Contents

From the Director’s Desk

Editorial: When a Book is not Just a Book

Focus: David Musgrave, Liam Guilar, Geoffrey Gates

What Marketing Plan?

New OzCo Grant to IP

The IP.Digital Buzz

IP Picks Update

Out & About

In Review

Your Deal

From the Director's Desk

We’re putting the finishing touches on our Spring list of titles, which may explain the unseasonably warm weather outside Treetop Studio!

There’ll be four titles on the new list: two prose, one poetry, and one Text + Audio CD combining poetry and music.

I’m pleased to report that our testing of the new mp4 audio format has demonstrated that it will work on most computers having the necessary free players, as well as in your portable CD player. For those of you who haven’t tried one of our Audio + Text titles, there’s no time like the present!

I’m also pleased to announce that IP’s publishing program has been endorsed, for the fourth year in a row, by the Australia Council in the best possible way: with a grant of $8000! That puts us squarely in the midst of established publishers like Allen & Unwin and Penguin. Congratulations to Andrew Lansdown and Geoff Gates, whose books received the nod this year.

My schedule in support of our launches is looking to be even more busy than last Season, where I managed to focus on events in Sydney and Brisbane — only because our authors live there. Next Season will take me to Sydney again, but also regional New South Wales, the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Perth.

I was particularly pleased to be invited to serve as publisher on a panel for the Queensland Writers Centre at their One Stop Shop in Rockhampton recently. Martin Buzacott (QWC’s CEO) and I were very pleased at the results and are planning to work closely on future regional events, as well as activities in South-east Queensland. I’ll be meeting with regional groups on a swing into Far North Queensland later this month to find out what events they’d like to see mounted.

I’ve been putting some energy into gearing up our export trade, and I hope to have an announcement on that front in the next issue.

Stayed tuned as well for the details of Spring Season 2005 events as well as interviews and features with some of our other Spring Season authors, plus some pre-holiday season deals to die for!

Cheers!!

Dr David Reiter

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[In this issue, Assistant Editor Anne Marshall interviews Autumn Season 2005 authors David Musgrave and Liam Guilar as well as IP Picks 2005 Best Fiction winner Geoff Gates.]

David Musgrave’s On Reflection was launched in May in Sydney. We were pleased to receive funding in its support from the Australia Council.

AM: On Reflection seems to have an experimental structure, fusing prose poetry with verse poetry. What were your reasons for organizing it like this?

DM: I arrived at the structure of On Reflection more or less by accident. I had written the first two poems and then on re-reading them later that night realised that they were inadequate to the task of saying what I wanted them to – so I added the prose paragraphs, sort of like a Tranter haibun, which I had recently been acquainted with. The idea seemed to work well and it just developed from there.

AM: Your first book of poems To Thalia, which was published in the Five Island Press’ New Poets series, was actually written after On Reflection. The structure of these two books is very different. What thoughts do you have about the structure your new book might take?

DM: There are actually two books due. One will be poems on the theme of water called Bodies of Water and will contain photos by my wife, the photographer Fe Robards. The poems will be structured in a kind of thematic segue, and each poem will have a complement – I guess I’m still hung up on the mirror thing. The other book will contain all the poems I have written since To Thalia and will just be a collection.

AM: The cover of On Reflection is from a still from the 1975 movie First Meetings by the Russian filmmaker Arseny Tarkovsky. Do you have a particular interest in Russian cinema, or does it reflect a broader interest in cinema styles and periods?

DM: It’s actually from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Zerkalo (Mirror). Arseny was his father, a pretty well respected poet in his own day. I try to see as many Russian films as I can as it helps with my study of the language. My main interest is in Russian poetry, in particular, Brodsky and the four greats from the revolutionary period: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak.

AM: The poems follow a young poet living in Sydney. Do you think the book’s locale is essential to the book and the shaping of the character, or could these poems have been set in another place or even another time?

