[We take a closer look at the IP Picks 07 winning and commended entrants here, with Lauren Daniels (LD) providing a commentary on the prose short-list and Assistant Editor Mary Trabucco commenting on the poetry results.]

BEST FICTION

Backburning by Sylvia Petter, Winner

Sylvia Petter’s short story collection is a spin-of-the-globe compilation of her award-winning talent, hewn together with the archetypal and vivacious themes of love, death, passion and relationship.

From the first story in her collection, scented with coriander and steeled with a clarity sharpened by a random exchange with a stranger, the voice of the speaker effortlessly reaches the ear of the reader throughout the work:

As the taxi speeds off I think of my family waiting for me at home, of my husband, my daughters. I want to tell them about their grandmother. I want to tell them about timing, how a new fire can burn once an old one has died. I also want to tell them about back burning and fires that are lit to quell bigger flames.

Much like her life, Petter’s stories whisk inspiration from across the globe. From London, Vienna and Algeria to Prague, from the shadows of Dachau to the Blue Mountains of Australia, the panoramic settings entrance the reader. Resounding from these locations, the lyrical voices of her characters emerge like poetry:

My name is Jason and I was spun from the strands of my true love’s mind.

Clamoring, sighing, sometimes whispering from the frames of their stories, the cast of Backburning share their wisdom as willingly as their hearts, inviting us right into their lounge-rooms to contemplate the path which grazes our feet:

“It is still too early for you to understand in German. But I shall give you a line from a poem I have taken a lifetime to understand.” The room was still as Franz spoke: “Blindly following my goal, I see not the path I tread.” His eyes held theirs. “Think about it,” he said. “We shall talk next time.”

Sylvia Petter’s Backburning crackles with story and the audience will pause from the narratives if only to realise they are, in fact, dusted with the clematis pollen wafting from the pages. One of the core elements making this collection so successful is evoked, with a simple precision by one of her characters:

“You have to live language,” he would say. “It’s not just words; it’s all the senses.”

Sylvia Petter

Sylvia Petter was born in 1949 in Vienna and grew up in Australia. She began writing fiction in the early nineties, participating in online writing workshops. She has read and given papers at conferences of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, notably in New Orleans in 2002 and Alcala de Henares, Spain, in 2004.

Her stories have been published widely online and in print, and have been mentioned in The Economist (UK) and Archipelago (US). Her first collection of stories, The Past Present, was published by IUMIX Ltd, UK, in 2001 in print and electronic formats.

The Village That Wasn’t by Paul Sterling, Highly Commended

Paul Sterling’s novel is in the classic tradition of Our Town by Thornton Wilder.

When people from Melbourne travel South or East, they pass us by. They visit Geelong, Apollo Bay, Lorne, Ballarat, Bendigo or Warnambool and some of them even get as far as Adelaide. If they visit the Grampians, they will see Hamilton, Ararat or Halls Gap, but not us. They will sweep by, to the South or to the North, tossing fast food wrappers and plastic bottles into the fields and verges, without even knowing we exist. In fact, the village of Buggerum does not even appear on the RACV road maps, and that is surprising when you consider just how important and infallible the RACV is supposed to be.

Sterling’s novel is a subtle—sometimes humble, often hilarious—tribute to the small town Australia which resides in our hearts, our memory and even just off the verandah. The narrative encompasses a proud, good-natured and sometimes cheeky Aussie equivalent of Grover’s Corners, populated with endearing, sometimes familiar, characters of the raving inventors and trio of retired, keenly observant school teachers.

Given the task of collecting the stories that surround the lives of the residents of Buggerum, the local postman turned narrator walks us through his quiet country town and introduces us to a delightful cast beginning with most intriguing character of all, the town itself:

The first name given to the village by the original settlers has been stricken from the records. Virginia Gardens smelt of English roses, vintage carriages with leather seats and of hot buttered scones. After the Second World War, when the only two survivors came home, we decided we might be better off if we forgot England which had banished our ancestors and used our sons for cannon fodder and give our village a local name. So we asked the only Aboriginal in the village, Ben Deakin, whether he thought we should get rid of the English name and choose a traditional land name from his own ancestry. He thought for a while, and then he said, ‘Buggerum.’

Paul Sterling

Paul has worked in international trade in the private and public sectors in Australia and overseas. He now lives in Ballarat, writing short stories and novels.

Paul has won more than two dozen prizes in regional short story competitions, and has had more than twenty stories and articles published in Australia. His first novel in English, the story of a French couple adapting to life in Australia, appeared on Australian bookshelves this September, distributed by Pan Macmillan.

