skill and quick reflexes to route their most important forces. After the battle, an especially courageous wizard offered to tutor me, and the rest agreed, although reluctantly. I spent the rest of my childhood in training, until my masters sent me to investigate an assassination attempt on a queen.

[Edit: The answer, of course, being Anakin Skywalker.]

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photo credit: kevin dooley

I’ve been back

from my holiday and mired in the depths of unemployment for almost three weeks now. It’s often thought of as a paradise, but in reality it’s a little bit depressing, this not having anything to get you moving once you wake up. Or perhaps I’m just not the right person to appreciate large amounts of hours with nothing particularly pressing to fill them up with. For the first week or so, I had the task of getting my thesis resubmission process completed. Which I did, after spending a painstaking day re-jigging some images and chasing down signatures from various faculty members. So that kept me occupied. After I’d done that though, it’s been pretty much been a week or two of very little at all.

Wait, sorry. ‘After I’d done that’ is probably a little too glib for what it actually represents. I am now officially done with my thesis. It’s complete. Finished. Kaput. I never have to look upon its smug, papery face ever again if I don’t want to. Well, that’s a lie, I’m currently flicking through it for table scraps that I can try and mash together into some semblance of a meal that a journal editor might like to chow down on. But the main thing is that I have passed and I will never have to do something so incredibly hard ever again. So yay for that. Alright, back to the main point of the post.

In order to keep myself from going completely insane at home, I’ve been trying to make sure that I have goals to achieve each day. These range from the mundane (make sure I get the dishes out of the dishwasher and put on a load of washing) to the necessary (go for a run so that I at least leave the house once a day) to the creative. And strangely enough, the creative ones haven’t yet included writing. I have yet to write any new fiction since before I left for Sydney, back in September. This is probably the longest I’ve ever gone without writing something, anything, for a few years. And the urge still hasn’t taken me. I have no doubt it will come back eventually (and hopefully in time for my resolution to write a novel in 2012) but for the moment, I’ve got nothing going on in the writing department with the exception of a COSMOS article or two. Oh, yeah, I’m an occasional paid science journalist now (:.

Anyway, so instead of writing, I’ve been turning to other forms of creative output. One which has turned out to be surprisingly rewarding is that of programming. Now, I’ve tried to program before, and you’d think my background in disciplines that use logic as their main way o’ doin’ stuff would result in me being an apt pupil. But the language I chose to pop my “Hello world!” cherry was Fortran, and Fortran can be a little difficult for the newbie. So this time around I’ve been easing myself into it by adopting Python as my tutor. And so far, the results have closely resembled this xkcd comic. I’m following the excellent Python for Absolute Beginners book by Michael Dawson, which walks you through a number of game-based programs and teaches everything from basic programming workflow to more advanced techniques. It’s already got me dreaming of all kinds of text-based adventures that I could create.Of course, I’ll need to figure out a whole heck of a lot more stuff before I get that far, but the possibility is firmly embedded in my head now.

The other thing I’ve turned (or should that be tuned?) back to is playing around with sequencing. As previously mentioned, there’s a (FREE!) tracker known as Buzzmachines that offers a complete digital solution for making a song from beginning to end, with one of the most elegant graphical interfaces ever devised. And it’s been really fun to mess around with sounds and such. So far I’ve been playing around a lot and not making a whole heap of songs, but here are some little tunes that I’ve been happy enough with to upload to my Soundcloud:

Peachy keen — Trying to emulate the arpeggiated style and substance of chiptunes, though I did use a lot of sounds that are ‘illegal’ for the genre (i.e. delays, etc.). Still, I think it came out okay.

Shred test — I was linked by wauterboi to this excellent VST called Shred, which emulates guitars rather bloody well. So I ended up playing with that and a rhythm gate to make something a bit more driven.

Little mountain & Easte-reverb — These are part of an ongoing attempt to make some music that I can share with my fellow writers as songs that aren’t going to distract them. Kind of like the Ghostly ‘Music for creatives‘ album (which you should definitely get if you haven’t already).

So that’s a few of them. I’ll be trying to get maybe one per month done, as the mood takes me. But really its all about enjoying the process, rather than any kind of output.