DM: The place was pretty inessential; it was more about a journey of spirit. There were some moments of serendipity with the Sydney setting, though, such as the bushfires…

AM: How did you arrive at the structure for the book, and did you find yourself writing poems in counterpoint to one another or did you organize them according to the structural principle after all the pieces had been written?

DM: After I hit on the idea of having prose paragraphs facing the poetry, I think I wanted to make the book much larger, more a “day in the life of” at a minute level. My father died in the middle of writing, however, so that changed the perspective. It seemed to make sense to put his death in the middle of the book and let the work organise itself around that. The hardest thing was ordering the poems as they tended to come out of nowhere. It was easier to order the prose, although in some cases the prose came first. It was harder to order them all at the beginning, but once I’d written thirty or so poems, it all started falling into place pretty much by itself.

AM: Your next collection of poems is to be on the theme of water. Is this a natural progression from On Reflection and what inspired the use of water as a theme?

DM: When my wife and I first got together we used to go away a lot, up and down the coast. I’d have to follow her around as she took photographs of rock pools and so on and, despite the romance and all that, I got a bit tired of just hanging around, so I started writing poems about where we were. Initially it was only going to be a few and it would have made a small exhibition, but like most things I turn my hand to, it got out of control pretty quickly. I think there will be about 60 or more poems, and whereas they were meant to be pretty simple poems about love, and place, they’ve taken on a great deal more as subject matter. I think the attraction of water as a theme is its protean qualities.

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Poet Liam Guilar teamed up with composer/musician Chen Yang to produce the latest IP.Digital title, I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me. Liam recounts some of the experiences leading up to release of the CD.

AM: As both poet and musician, how do you find your musical side connects with your poetical mind and vice versa in producing works such as I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me.

LG: I don’t consider myself a musician. Chen’s a musician. I don’t see poetry and music (or at least the music I like) as being separate. When I write poetry I listen for the sound of it. I see poetry as being the most basic form of music; a voice speaking rhythmically arranged words. I suspect that happened before people started “singing”. I also like traditional unaccompanied singing… and know the words to some of the “big ballads”, which are as fine a poetry as anything you’d find anywhere. So I don’t see this as “poetry and music” or “poetry with music” but two different forms of music working in counterpoint. The difficulty is in trying to explain it to most people who do live in separate camps.

AM: In your collaboration with Chen, what sort of atmosphere did you feel the addition of the violin and piano would provide to your selection of guitar music?

LG: I wanted to use the music to suggest different ways of reading or hearing the words. So poems like “Contradictions” or “Moonbathing” I’ve always heard as lute ayres, my answer to what would I write if Dowland or Rossiter asked for a lyric. It seemed natural to use a solo guitar. With several of the other pieces I wanted to use traditional Irish music, for example in “Rereading the Tain” to suggest a very simple and untroubled enthusiasm. And the guitar is not indigenous to that music and, unless you’re one of a small group of excellent guitar players, it sounds wrong. There’s a trajectory to that sequence that the music follows, ending in the lyrical sweep of Carolan’s Hewlett as “A Literary Education” resolves parts of the problems in the middle pieces. As well as that there’s a mournfulness to solo fiddle, especially if you play with it in Adobe Audition and put Chen in the Taj Mahal that suits some of the poems.

AM: Allan Alexander is the arranger of some of the music that appears on the CD. Did you have any creative input on these arrangements, and how did the arrangements that Allan provided contribute to the overall feel of the CD?

LG: Allan’s arrangements exist in book form, and I had no input into them nor would I have the temerity to suggest anything about them to him. He’s very good at what he does. What I did do is cut pieces or use bits of pieces, or in one case take a piece and distort it till it no longer sounds like his original tune (the weird background noise in “Rapunzel” is actually the same tune you hear on guitar and piano bent out of shape). Most of Allan’s arrangements are characterised by their apparent simplicity and their melodic strength. His variations on “Hewllet” are probably better than the original tune.

AM: What was the significance of using the Moon Rose by Alana Hampton as the image on the cover?

LG: None at all really; it’s the book cover, and it’s beautiful. And it combines several of the themes running through the book: roses, the moon, tides, and the ocean.

