reeling and writhing

New Australian Stories 2.0 partnerships announced at Scribe

Australian independent Scribe Publishing is involving Varuna Writers'Centre and the Ned Kelly crime writing awards in its selections for their next volume of short stories, to be released in February 2011. There's a stellar cast of contributors in the first volume, which you can read about here.

For New Australian Stories 2.0 we are collaborating with two partners.

Firstly, our friends at Varuna, the Writers’ House, will be running the Varuna/NAS national short story competition, with the winners (judged by Peter Bishop, Cate Kennedy and Aviva Tuffield) to be published in New Australian Stories 2.0, and/or to be awarded a week-long residency at Varuna to work with Cate Kennedy, one of Australia’s finest writers of short stories.

Submissions to the Varuna/NAS competition open on 1 June and close on 30 June. Visit the Varuna website for more details: www.varuna.com.au

Secondly, we are teaming up with the Ned Kelly Awards to publish the winner of the S.D. Harvey Short Story Award in New Australian Stories 2.0. This award was established in 2009 in honour of Sandra Harvey, a respected journalist who worked both for the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC’s Four Corners program, and was fearless in her pursuit of the truth.

Applications for the S.D. Harvey Award close on 31 May. For more information about entering the award, go to: www.nedkellyawards.com/SDHarvey.html

3 Chords & the Truth, opening in Canberra tomorrow

If you are going to be in Canberra in the next couple of weeks, get along to this, it will sound and look wonderful.Wish I was!

new template, new posts, new internet scrapbook too

Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: post-digital media design, an introduction

Here's Chris Heathcote's part of the panel that got considerable Twitter time last week during SXSWI, particularly from Richard Nash, who quoted Ben Terrett of Newspaper Club saying 'we have broken your business, now we want your machines' (or words to that effect). Though no one has written a complete post on the presentation yet, it appears Nerds and gold coins were involved. Molly Wright Steenson's gnomic remarks are included in her post here, and probably deserve a post of their own. Newspaper Club, likewise. Looks like a lot of fun.

Update - as noted by Meanland folk (that's the Meanjin-Overland digital project), on  Twitter , James Bridle has now posted on his part of the panel at booktwo.org.

(crossposted at mulberry road )

a brief explanation as we are all busy people

Yes, I am still combing feeds for various nitty gritties for you all. No, I'm not spending much time on Twitter, in fact I seem to have fundamentally misunderstood its main purpose, as I never use it on the phone.

Yes, the Tumblr bookmarklet is the most amazing thing since sliced bread, and I doubt Typepad or anyone else has matched it.

And finally - I'm more or less back in transmission, hopefully a bit stripped back from playing and working with a cleaner palette over here. We'll see if that's the case as things go forward.

essaying the lost and found: Robert Forster in the (old) Monthly

"When did you write that? How did you happen ... to ... uh ..." The nervous and incredulous male voice stops there on the tape. It's 1954, and Connie Converse, the singer and songwriter who has elicited this response, has just recorded one of her songs onto the reel-to-reel. Fifty-five years later the quality of the song is undeniable and the questions put to her still have a strange poignancy. How did she write these songs? How did it happen that at the great cultural crossroads of postwar New York there was a lone woman writing songs on guitar with a sophistication of lyric and melody unmatched by any other folk songwriter of the time? It stumped the man who was recording her, and her answers, if she gave any, aren't on the tape.

Lost Women Found | The Monthly by Robert Forster. Link courtesy of his excellent personal website, where you can find links to quite a lot of his writings.

Crossposted at mulberry road.

small but perfectly formed template changes...

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