And that brings me to another point I wanted to make in that, for me at least, I think it’s important to have multiple outlets for creativity. I don’t think I could exclusively stick to one way of bringing ideas into reality; I’d get either bored or stale in my methods. Even from just the two examples I’ve put here show how bringing learning into your life can result in new ways of expression: I now have the ideas of a text adventure and a themed album floating around my head. And who knows how those ideas will interact with the rest of the stuff that gets thrown in there? And before anyone gets any misconceptions, no, I’m not looking to make money out of these things. Of course I’m never going to get signed to a label or picked up by EA (not that I’d want to in the latter case), but it’s fun to try new things! And that’s what I’ve been feeling like doing lately, trying out new stuff.

Alright, well that’s enough rambling from me for the moment. I hope you’re all enjoying the lead up to the holiday season. Let me know your plans in the comments, or tell me some of your alternate creative hobbies, I’d love to hear whether your outlets have interacted with each other in unexpected ways.

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photo credit: s myer

[Pre(r)amble: This post is pretty much all over the place. I've tried to distil the main points/questions as I go along, but it's not exactly a complete, ordered thought process. Consider yourself warned. ;)]

I have been

writing now for very nearly seven years. The real figure is obviously a lot longer than that–my Mum’s carefully maintained boxes would testify to support this fact–but I’ve been using writing as my main form of creative expression for seven years. In that time I’ve had some hits with publications and more than enough misses to counterbalance them. I’ve met people whose writing I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving, and people whom I consider to be great friends even though I have never met them.

Bloody hell, so far this is reading like a eulogy. Let me start again.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my writing. More specifically I’ve been thinking about my writing in the context of my main pursuit, that of science. As has been pointed out by me elsewhere, I’ve just finished my PhD in chemistry, and so the time has come (the Walrus said) to talk of many things. Or at least think about them obsessively until I feel obliged to externalise them in a blog post.
The things I’ve been thinking about are things like where my writing will fit in my future career, how I’m going to balance work and life and writing, whether I want to continue to take writing ‘seriously’ or relax my expectations of myself; y’know, all that fun stuff. So I guess that’s what this blog post is going to be about: thinking about and planning how I might continue my hobby without killing myself doing it.

The fun factor

Hobbies are meant to be fun. Challenging, but fun. I think it is safe to say that following the path to becoming a respected, known writer in Australia doesn’t always tick those boxes. And the main offender is the submission cycle. I joked to a friend the other day that we had to start a support group for people who were submitting just to stop us all from getting too depressed (The Subcommittee, a Facebook group that I reckon is the best thing to come out of my writing this year). There’s the fretting over drafts, the imagining of intended audiences, the guessing at when a rejection email will come back. Of course there are good aspects as well, the most noteable of which is the coveted acceptance.

But for a person whose career isn’t determined from his publication record (well, at least not his literary one–scientific publication is another matter entirely), why should I go through that stress? Why should I be placing that pressure on myself? I’ve found that over the last couple of years, writing has stopped being about fun and play and more like work. I want to change that. Which I think is a nice place to wrap this part up and pop out my first conclusion:

1) I want writing to be fun again. Or if not fun, exactly, then at least for it not to feel like work.

Audience

Okay, so I want writing to be fun. But I also want my writing to be read. Because as much as I love playing with myself (ahem–purely in a metaphorical sense), I get a lot out of interacting with readers and other writers. But then I have to ask myself: who is my audience, and how does that audience change the way I write? Well, I want to get my stories out there and read by people whose opinions I respect. In other words, those people whom I have read and whose work I admire, or whom I have met and think are ace, or both! And I’m not sure that submitting to literary journals really does that. Sure, I might nab a few new readers; not a bad outcome. But do I really care if Jane or John Critic think my story is cool? Not really. It’s flattering, for sure, but on the other hand if someone I knew and was into came up to me and told me they liked my work, I’d be over the fucking moon! So. Second conclusion:

2) Having my contemporaries (and more specifically, people who I know and respect) reading and enjoying my work is more important to me than praise from an unknown.