AM: How did your multimedia version of the book evolve from your initial concept to its finished state?

LG: The process can be broken into two parts. There’s the development of the idea, which is the personal and there’s the completion of the project, which is public. The impetus came a long time ago, when a student asked me what was the difference between a poem and a song lyric. I began experimenting with running words and music across each other to create new spaces. I listened to as much recorded poetry as I could, to see how other people had answered the same question. I then went through a long period of experimenting by drafting versions. It’s the same process as writing. With a computer, a decent sound editing program, and a CD burner you can produce fairly good drafts of an audio CD. “Drafts” went to America, the UK, Europe, and round Australia. Some of the feedback was highly critical. I quickly learnt the difference between what I could do, and what I could get away with. Over time some poems stayed the same, some were discarded early on. If you go too far with digital manipulation you get babble and distortion and while that is interesting, all babble and distortion sounds similar.

By the time IP picked up the idea, I thought I had a fair idea of what I was doing, and a wide variety of opinions about what might work, and what wouldn’t, to draw on. So on to the public part, when we came to do the CD. Many of the poems selected their own music; the only real problem I had was that I’d damaged my shoulder and couldn’t play the lute and I wanted a Ney for one track, but failed to find a player.

The collaboration with Chen worked on two levels. The first is that his ability as a musician allowed me to extend the range of music I could use, and also covered for the lack of lute music, which on reflection is a bonus. The second was his ability to compose digital music for some of the tracks. I was fairly prescriptive in what I wanted. At one stage, I had envisioned giving the poems to a composer and asking him to create music. But we didn’t have time and, because of that, Chen wanted directions. Often these were odd: “I need a waltz. Think late night French Café; Button Accordions” and he would come back with a piece reeking of Gaulois and calvados or I’d provide a string of words: cold, distant, empty, icicles, bamboo flutes. I was surprised at how close he got.

He made the decision to base the digital music around one theme, to avoid too much variation in the overall sound. He was also very conscious of not overpowering the words. What he came up with, a spare soundscape, is one I like very much.

AM: How did you go about choosing which tracks to record – by virtue of spoken or musical potential? How did you choose which tracks would be best suited to musical enhancement?

LG: I don’t see it as “enhancing”. It’s just how I hear the poems, usually when they’re being written, but sometimes in retrospect. When I wrote the whole “Rereading the Tain” sequence, it was wedded to different types of music in my head, even the one track that just has the bodhran beating away in the background. When I wrote “Poetry and Blood” I was hearing it as a slip jig called “the Kid on the Mountain”, (although we didn’t use that tune when we recorded it), and then working backwards during the initial editing to shake the lines free.

The movement in the sequence is musical, from dance music, through troubled silence, via slow airs to a comparative tranquillity. “Rapunzel” (which is one of the oldest pieces in the book) and “Folk Story” were specifically written to be worked on digitally. I heard “Rapunzel” as a collage of voices, layering over different soundscapes, like some of those experimental radio programs that used to be on very late at night. Once you begin recording, you can move the words into a different space and start playing with the possibilities of digital manipulation. You’re giving them a different context to bounce around in, extending away from natural voice or printed page.

On the other hand, some of the poems in the book are simply poems. I like reading them aloud, but they don’t need music. The exception here would be “You should know by now” which I did record for this project, without music, because I don’t know how many readers can hear the Welsh names.

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Geoffrey Gates shows how a well developed passion for travel spurred on his fictional impulse in his award-winning first novel, A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion.

AM: Since A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion has a book within a book, was it necessary for you to do a general outline of Eduardo Maranda’s book before you could write this one?

GG: The ‘two books’ evolved together, one echoing the other. Sometimes when I was writing a section where Eduardo had ‘penned’ a chapter, I really did feel like it was him who was writing it and not me! The general concept behind Eduardo’s book was there at the start, however. It was the point of departure for the imaginative journey.

AM: Was there a particular reason why you left the book open-ended?