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BEST CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Dreaming of Sunshine by Chris Dowding, Winner

Three months after their wedding, the speaker and his wife leave familiar comforts—their Australian lives, jobs and families—to embark on a journey which enriches their perspectives and unexpectedly brings a fresh appreciation for home.

I wasn’t exactly sure why I wanted to go, but I knew Ireland called me. I had been sheltered from life for most of my years. I was born in 1972 and grew up in Redland Bay, a tiny farming village of a few hundred people.

In departing the small town overlooking Moreton Bay and the two-storey house built by his father, the speaker chronicles his experiences as a newlywed, living and working in Dublin as a transformative experience. He writes:

For me, the reality of travel came as a bit of a shock. I was bitten by bed bugs in hostels, terrified by ‘extreme sports’ bus drivers and shoved out of the way by little old ladies in grocery stores.

Layered with historical sweeps and peppered with research, the intimacy of the memoir is supported by insights into many of the crucial moments of Irish culture, including details surrounding the essential icon:

Sir Arthur Guinness, the founder, signed a 9000-year lease for the original parcel of land at the bargain price of £45 per annum in 1759.

Dowding’s travel memoir balances keen observations with a good dose of humour:

The [weather] reporters tended to be upbeat, outgoing types, who strove to put a happy angle on weather that was likely to be cold, wet and briefly sunny on the same day. Reports were couched in vague terms like ‘brightening rainy weather’. The reporter on Channel Four spent most of her allotted time talking about the weather in Spain, Morocco and the Black Sea.

As the speaker moves into unfamiliar territory, confronting and overcoming difficulties and meeting people from varied backgrounds, a synthesis begins. The speaker meets himself—a true appreciation of his Australian upbringing surfaces alongside an understanding that he is not only the product of his culture. He is also one who can freely choose who he will become.

Chris Dowding

Chris Dowding grew up in Redland Bay, a rural seaside community thirty kilometres south of Brisbane, Australia. He attended the local school in an era when kids got excited by doing tricks with yo-yo’s or poorly executed stunts on their BMXs.

In the 1990s, he studied civil engineering at QUT in Brisbane. After graduating, he lived a quiet solitary existence until he met his future wife, Kerryn.

Chris and Kerryn moved to Ireland in 2001. Both Kerryn and Ireland had a sense of spontaneity and surprise that Chris had previously avoided in his life. This was so unusual for him that he began writing about his experiences.

Chris and Kerryn now live in inner city Brisbane with their cat, Mia.

Ivan from Adriatic to Pacific by Coral Petkovich, Highly Commended

Tomorrow morning he would be on his way, leaving Europe for an unknown future…. For better or for worse, he did not ask himself—it was a new beginning, and that was enough.

Today’s audiences express a consistent desire to see a world drawn together through true stories as well as good fiction. With united fronts emerging to tackle all sorts of encompassing issues—from global warming to peaceful cross-cultural interchange—we are increasingly aware of our interconnectedness.

Petkovich’s novel responds to this sense that individual stories connect us with our greater story. We’re invited to follow Ivan’s journey from a childhood in the Balkans thrown into turmoil by World War II towards a new life and fresh optimism found in Australia.

Through a story like Ivan’s, we rise to greet our neighbours and follow their paths, from displacement to hope. From its opening lines, the work invites us to see into the life of a refugee with our hearts:

Today there are hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered throughout the trouble spots of the world. We see them on television, crowded into miserable huts or tents, apathetic, poorly dressed and half-starved. “Isn’t that terrible?” we say and for the most part we feel compassion. But there is also relief – the problem is not ours to solve….

We are reminded, in the character and person of Ivan, that refugees are always present within our collective history. Through the underlying themes of strength, courage and intimacy which propel this story, the author draws the pages of Ivan: From the Adriatic to the Pacific to remind us to trust that life—battered and dislocated at times—continues.

Coral Petkovich

Coral has always enjoyed writing. Her 21st birthday present from her parents was an Underwood typewriter. She has continued to write in Australia where she has had several short stories published and one highly commended in a competition.

Coral belongs to a small writers’ group and she continues to write short stories. She lives with her family in Spearwood, Western Australia.

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BEST POETRY

What Can Be Proven by Mark O'Flynn, Winner

A strange and compelling world is revealed in Mark O’Flynn’s What Can Be Proven, and yet reading it is like returning to familiar things that we have forgotten. Some things have become rarer since the heady days of twentieth century modernism: discipline of craft, intellectual ideas, an elevated poetic voice, but also the capacity for revealing familiar things in a strange new light. Beginning with “Cherry Picking”, we are introduced to poetry with an almost physical presence because each word leaves a weight like the ‘imprint of the iron ladder hard against shins’.