Distribution

Speaking of journals has reminded me of another line of thinking, concerning their readership and their reach. The main question being how many of my contemporaries read literary journals? For at least the last year or two, I am the only person I know who subscribes to Meanjin. I have also heard through the grapevine of the absolutely dismal figures for subscribers to both the Westerly and, to a certain extent given its age, the Southerly. I dare say those figures don’t even compare on the same scale to the numbers of people that read the online components of literary journals (in the sense that the online compenents probably get hundreds of visitors per day). In the absence of hard statistical data, I’m unable to make any concrete assertions, but if we are evaluating distribution purely on the number of people that read your work, then online means must be considered suprior. Similarly they are more advantageous in the terms of my second conclusion, in that I can guarantee that more of my contemporaries are reading thins online than they are in journals that they subscribe to. Of course, there is always the factor of quality assurance in Australian literary journals. Australian journals produce absolutely top notch stuff in both design and content. Every single journal I subscribe to (of which there are many) is a joy to read. But couched in the context of a non-professional writer who just wants to share his stories, there isn’t much to persuade me against posting stories on Facebook rather than submitting them to a journal.

I’ve been dabbling in online distribution in various forms for quite a while now. And by ‘online distribution’, I mean posting my writing on an art website (deviantART) and maintaining this here blog. Not the most professional of options, but then that kind of fits with the theme of this post. Nevertheless, there’s some surprising statistics to be had from looking at it. On the deviantART side of things, I’ve accumulated a bunch of friends and followers who read and comment on my work, and have influenced me in a profoundly positive way. The pieces that have been featured as a ‘daily deviation’ (a daily showcase of artwork and writing that community volunteers think is worth featuring) have accrued almost 26,000 views between them. While this doesn’t mean that 26,000 people have read things that I have written–only around 800 of those actually responded with a comment–it is still a heck of a lot of people to be looking, however briefly, at my writing.

(I should hastily note at this stage that I am not looking to burn bridges. It’s highly likely that I will continue to submit stories and articles to journals for publication, but I won’t be putting pressure on myself to do so. Editors please don’t hate me.)

What does all that mean? In a sentence:

3) I’m equally keen on seeing my work in print or digital, but seeming as though digital has already resulted in my stories being read by a bunch of people, I’m leaning that way as a first destination.

Conclusions

Alright, so after all that, maybe I can come to some kind of conclusion as to what might be the shape of future writerly self. Now what the heck were my points again? Oh right:

1) I want writing to be fun again. Or if not fun, exactly, then at least for it not to feel like work.

2) Having my contemporaries (and more specifically, people who I know and respect) reading and enjoying my work is more important to me than praise from an unknown.

3) I’m equally keen on seeing my work in print or digital, but seeming as though digital has already resulted in my stories being read by a bunch of people, I’m leaning that way as a first destination.

So what does the combination of these point towards in terms of what I’ll be doing with my writing in the future? Here I think I’ll switch to bullets, since they’re easier to think in:

• Maintain a formal distribution space for stories that I think are publication quality. This could be a well-designed website, or choosing a platform such as Smashwords or Amazon Singles to put together some 99c wonderpackages.
• Share these stories with friends and followers via deviantART and places like Twitter. Given my glacial writing pace, I don’t think there’s any risk of spamming people.
• Continue to send some stories off to more traditional markets such as journals and competitions when I feel that they fit, but don’t put any pressure on myself to accumulate publication credits.

Keep in mind that this should all be considered with the fact that I hope to start a career in science research in the new year. This will effectively (discounting the four mind-numbing months at my temp job) be the first time I work a full-time 9-5 job. So time will become even more of a premium, and I want to be ready for that. I don’t want to burn myself out and end up hating writing. I also don’t want to neglect the other important things in my life (i.e. Louise, friends, exercise, etc.). But as you can see, devoting this amount of time to roundabout thinking to how I’m going to make sure I don’t kill my writing hobby shows how much it means to me. I think that for folks such as myself who are looking to keep up a creative output while working, it’s important to have some kind of idea about how to go about it.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far thanks for sticking it through. If you had any comments with regards to anything I’ve said here I’d love to hear it. I’m still a little up in the air, so any advice would be really appreciated.