GG: Without giving too much away, several characters disappear from their families in the course of the novel. In the end, I bring these characters together and there is a sort of poetic reconciliation. A few people have suggested that the novel leaves itself open for a sequel. I’m not sure about this – I think there is a unity to it as it stands.

AM: Did the idea for A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion arise from your extensive travel experience, or some other source?

GG: My earliest chapters of the novel were written nearly more than ten years ago, when I was about to head overseas on my own for the first time, with a one-way ticket. The idea of travelling without stopping probably came out of a sort of anxiety about leaving my family and friends indefinitely. Another thing is that I was reading Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude at the time. There is a bit towards the end about old men feeling a terrible nostalgia for their home countries as they travel on trains. So, in all, the idea came out of a mental situation rather than actual travel, although I did end up doing plenty of that as well.

AM: Did the intricate connections between your main characters that reveal themselves at the end come when you started writing the novel, or did they develop during the writing of the project?

GG: The connections between the characters slowly became clear as I wrote the novel. Basically, I wrote the first third of the novel with one main character (Carlos) in mind. But from the beginning, I imagined several stories happening at once. At first I tried to write a historical background to Carlos’ life – I drew a family tree and wrote chapters about the life of his parents and grandparents. Then I dropped all this and developed the story of two other ‘Perpetual Locomotors’ he meets. I tried to write a number of synopsis ideas to link the characters. Eventually one seemed to be just about right but even that changed as I wrote Part 2.

AM: What made you decide on the nationalities for some of your characters, and the countries they visited?

GG: Carlos was always Australian but with a Spanish or South American background. That was important for the more fantastical elements to work, as in magic realism. The second character I developed was first from Holland, then Uruguay, then Spain, and finally she became French. Similarly, Eduardo Maranda was originally from Argentina but became Mexican. To an extent this is about ‘writing what you know’. I made a trip to Mexico in 1999, for example, and that determined Eduardo’s nationality and the exotic settings for Parts 2 and 3. I spent a summer in France in 2001 and that helped define Manon and her background in Montpellier.

AM: Was there a particular strategy that you used to keep track of locations, characters and the many subplots while you were writing A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion, or did that just come easily?

GG: I did a couple of simple things to keep track of the subplots. For example, I wrote out a calendar for the months of the story (basically January to August 1993) and plotted key events as I wrote them. There was also a lot of writing and re-writing, as a key narrative idea is to use foretelling – an implied narrator holds the sequence together. It was a bit of a headache sometimes, but very rewarding as well to keep several plots moving at once. Some of the bigger ideas like the ‘Last Balloon Ride’ drove things forward in a way, as I needed to plot both Eduardo’s narrative and my own. I don’t think the plot came easily, although sometimes I could write several chapters in a row quite rapidly. Then I would spend quite a bit of time working out how to go forward from there. I guess that’s the usual thing in writing.

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More and more publishers these days are making their decisions based on who the author is rather than what’s inside the book. Marketing and sales executives seem to have more clout than their colleagues in the editorial department because so much depends on their ability to “move” — that is, sell — books.
Less effort is put into “discovering new talent” than attracting someone who has a strong profile in the community. With a name like Schapelle Corby or Douglas Wood in hand, the question is not whether to publish but how large a first print run.

With current-event celebrity status lasting not much longer than the time lag between global crises (who had heard of Schapelle a year ago?) there’s little time to lose once a name reaches public attention. The deal is struck, the marketing plan formulated, the print deadline set. Somewhere along the line the content gets written, or ghost-written, as the pre-orders pile up at the distributor’s office…

Needless to say, that scenario is as familiar to us at IP as the controls on the New Dr Who’s spaceship. We didn’t have Peter Beattie knocking at our door with his memoir — nor, for that matter, did UQP! But it’s not what independent publishers are there for. We still choose work on its merits first and keep its marketability in perspective.

Even so, we have had an increasing number of titles of late where the marketing plan became more than keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for good reviews.