However, there is more to enjoy here than the language. The Australian landscape becomes that mythic ground against which our psychology is examined. In these days of water restrictions and climate change, water features prominently. In “Cherry Picking”, the turn of the weather in the orchard does the opposite from what rain should do in a country that dreams of the stuff:

a year’s enterprise ruined in a downpour […]
Ends a season; ends all modest ambition

In O’Flynn’s hands, farming in Australia takes on Shakespearean dimensions. Despite the loss, the protagonist’s dreams continue to ‘persecute’ them: this ‘never say die’ attitude sets the tone for the poems that follow.

What is real and what mythical in the landscape is explored in the following poem, “Wake in Booligal”, which turns on the idea of what it might mean when ‘home’ is a place where rivers are simulacra, trees ‘aberrations’.

The collection travels through evocative scenes, from the wild seaside that conjures South American magic realism in “The Lighthouse Keeper”, to landscapes of memory in “Shopping Complex” and “My Father’s Voice”, to the battlegrounds of history in “Allotropes of Tin”. Sometimes the quarry is bleak, at other times wonderful, like the bird-filled ‘cloudless heavens’ left to the heroic lighthouse keeper’s wife. The poet also turns to themes of imprisonment, hunting, and a range of animal subjects from rabbits to bats and pigs. The overall thread holding these different subjects together is a focus on what is strange and unexplainable, on mysterious and fleeting impressions, like the appearance of Japanese tourists who ‘hurl themselves / into the view […]’ at the end of “Unbuttoned”, which leaves the poem on a note of unexpected tragedy after the rather mundane path through the walking trail to the lookout. Unexpectedly, like the unknown mysteries of “The Stolen Book of Kells”, this collection is more interested in what cannot be proven, than by what can. The irony of the title is reflected beautifully in the opening poem, in which rain can mean tragedy.

Mark O'Flynn

Mark O’Flynn began writing for the theatre after graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts. He has had seven plays professionally produced, including Paterson’s Curse, published in 1988. As a playwright he has worked for numerous community theatre companies. He has also published a novella, Captain Cook (1987) and two books of poetry, The Too Bright Sun (1996) and The Good Oil (2000). His fiction, reviews, essays and poetry have been published in a wide variety of journals and magazines. His most recent play Eleanor & Eve was produced at Railway Street Theatre Company in 2003. A novel, Grassdogs, was published by Harper/Collins earlier this year. In 2007 he is due to travel to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland to work on a new novel. Mark lives in the Blue Mountains.

Straggling Into Winter by Kathy Kituai, Highly Commended

A serene and very human voice emerges from a year-long tanka journal in which the changing seasons reflect the poet’s thoughts on illness, love, and world events. Perhaps it is the form of tanka itself, with its five-line structure that can so easily be held in the mind and meditated on, which has enabled Kituai to cultivate the equilibrium that fills her collection; on the other hand, maybe it is the cycle of seasons, the close observation of nature and animals, the isolation and confessional nature of writing a journal, which has long been this poet’s practice, which leaves us with the conclusion that this collection has brought about a quiet redemption after great loss.

Yet Straggling into Winter rejects the redemptive cycle from a death-filled winter into the new life of spring that characterises Western iconography. One of its gifts is the freshness of a cross-cultural perspective, where cherry blossoms draining to the sea reflect the jubilance of Japanese students graduating; mostly the poems are set in Australia but the originality of this perspective colours everything. The great delight of the tanka is the jewel-like images it produces: how a bowl captures moonlight, willow twigs flaring at sunset, a poet wandering into a fog, as he suffers an aneurism, scattered plates abandoned, pumpkin shoots, playing checkers when the doorbell rings. Poems that chronicle the progress of illness, the ‘black butterfly’ of cancer, alternate with visiting wild birds and animals and moments of humour, even in the hospital, where crutches are stolen by hospital ‘terrorists’, musings on the Israel/Palestine tragedy, and the nature of old age and love.

As Kituai ponders the way we need wardens for the journeys of birth and death, I was struck by how her journal could be just such a thing for many people. Kituai may be one of those rare writers who reject the idea that illness and death are things that have to be worked through and then left behind; rather, by beginning and ending with winter, she suggests death and loss are where we begin and what we work towards. There’s peace in that thought.

Kathy Kituai

Kathy grew up by the Swan River, watching fish glitter in the shadows. Observing nature in childhood has led to poems on bird life in all four of her poetry collections.