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photo credit: doug88888

I’m sitting in

a cafe on Newcastle’s Hunter St., listening to a symphony of bakehouse clatter and the bubble of excited voices as they discuss performances, panels, and workshops. It’s absolutely hammering it outside, but I’m dry and warm and filled with delicious satay chicken pie, and more than a few cups of coffee.

The train ride here was fairly uneventful; two and a bit hours of gorgeous landscapes scored by a group of Indian pensioners singing the songs of their country. Not quite as romantic as it sounds, and I tended towards bumping up the volume on my music whenever they reached a particularly boisterous chorus. But harmless, certainly.

When I first arrived in Newcastle, I wandered the suburbs near the hostel that Sam Twyford-Moore had kindly agreed to put me up in. I should take the time out now to give my sincere, heartfelt thanks to Sam, who has been the perfect host through Sydney’s writing community. Ever since first inviting me to the writing centre at which he works, he has ensured I felt at home and introduced me to the vibrant group of writers and creators here that are producing amazing stuff. Thanks Sam.

We checked in at the hostel and Alex–a lovely girl who is working on an absolutely fascinating account of trying to reconcile a sword her grandfather found in WW2 with its owner–gave Sam, Jacqui, Jess, and I a lift out to the heart of Newcastle where TiNA was/is being held. Picked up a guide, grabbed a coffee and then went off to meet up with Amber and part of the Voiceworks crew (Brad, Beth(?), Christie(?)). Was really good to finally meet Amber, given we’ve known each other through deviantART for well over four years now. Meeting people I knew from the Internet was a constant theme throughout the day, as I caught up with various Twitter peeps (JoJo, madiecrofts, jodiekinnersley, booktuner, etc.) and found them all to be kind and inviting and lovely (and sometimes incredibly enthusiastic). The Voiceworks peeps were running a great workshop about editing your own work, and asked us to produce a story or poem or something by censoring out words in a newspaper article. Mine ended up transforming an article about the effect of India’s burgeoning skilled worker set resulting in a greater number of luxury items being bought for households, into a small fiction about dicks:

“India plays with Margaret on the concrete floor. Daniela is happily unaware of India’s massive bulge, the largest in the world. India’s rising, he earns five times what his father does, but it feels like less, because everything costs more. Toys scatter the floor. India’s asking which of them they own. ’40-inch like mine, 10 neighbours would come to your house to watch it.’ He will limit himself to two children.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a news story about capitalism could very easily be converted into soft erotica. Thankfully I didn’t have to read it out. The editorial went on to discuss the main mistakes made in self-editing, how to distance yourself from your work, and all sorts of other useful stuff. Unfortunately I had to leave a bit early to catch a panel by Sam on the Sydney writing scene. That one was really interesting, with a varied panel discussing where they have come from and how the interpret the Sydney creative scene which (it was said) has really begun to bloom in the last five years. The discussion ranged widely, from the Sydney vs. Melbourne rivalry (being from Perth, I was an enthusiastic neutral), to writing from place, to philanthropy, to the concept of embracing all of Australian writing in one big happy community. I was a little bit absent from much of the discussion about writing from place, given that the majority of my fiction doesn’t occur in a specific geography. The issue of place seems to be rather prominent in Australian fiction, and I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s due to the Miles Franklin and that idea of the ‘unique Australian voice’. In any case, it was very well moderated by Sam, and a lot of the questions were answered at length and with a lot of consideration given to the nuance inherent in the dynamics of creative communities.

After that, we went back to the TiNA headquarters for drinks, and pretty much stayed there until the Big Top party. I was initially bamboozled at the bar by my insistence on ordering pints rather than schooners, but I got the hang of it eventually. All went really well and I had a blast meeting people like Ronnie (Scott, who produces The Lifted Brow and shares my enthusiasm for China Mieville), Nicci who I chatted to extensively about books and music (she runs The Booktuner, which is a great mashup initiative of matching album soundtracks to books–in my experience she’s spot on every single time), Pip Smith (who runs Penguin Plays Rough), and a whole bunch of other people (Ben, Connor, Luke, Rebecca, Maddie, Rosie, Brad, Amber, Jodie, etc. etc. etc.) who ate, drank, and were very, very merry.