Joel Deane’s novel Another is a good case in point. Even before the title appeared, we had two features in The Age. This had less to do with the fact that Another was last year’s IP Picks winner than the fact that Joel is Chief Speechwriter for Victoria’s Premier, Steve Bracks. And sales were certainly boosted when the Premier ordered copies of the book for his department as Christmas presents! Joel made effective use of his contacts in the media to get coverage in the major Melbourne papers and lifestyle magazines, so we were off and running.

Merle Thornton’s novel After Moonlight also has kept us – and her! – busy on the marketing front. Merle’s a leading light in the Women’s Movement, as well as mother to prominent actor Sigrid, so this was a dream-run. Thanks to the Regatta Hotel, which has named a room for her in celebration of the time when she chained herself to their public bar to protest against the exclusion of women, we had our first conference attended by the national media. Soon after pictures of Merle and Sigrid sipping beer at the bar graced the major dailies, the orders began to flood in. Since then, Merle has been invited to speak at various events often, but not always, concerned with the status of women. Most recently she was keynote speaker at the launch of The Griffith Review.

Most recently, we launched the inaugural winner of the IP Picks Award for Best Creative Non-Fiction, No Middle Name, by Brisbane author Tilly Brasch. The book is a reflection on the tragic life of her son Riley, who suicided after suffering from mental illness. Suicide is one of those subjects that people feel uncomfortable about, so it wasn’t certain from the outset that No Middle Name would succeed. However, we promoted the book to various health and social support agencies, and it all came together with the launch at Stepping Stone Clubhouse, one of the few places Riley did find help. We sold nearly 150 copies on the night, and the book is well on its way to selling out of the first print run. Tilly’s been invited to address several professional groups and associations over the next few months, so that bodes well for the book.

But these are success stories, I hear someone at the back of the room call out. What about those books that don’t have an obvious market? What’s involved with putting together an effective marketing plan for say, a book of poetry?

Here is some well-worn advice from a publisher who’s been pushing that particular boulder up the mountain for eight years now.

1. Think events. It’s not so much that people hate poetry; it’s more that they don’t understand it. Some would confess to even being afraid of it. We all know the reasons — but how can we fix the problem? You have to get people out to hear you. When poetry comes off the page in a decent performance, people invariably respond to it. Note that I ask for a decent performance, not something that will remind an audience of what they suffered through in Grade Eight English. Learn to perform your work well, even if you have to be coached. And then plan to appear at several events in the first six months after your book’s release. With any luck people there will spread the word — which is still the best marketing tool.

2. Call in your favours. You’ve been cultivating your local bookshop manager for some time. Now it’s time to suggest a book signing or reading there. A few IP authors have mobilised friends to go into various bookshops, asking for their book, even ordering it. That creates a sense of demand in the mind of the bookseller, which can translate into orders.

3. Go for the right kinds of reviews. Our experience is that most reviews in the “major” magazines do not translate into sales. It could be that very few people actually read those reviews, other than the author. You need to get coverage in your local newspaper, and, if possible, in the metropolitan papers, radio and TV stations. The broadcast media are a hard sell, but generally there are talk shows that will consider your book — especially if it has an angle (see point 4).

4. Find your angle. Think about your book. What is it trying to say? Are there social or personal issues that might strike a chord with readers looking for “answers”? Analyse the ideas in the book to find a “hook” that will convince a reporter or reviewer to run with it. Think about yourself, too. There’s lots of empathy out there for authors who’ve struggled for years until finally getting that book out there. If people are inspired by your story, they may well buy the book and then spread the word.

5. Believe in your book. If you believe your book deserves to be read — and convey that attitude — booksellers will give it a go and people will buy it. Gone are the days when an author could sign a contract and then just wait for the royalty cheques to roll in. You have to be an active and positive force in the promotion of your book. If it’s not “flavour of the month” on its own steam, you have to do your best to make it so.

Armed with the knowledge of what the author’s role should be in a marketing campaign, you will be an asset to the PR pro handling your book. And if your publisher can’t afford expert advice, you can help by being there when the calls for interview come in, and being guest speaker at writers’ groups and bookclubs — whatever is needed to give your book exposure.