Composer Rosemary Austin created a musical score from the title poem of her second collection, The Lace Maker. Choreographer and dancer Elizabeth Caron performed to her poetry at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and Peggy Spratt created visual art in response to her first collection green-shut-green.

Kathy has won the CJ Denis Poetry Prize and the Annual St Kilda Competition and been a finalist in the Broadway Poetry Prize, Somerset National Poetry Prize and the David Campbell Poetry Prize.

She teaches creative writing in Canberra.

Age of Anomalies by Hal Judge, Commended

As a collection, the experimental Age of Anomalies is not easily classifiable because, as its title suggests, it is about contradictions and abnormalities. Yet, by suggesting that an entire age, indeed our age, could be defined by its irregular and paradoxical character, this poetry collection sets itself the ambitious goal of somehow explaining and encompassing this very phenomenon. The result is a kaleidoscopic, dystopian worldview.

Beginning with the small and deftly drawn nugget “Snail” and satirical “Gloo Guns”, the perspective widens to social commentary in “Sargassumfish”, ‘Area Denial” and the title poem “Age of Anomalies”, revealing that Judge can handle small detail but more often prefers a broad brush stroke. His style is often sparse, and follows the rhythms of colloquial speech.

To avoid leaving the impression that Age of Anomalies is all about big political and social ideas, I should note that a number of the poems tackle personal themes. The best of these, “The Dream That Haunts Me”, evokes a great sense of loss in a death that may or may not have happened, depending on whether the dream is a premonition or a real past, all carried in the surprisingly poignant image of the dreamer opening and closing the fridge. “Downshift”, for all its simplicity, is a poem during which you can pause momentarily amidst all the chaos and sigh, realising what a likeable person Judge is, as he embraces the slower rhythms of life. Between these personal poems and satires, political poems such as “The Secret of Boundary Street” and ‘Mozambique 1994” emerge like beacons from a more serious voice, critical of Australia’s treatment of the Aboriginal people, and exploring a troubled Mozambique.

The collection builds to a series of grand poems which have in their scope a panorama representing our troubled modern times, in which the collection summons the strength to answer the question of the title: how can we describe this age, defined as it is by anomaly? “The City is Dying” does this remarkably well, because of the insight and interest Judge takes in each facet of Australian society, from the jobseeker to the bagman, to the busted tycoon, and crumbling hospital: we see the impacts of turbo capitalism and welfare state. “Institute of Happiness” is multi-voiced, explores paradoxes and Judge really gets into his groove with a command of the language as he addresses the reader directly, drawing them with excitement through a labyrinth of scenes. The touching “Where is Arabic” counts the toll of dead family members in the number of stones a boy clutches. Judge reaches his epiphany with “Found Poems”, of which “Doing What’s Right” is the most chilling and powerful, a pastiche of comments from powerful corporations. Judge allows them to speak for themselves, and they answer the question of the collection rather too well.

Hal Judge

Hal Judge is an emerging provocative writer from the polis of Canberra. His poems have been published in over 20 literary publications including Entropy, Poetry Monash, fourW, Blast, Muse, LiNQ, Idiom, Ozpoet, New Matilda , The Surface (Scotland), Crikey, Azzikra (Indonesia) and Short Fuse (Global Anthology). His concrete poem “Area Denial” won the ACT Writers Centre Award in 2006.

He is also a versatile writer of short stories, plays and screenplays. Six of his experimental plays have been staged in Canberra and Sydney. He is currently working on a commissioned feature length sci-fi movie. His writing reflects a desire to experiment with wide range of forms, technology, genres and themes.

He is currently studying a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra and writing prolifically.

— MT

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BEST FIRST BOOK

With One Brush by Jan Dean, Winner

I could hardly believe when reading this manuscript that the author could sustain the luminous power of the poetry, and yet she did: each poem built on those before, with seemingly effortless grace, turning visual art, and especially that of the impressionists, into poetry.

In between evocative poems which explore artists, their work, and different mediums, such as “The Body and Brushes with Blood”, “Signed Auguste Rodin”, and “The White Curtain”, Dean’s poems are occasionally about fruit: the opening “Six Persimmons”, which on first reading immerses you in the sensuousness of the overripe fruit so you cannot see beyond it, but on further reading yields fruit you can actually pluck, it’s so real. “Skin a Fig” makes erotic connections between the fruit’s texture and human skin, more erotic still when the fruit are hidden away at the end. Dean also writes about the occult and archaic, from “Banquet” which take us to a hell or purgatory too intoxicating to be terrible, to “The Woman in White’, in which we encounter a female spectre whose connection to the preceding poem intrigues: could she explain why women were so inextricably absent from Dean’s hell? The connections Dean weaves between her poems, and in individual poems, hold rich secrets worth unravelling; the fact that she gives little away about their meaning makes them more appealing.