I ended up leaving a bit early, exhausted as I was by two weeks of consistently interruptive dorm-mates at the hostel. The room that Sam had booked me into had a double bed, and I luxuriated in the feeling of crashing drunkenly into a bed that was actually big enough for me, falling blissfully asleep. Until, that is, I woke up at four in the morning to discover that my window had been open, and it had absolutely hosed it down during the night. Needless to say, when we left the next morning, I was careful to inform the manager of absolutely nothing, pocketing my $20 key deposit without so much as a chipper warning that she may want to look at the curtains. I am a terrible person.

Jacqui and I got out into the depressing weather that had rolled in overnight and traipsed down to catch the bus into town. We then proceeded to wander around a bit before finding a bakery for breakfast. Can’t recommend the Newcastle Bakehouse enough; perfectly cooked bacon, soft eggs, rough-cut mushrooms, and fresh-baked bread. I was in heaven.

The zine fair was up next, and while it took us far longer than is really acceptable to find it (in a multi-storey carpark up the steepest bloody hill in Newcastle), the trek was worth it. Awesome books and zines lined every stall. I may or may not have burned through pretty much all the cash in my wallet buying zines from the dotdotdash folk and grabbing the very lovely Penguin Plays Rough collection. After tagging in for Voiceworks and helping sell a couple of issues, and having a coffee and an excellent chat with ex-dotdotdasher Steph, I came down here.

And now I’m about to go and see a discussion on story in video games, before catching the long train back to Sydney. It’s been a really fantastic festival, both for the panels (although they have all been great) but more to see the enthusiasm and up-for-it, inclusive attitude that everyone involved possessed. I never felt like I was on the outside looking in to a clique, which was something I was afraid might happen. But from the first cup of coffee to the last pint schooner of beer, it was a blast. So a final thank you to all those I spoke with, and to the organisers of TiNA for a great event.

List of TiNA Twitterfolk (feel free to comment with more):

@samtwyfordmoore @jacquident @maddie_crofts @jojojakob @velvetbrownfox @RosannaBeatrice @rebeccagiggs @WritesFiona @JodieKinnersley @theliftedbrow @booktuner

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photo credit: estherase

The tumbleweeds crossing

the broad, white space of this blog are, I assure you, temporary installations. I’m entering a three week crunch time, die-or-do (the former preferable) period in my thesis’ existence. Couple that with the insistent pull of the page in order to fulfil my obligations to the Subdate Challenge and it’s clear why I don’t have a huge amount of time to blog. Except of course, to mention two news items, both  related to competitions and women.

The first is the announcement of a new competition rising over the Australian literary landscape. The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award has been announced over at Spineless Wonders, accompanied by an interview with the namesake of the competition herself, Carmel Bird. The competition will be judged by the inestimable Sophie Cunningham, most recently the former editor of Meanjin but also the editor/publisher of approximately three-point-six billion other things.  Submission details can be found here, but the main features are a tidy $500 for the winner, and $100 each for two runners-up, a piddling entry fee of $7, a maximum word count of 3,000 words, and a closing date of the 31st of July. Fairly standard rules apply, but be sure to check the submissions guide before sending in your piece!

Related to the competition by way of Ms. Cunningham is this piece in the New Yorker, regarding the formation of a new women-only prize in Australia in response to the under-representation of women in the Miles Franklin award. I’m all for more prizes, just as I’m all for anything that give more exposure to great writing, but I also think that Sarah Holland-Batt makes a good point when she says that:

“Really, these are two separate issues: whether there should be a new prize, which there probably should, and whether there is a problem with the Miles Franklin—and there is.”

To have no women on a short list that could quite easily have accommodated them has meant that this year, the implied gap between male and female writing of and in Australia has become glaringly obvious. And while I support the ‘positive discrimination’ that such a new prize would enforce, I would much rather see a concerted effort made to fix the underlying issues in the reluctance to hold up our female writers as being of literary merit. Obviously that’s much easier said than done; as with anything subjective and related to taste there are a million different tacks one can take to defend a selection that happens to favour male writers. But surely, with the quality of writing that we have coming from female writers in Australia there must be some basic selection bias that prevents them from being picked? In any case, I say bring on the ‘Australian Orange Prize’, I can’t wait to see the short list.

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