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We’re pleased to report that the Australia Council will be supporting IP’s publishing program for the fourth year in a row. Here are the highlights from our media release.

Jill Jones, Acting Manager of the Literature Board, said of the grant that it was “well-earned in an increasingly competitive environment.” Each year, publishers are invited to nominate the titles for the Board to consider and only the best are offered grant support.

David was particularly gratified by the $8,000 award this year. “It confirms that IP has a place among the most highly regarded publishers in the country, and that the authors we have chosen to publish rank with Australia’s best.”

In another significant move, the Board chose to support two of IP’s fiction titles. “Up until now, we’ve been thought of as a poetry publisher,” David said. “We’ve been working hard to persuade them that our fiction list is worthy. Obviously, that’s paid off.”

The grant will support a first novel by Sydney author Geoffrey Gates and a short story collection by veteran West Australian author Andrew Lansdown. Gates’ A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion won the IP Picks 2005 Award for Best Fiction, while Lansdown’s collection The Dispossessed was Highly Commended in the same competition.

Ironically, while IP’s star is rising nationally, Arts Queensland has denied the company State support for the past three years on a technicality – after several years of support under previous Arts Minister Matt Foley. Acting on a policy that is unique in Australia, the State body refuses to consider applications from private companies for arts support.

“This effectively denies Queensland writers access to being published by Queensland’s fastest growing publisher,” David pointed out. “This policy is undermining our writing industry at a time when the State government is squandering tens of thousands of dollars on slick brochures telling us what a good deal writers and publishers are getting in Queensland.”

Will things get any better under the new Arts Minister Rod Welford? Keep tuned.

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Treetop Studio now has the newest version of Final Cut Studio, and we haven’t wasted a beat in applying it to our latest projects. The suite boasts professional music and video editing packages as well as a program called Motion that creates animations and special effects.

The suite arrived midway through our post-production of Liam Guilar’s I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me. Liam is a bit of an audio geek himself, so some of the mixing he’d done with his poems and the music played by Chen Yang (violin) and Liam himself (guitar), not to mention some of Chen’s synthesized pieces, posed a bit of a challenge. But several “coasters” later we all came out smiling.

Lisa and David are pleased to report that Soundtrack Pro, the audio editing portion of the Suite, handled the fine-tuning of the work with ease. The resulting CD is a stunner, and we’re really looking forward to launching it. Building on our partnership with 4MBS, the Brisbane event, which is billed as A Celebration of Music and Words, will be held at 4MBS’ Performance Studio on Sunday 28 August, from 2-4:30 p.m. It will be as much a musical recital as a launch, with Liam calling in a few musicial friends to assist. Seats are limited, so please book early.

For subscribers on the Gold Coast, the CD will also be featured at an event at St Hilda’s College, on Tuesday 23 August, 6 p.m.,
the Caedmon Centre. Check with Liam for further details.

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Meanwhile, back at the Studio, again with Lisa’s assistance, David is authoring a multimedia version of his award-winning Hemingway in Spain collection. The finished work will be released on DVD, a first for IP.Digital. It will have 100 minutes of audio readings from the book, as well as video and stills from Spain. (Hopefully the number of bonus “bloopers” will be kept to a minimum!) David is planning to put Motion through its paces in animating the visuals for the work.

We haven’t set a release date for Hemingway in Spain as yet, but we expect it to be ready early next year.

David’s also awaiting word from the Banff Centre for the Arts, which is considering co-producing his multimedia memoir My Planets. Fingers crossed on that!

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Autumn Season 2005 saw us promoting six new titles in Sydney and Brisbane in several events. The Season kicked off on 14 May with a combined launch of David Musgrave’s On Reflection and Jenni Nixon’s Café Boogie at The Friend in Hand in Glebe.

Poet Brook Emery did the honours for David’s book, while our Director, David Reiter launched Jenni’s very fine Text + Audio CD. Although David seems to have an uncanny ability to be in two places at once, he missed out on the launch of the print version of Jenni’s book last year, so he was very happy to make it to this event.