The collection’s great strength is the uniqueness of the changing perspectives Dean imagines for her poems: each time we leave the world of painting behind we are momentarily disappointed, but the new subject or device soon makes us forget. Particularly interesting were “The Dream Paster Muses”, which shows us the world from the vertiginous point of view of a man who plasters advertisements on huge billboards. Dean herself is a visual artist in a number of poems best described as word paintings: “The Door in the Wall” asks us to imagine what is hidden behind a mysterious door: we can see a love garden, a refuge, and also much more: all that the protagonist desires. “Acrobat” is a still life interior, but animated, and a panoramic view from the room where the artist stands, walls hung with art, trees bending outside, the children in their playhouse, until a great tsunami comes. Most vivid is the scene in “The Reading”, where we are brought right into the room as the poet witnesses a historic reading of Les Murray’s.

If Dean has a message through With One Brush, it is gently given: perhaps it is about the cycle of things, how, in “Script of Sorrows”, we might return to a world less mad, and more at peace. By the end, in “Creeping” and “Sensations”, we learn what we had suspected, that Dean’s view of things is hopeful, that the world can regenerate, and even that we can return and be given a second chance:

Waiting in amoebic form we’ll stay
floating along in boundless time, until
our shore leave comes…
and revitalised, we begin again

Amidst the conflicting visions of our times, a voice like Dean’s is needed, because she is able to see things with compassion and hope, even in the poem “Banded Rail”, in which a dead bird is brought to the poet. This prompts her to imagine the bird’s point of view in a truly ethical moment where we experience that spine-chilling sensation of seeing with another’s eyes, when she acknowledges: ‘for us to meet, you had to die.’ Existing in Dean’s world, even if only for the duration of a book, is experiencing a world in which many more things are alive than most of us had imagined, even a painting.

Jan Dean

Jan Dean, a former visual arts teacher, believes the six-months as an exchange-English teacher in Japan, prior to her retirement, was instrumental in her reconnecting with poetry in 1996. Since then, she was runner-up in the 2002 Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, and has won several poetry competitions. Jan spent six years as President/Publicity Officer of Poetry at the Pub (Newcastle) Inc.

Jan’s poetry has appeared in several publications including Sunweight: the 2005 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology; The Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Inc); The Best Australian Poetry 2004 (UQP); Hecate; Quadrant; Blue Dog: Australian Poetry; Southerly and The Weekend Australian Review.

Let Sleeping Gods Lie by Dianne Gray, Highly Commended

Dianne Gray’s Let Sleeping Gods Lie swayed the judges with a flair for Australian setting and humour, lively characterization and the playful delivery of the rather tricky themes of religion and the quest for truth.

Let Sleeping Gods Lie is a gutsy fiction novel delivered through a natural, easygoing style, allowing readers to steep in a vivid sense of country Queensland as the storyline unfolds:

The last month of the sugar cane-cutting season was not the best time to be in Far North Queensland. Sugar cane trains sliced through farms and across highways, struggling to feed the last loads of cane into the mouth of an ancient mill and clogging traffic in thirty degree heat. Sugar-mill workers tilted their hard-hats to scratch tired heads as they watched an old rusting smokestack wipe its oily beard over Bookalong Creek. The air was thick with the unmistakable aroma of molasses. Farmers opened their books to scoff at the pitiful price of sugar. Tractors and harvesters fled into fields, choking on dust and the price of diesel.

Madison Ingram hid behind a large mango tree at the side of the creek and listened as the sound of the bike faded into the distance.

Gently calling upon all of the senses and adorned with natural beauty, Dianne Gray’s Let Sleeping Gods Lie layers the narrative with powerful themes examining religion and the shadow it can cast across a landscape, through communities and within families. The plot is propelled by the strong elements of mystery and moth-balled family secrets, while the characters populating the story can’t help but make us laugh.

Gillian, on the other hand, never watched television. It unnerved her. If she saw a good news story, a sad news story, movies, advertisements, animal programs or anything involving slow motion and music, she would cry. In fact, the only time Gillian ever cried was in front of a television. She took after her mother in that respect, who rated a good movie by the size of the mountain of used tissues on the floor.

Dianne Gray

Dianne Gray has been a successful short story writer for the past ten years. She has won several national awards and her stories have appeared in HQ/Harper Collins anthology Enter, Ginninderra Press’ Lunatics Lovers and Poets and a soon-to-be-published Harlequin crime anthology.

Dianne has also received three Sisters in Crime awards and says she loves nothing more than getting stuck into a great crime story with a good twist. Dianne currently lives in Canberra but was inspired to write Let Sleeping Gods Lie while living on a cane farm in Far North Queensland where she worked at a sugar mill and a crocodile farm.

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In this issue, we bid a fond farewell to Jennifer Newberry. Jennifer is saving up for a big trip to Europe, where we suspect she may apply her content editing skills to a few Lonely Planet publications. Have fun, Jen, and thanks for all your help!

And now we welcome the following to IP!


Courtney Frederikson

Courtney is in her final year at the Queensland University of Technology where she is completing a major in Creative Writing, with minors in Interaction Design and Performance Studies. Courtney left high school with a highest achiever award in fine art, and jumped straight into University. Since then, the last two years have been bliss for her as she gains skills in her three great passions. Now at IP she is excited about exploring these medias further and venturing into the world of literature and media publishing.

For the last four years Courtney has also worked in bookstores, as well as having completed a certificate in retail, specialising in books. Surrounded by books everyday she is both empowered to write, as well as terrible intimidated. All Courtney wishes to do with her life is create powerful stories through words, images, movement or voice. At IP she believes she can help others do so.


Katia Nizic

Katia Nizic is a current QUT Creative Writing student with special interests in editing, publishing and young adult fiction. During her time at QUT she has contributed reviews to Utopia student magazine and her editing skills to KURB magazine. Upon completing her degree in 2007, she hopes to pursue further study and obtain her Graduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing from UQ.

Katia has also been involved in the writing, production, shooting and editing of a short product promotion film for a leading Australian natural health company. She enjoys writing young adult fiction, and is currently at work on a YA novel set in the imagined city of “Little Edinburgh.”

In her spare time she works at a Dymocks book store and attempts to coerce staff members into joining a book club. Her pursuit of a career in publishing has also taken her to Sydney, where she completed a week of voluntary work experience for Dolly magazine. She hopes to eventually pursue a career as a writer and book editor.

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Many would-be authors sign up for creative writing courses hoping to discover their style, as if a minor in archaeology or even genetics would help. But do we have a single writing style, unique to ourselves, like a fingerprint? The answer is no!

Historically, students were asked to imitate the style of the masters. The assumption was that even if the students already had their own style, it probably wasn’t a very good one, and exposing them to professional writers might trigger some neuron growth in the students’ brain. It’s a bit of a leap from imitation to initiation, though, and many students would get put off by the large gap between what they thought they could write and what they saw on the printed page. The greater benefit was often overlooked: reading a variety of writing styles should suggest that no single style will be the best for all occasions. The writer in fact should be able to adopt a myriad of styles depending on the writing situation.

Consider dialogue, for example. How does a writer convey the difference between characters if she is only capable of writing in a single style? Personality cries out for a fingerprint by which the character can be distinguished from other characters. Sometimes this can be achieved simply through content, where a character is obsessed with something that defines him. However, what do you do with characters who largely share opinions and interests? You need to differentiate them through style. You see one character as better educated, so you use more complex sentences. Another is working class, so she may speak in fragments, or even ungrammatical constructions.

Even in description or exposition, there may be reason to vary your style or adapt it to the writing situation. A satiric or comic piece may require under- or overstatement to achieve its best effect, whereas a neutral style may be more appropriate when the narrator’s primary task is to show the action.

Authors sometimes slip into a mismatch of prose and poetic styles. This can happen when an author strains for a poetic moment in an otherwise prosaic hour. On the verge of epiphany, a character is allowed to utter a phrase worthy of Shakespeare. Problem is, the novel is contemporary and naturalistic—and people haven’t spoken like Shakespeare for centuries!

Continuity and consistency come into play here. You don’t want to switch from a rowboat to a kayak in mid-sentence. Choose a style that will work for your narrator and stick with it. Look for ways of differentiating between your characters through their style of dialogue, which will be different again from the style of your narrator, and then keep it consistent. You’ll know it’s working for you if readers can identify who’s speaking in a piece of extended dialogue without any narrative directions.

I know judges of writing competitions who swear they can identify entrants by the style of a piece, and this may well be so. Some authors fall back on a style that works for them like a pair of worn but comfortable slippers. It becomes a trademark that many would-be authors envy and try to recycle. Generally, that’s a waste of time. You’re better off adapting your style to the writing situation and to the demands of your characters for independence.

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Michael O’Sullivan (Secret Writing) won the 2006 Smiths Bookshop Short Story Competition, judged by Peter Corris for Michael’s short story “Stranger in Paradise”.