The production of both print titles was supported by grants from the Australia Council, for which we are grateful. Both poets performed their works very well, with David reading in duet with Matthew Holt to reflect the counterpoint of lyric and prose poem at the heart of On Reflection.

The very next day, we had another double launch — this time at the Sydney Jewish Museum. Our youngest author to date, Genevieve Cumming-Jaffé presented her interactive CD on the life and times of Abraham Jaffé, her great-grandfather and Holocaust survivor. If These Walls Could Talk is a perfect example of how New Media can offer writers alternative modes of expression to engage readers — and viewers. The launch itself was a multimedia affair, with David on his faithful laptop, cued in to play audio files etc at the appropriate times, while Genevieve recounted her experiences reconstructing her great-grandfather’s life through her research in Germany and through interviews with family who came to Australia.

The launch of If These Walls was complimented by spirited readings from Nora Krouk from her book Skin for Comfort, drawn from her life in Russia and China and then Australia, with great insights into the challenges facing the Jewish people in modern day Israel.

The Jewish Museum is now stocking both titles, so we encourage Sydneysiders to stop by the bookshop after touring this amazing cultural facility. As they say, ‘you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate it!’

The following week, David was back in Brisbane for two more launches: Tilly Brasch’s No Middle Name and Barbara Winter’s The Australia-First Movement. We were pleased to partner with Stepping Stone Clubhouse at Coorparoo for the launch of Tilly’s award-winning book, which is at once a tragic indictment of our health and social support system but also filled with insights about how we can, as a society, do more for vulnerable youth. We were delighted by how well the crew at the Clubhouse — itself a support agency for youth — did in organising and catering the function, including the serving up of Riley’s favourite sweet, pineapple tarts! Arch Bevis, Senator for Brisbane, gave a moving tribute to the book and Tilly’s efforts to raise awareness of how we can do more to prevent youth suicide. Tilly has since been interviewed on ABC 4QR, and you can hear that moving interview in Real Media on her mini-site.

We launched Barbara’s book at the Brisbane office of the National Archives of Australia. Her study of the Australia-First Movement, a group that started off nationalistic but went very bizarre from there, involved many years of research at facilities like the Archives. So it seemed quite appropriate to launch the book there. Unfortunately the weather was not kind, with hail, wind and rain lashing Brisbane that day, but the dedicated group who attended were rewarded with Barbara’s witty anecdotes about how the book came to be. The book has attracted national attention, with a feature on Radio National’s Perspectives program recently and an extensive feature on the book about to appear in the West Australian. Check out Barbara’s mini-site to hear the interview in Real Media.

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David responded to several invitations to speak on publishing over the past few months. He was guest of the Gold Coast Writers Group at Elanora on 21 May, then at a meeting of Crime Writers Queensland on 17 July. Just recently, he served on a One Stop Shop panel sponsored by the Queensland Writers Centre at Rockhampton. The QWC roadshow has been travelling to several regional centres in Queensland as part of a new push to assist regional writers and groups.

The event went so well that QWC CEO Martin Buzacott and David are already planning a more extensive partnership between QWC and IP on several fronts.

Most recently, David was guest lecturer at Southbank TAFE, Morningside campus, to a group of Publishing Diploma students, enlightening them on the highs and lows of being an independent publisher.

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Following up on his trip to Rockhampton, David will be on tour in Far North Queensland from 15-19 August. He’s scheduled meetings with several writing groups and arts organisations along the way, including guest talks at the Writers in Townsville meeting on Wednesday evening as well as a session early Friday evening with the Mackay Writers Group.

We encourage all interested authors to attend to hear what he has to say about expanding opportunities for regional authors.

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Tilly Brasch will also be busy over the coming months.

As a direct response to No Middle Name, Tilly has been invited to speak at the Carers’ (Family) Forum as part of the 15th Mental Health Services Conference to be held in Adelaide on 30th August. This is an international biannual conference organised by the Mental Illness Fellowship of Australia with keynote speakers from Italy, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The conference attracts over 1000 mental health clinicians, managers, consumers, carers, researchers, educators, and policy makers.