Michael’s new book, Easter at Tobruk, will be released by IP in our Autumn Season 07.


Bill Collopy (House of Given) won third prize in the Age short story competition for a story called “Suckered Into a Perfect line”. Literary editor Jason Steger shared the judges’ comments on:

the often barbed and unspoken interiors of mateship. In a landscape both brutal and elegant, the voice of the duck-shooter narrator grips with a raw confessional power. This tone of disclosure is brilliantly set against dialogue which reveals exactly what is left unsaid between the narrator and his mate.

The rich textures of the duck-shooter's lexicon and the delicately drawn personifications of the river conjure vivid images and colours that remain with the reader after the close of the story itself.

Last but not least, David Musgrave (On Reflection) was awarded Highly Commended and $2000 in the Newcastle Poetry Prize for his poem “Open Water”.

Our hearty congratulations to Michael, Bill and David!

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Elli Housden reports that the Society of Women Writers of Queensland has just launched its latest anthology of poetry and prose writing. Behind the Faces is part of the Society’s 30th anniversary.

SWWQ was founded in 1976 to further the craft of writing among women, especially rural women for whom isolation was a problem. For these women a postal magazine circulated rural Queensland so that aspiring writers could read and critique each other’s work.

Meetings for City members offer workshops and guest speakers. These are held at the new city library in Brisbane Square, on the corner of Adelaide and George Streets on the second Tuesday of each month from 10am to 12pm. They also run writing workshops on selected weekends throughout the year, and hold an annual writers’ retreat and a competition for members only. Their newsletter, Ring of Bright Water, is distributed bi monthly.

The Society welcomes women from beginning writers to published ones. For more information contact their membership secretary, Tricia, by phone, 07 3203 6667 or email.

SWWQ is affiliated with sister societies in all other states and with the Society of Women Writers and Journalists in London.

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[Snippets from full reviews that we’ve posted elsewhere (click through to read the full review)]

Peter Pierce of The Sydney Morning Herald mentioned Michelle Cahill’s Accidental Cage as being among the poetry “debuts of note”.

Cordite ran a feature on Joel Deane (Another, Subterranean Radio Songs) in which he was interviewed by Paul Mitchell. The interview covers both Joel’s work in poetry and his work in politics as speechwriter for the Premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks.

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Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars by Nigel Turvey has been the recipient of more wonderful reviews. Jim Sommerville says that the book “is an excellent objective study of the violent confrontation there in August 1979 and subsequently in the Washpool and Nightcap rainforests.”

Dr Neil Byron, commissioner of the Productivity Commission in Melbourne, as well as commenting on how much he enjoyed the book, also discussed what surprised him about it: “What I was unprepared for, but impresses me even more, is the story telling, the characterisation, the rich detail in the presentation of the minute features of the personalities involved, on both sides of the war.”

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Fresh News From The Arctic by Libby Hart was reviewed in
Thylazine. Liz Hall-Downs writes that Libby’s poetry has “a contemplative stillness and subtlety, giving them the impression of an 'unfolding' of meaning as the work is read and reread.”

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Director David Reiter has announced that 2007, our 10th Anniversary year, will see us launch into some serious export activity. We made a good start in 2006 by signing up with CDBaby, who distribute our CDs through their shop and catalogues to the North American market. Just recently we set up shop with Customflix, an American DVD and CD distributor owned by Amazon, to sell our first DVD, Hemingway in Spain.

Customflix not only replicates physical DVDs and CDs on demand as orders come in but also formats them for distribution online via Amazon and others to the growing portable DVD player and 3G phone market.
Know of any other Australian publishers doing this? Once again, we suspect IP is well ahead of the pack.

We’re not sitting on our hands when it comes to our print publications, either. Building on our relationship with Tower Books here in Oz, we have now signed up with Lightning Source, one of the largest print-on-demand distributors in the world. Headquartered in the USA, where they serve the North American market, Lightning Source also has a big operation in the UK, which covers distribution to Europe.

The good news is that the unit price (the actual cost of printing a book) is only slightly more than what IP’s been paying for conventional short print runs in Australia. The better news is that Lightning Source is a division of the huge Ingrams Book Group, and every title they get is listed through Ingrams’ catalogues as well as the Amazon online shops.

It gets even better for our overseas customers. They no longer have to wait 10 days or more to get stock after they order it from us. They’ll get what they order in a third of the time—and at local freight rates!

We’ve invited existing IP authors to sign up for this export deal and will be making it part of the contract for our new authors.