Her role will be to “tell her story” about the difficulties she experienced living with her mentally ill son. She will also speak about bereavement following her son’s suicide. But she also intends to focus on the many positive aspects of Riley’s life.

The purpose of the Carers’ Forum is to “provide opportunities to share experiences and learn as we journey together”.

On September 13, Tilly has been asked to address mental health professionals at the Royal Brisbane Hospital Mental Health Grand Rounds.

She will speak about her experience with her son as a ‘mental health consumer’, her understanding of his illness, and her experience with mental health services.

The main focus of her address will be to compare public mental health services with services provided by the private mental health sector. She also intends to speak about the integrity of privacy laws when a mentally ill person clearly lacks capacity.

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Plans for Spring Season 2005 are already on the drawing board, with events in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, Sydney, Yass/Canberra, Melbourne and Perth high on the list.

First up will be the launch of an exciting new title in our Audio + Text CD series, I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me. It’s a collaboration of words and music by poet Liam Guilar and musician Chen Yang.The original poetry volume was an IP Picks winner, for Best Poetry by a Queensland author.

We’ll be holding events at St Hilda’s School, Southport, on Tuesday, 23 August from 6 p.m. and at The Performance Studio, 4MBS Classic-FM, 384 Old Cleveland Road, Coorparoo, from 2 p.m. Bookings for the 4MBS performance are essential.

IP Picks 2005 Best Fiction Award winner, Geoffrey Gates’ novel will be launched at two Sydney venues in October, followed by the launch of Yass author Michael O’Sullivan’s novel Secret Writing. IP Picks Best Poetry winner Joel Deane’s Subterranean Radio Songs. Out West we’ll be launching Andrew Lansdown’s latest, a collection of short fiction entitled The Dispossessed.

More on that in our next issue.

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On Joyflight, by Cate Kennedy:

There’s an intimacy and truth, imaginative transitory moments, old wounds re-told and healed. Lovers of narrative poems will discover Kennedy’s precision with language, metaphor, irony and humour that are all strikingly pictorial.

— Helen Hagemann, Journal of Australian Studies

On Minorphysics by Paul Mitchell

When strangeness is allied to description, Mitchell reveals a Martian gift that announces him as a devotee of Murray.

— Richard King, Overland

On After Moonlight, by Merle Thornton

Please raise your glass to Merle Thornton, not only for her decades of feminist activitism, but also for the genre-bending threads she has “plaited and spliced and plied” together into this, her true fiction about the internal contradictions so many of us white middle class women still struggle to resolve in the ‘real world’.

— Merrill Findlay, Overland

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We know you’re keen to hear about this, so here’s a sneak preview!

The fifth annual IP Picks competition for unpublished manuscripts will be open for entries on 1 October and close on 30 November. As was the case last year, we will be offering publication to the winners of the Best Fiction, Best Creative Non-fiction and Best Poetry categories. Highly Commended entries may also be offered publication.

This year we will add a new category: Best First Book. This can be in any genre, and there are no age restrictions. The winner will be published in our award-winning Emerging Authors Series.

Entry forms and conditions, along with further details about the competition, including previous winners, can now be found on our special IP.Picks page.

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Deal 1: Order any IP title by David Reiter and get a copy of his award-winning short story collection Triangles for free.

Buy any of the following from the IP Shop via our order page to qualify.

The Gallery
Kiss and Tell
Liars and Lovers
Letters We Never Sent
Paul and Vincent
Sharpened Knife

Do it before 1 September and and we’ll throw in free postage and handling (a flat $8 charge applies thereafter).

Quote YD:27_1. Payment by cheque, money order or EFT only.

Deal 2: Order an IP Six-pack for $66 + $6.

Your choice of any six IP titles published before 2004 for just $11 each, GST-inclusive, plus a flat $6 postage and handling.

Quote YD:27_2. Payment by cheque, money order or EFT only.

FIPC members get a further 10% discount off the cost of either package plus free postage. Sign up now and get the benefits of Club membership today.

Offers available only to individuals.