With the Lightning Source deal in hand, we’re currently talking to some large conventional distributors in the UK about taking us on. More on that in a future issue of eNews.

In the coming months we’ll be spreading the word to overseas libraries and bookshops that IP titles are now in town and just a click away. Our next 10 years are shaping up to be very exciting, indeed!

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Several strands of buzzing to report this issue!

Many of our artists are now up on the iTunes Store, thanks to our partnership with CDBaby, our American digital distributor. You can now listen to and download tracks from

• Chris Mansell’s The Fickle Brat
• Liam Guilar’s I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me (with Chen Yang)
• Alan Ferguson’s soundtrack to The Diggings Are Silent
• Jack Drake’s bush poetry collections The Cattledog’s Revenge, Dinkum Poetry and Bronco Harry’s Last Ride
• Jenni Nixon’s Café Boogie
• Paul Mitchell & Bill Buttler as Jumbuktu: As if Nothing is happening. And it is.

Once you’re on the iTunes Store, you can search by the artist or the title. And you can purchase downloads by the track or the entire album. If you happen to be passing through Portland, Oregon, you can visit the CDBaby shop and purchase the physical CDs there.

Also on iTunes and on our own podcast site is the trailer for David’s new DVD, Hemingway in Spain and the highlights of our Spring Gala Launch at the Performance Studio, 4MBS Classic-FM. You can subscribe to IP’s free podcast series either from the site or from the iTunes Store. You can even leave us comments on the site, but please be friendly since the world will read what you have to say!

We expect to broadcast podcasts at least four times per year, so we hope you’ll not only subscribe, but spread the word. We’re interested in partnering with individuals and groups who have polished audio and/or video content they want published as a podcast. Email us with a proposal and we’ll get back to you.

You can also view the trailer for Hemingway in Spain on YouTube and a shorter version of it on CustomFlix, our American DVD distributor, where you can also order the NTSC formatted version.

Liam Guilar reports that he has uploaded his own short video to YouTube for his poem “Lute Recitals”, which appears in his book and Audio + Text CD I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me. And Michelle Cahill (The Accidental Cage) has set up her own website, where you can view slideshows of the NSW launches of her book.

Soon to be released from IP Digital is our latest Audio + Text CD, 3rd i, featuring author Basil Eliades. Basil’s poetry works well on the page but it sparkles when you hear him in person. He’s a brilliant performer of his work, and we’re pleased to add this to our audio list for Autumn Season 2007. Look for a sample of his performance style with funky musical accompaniment in our next podcast.

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It’s not a decision we took lightly, but IP now has a new imprint: IP Kidz. Children’s publishing is a speciality field, and we have no intention of plunging into it headfirst. The titles we select will be top-rate but, in keeping with our niche approach, perhaps not the kind of work you see in the chain bookshops. Think arthouse, in print.

The story about how IP Kidz came to be has a lot to do with a conjunction of the stars. Several years ago, David sold the text for an illustrated book called Real Guns to Lothian Books. But Lothian never managed to publish it. They contracted with illustrators twice, and twice the illustrators failed to come up with the goods.

A couple of years on, some pointed discussions ensued between David and Lothian, and, finally, at a meeting in Brisbane between him and Peter Lothian, a compromise was reached. Lothian returned the rights on Real Guns to David and published his novel The Greenhouse Effect.

For a few years, Real Guns was shelved, and then, out of the blue, David got a call from a well-established children’s author/illustrator who said that she had seen the manuscript and that David simply had to get it out. It was obviously the words that impressed her, and possibly the story’s topicality. It concerns a young boy who, curious about why his dad keeps a loaded gun in the house, sets about to look for it and finds it, with nearly tragic consequences.

A few weeks later, we got a pitch from this Irish artist, Patrick Murphy, looking for illustration assignments. David checked out his portfolio, and loved his work. The stars had crossed paths again! Real Guns is scheduled for release in May.

You’d be right to conclude that IP Kidz was born on a whim, or at least partly so. Ten years on, the timing is right for IP to expand. We now have the depth to support a children’s imprint and think it will complement our other imprints, especially if we can develop some digital content along the way.

As you’ve come to expect from IP, the quality of the writing will always be the first consideration for acceptance into the IP Kidz stable, and we hope to match our authors to the finest illustrators around. Here we go…

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Our Spring Season events went on right to the end of November, starting with Brisbane events at the beginning of the month and concluding down in Sydney with several launches and David’s workshop Sell That Book at the NSW Writers’ Centre.

We were pleased to have Matt Foley, Chair of the Queensland Writers’ Centre to welcome guests at the Corner Bistro for our first Soirée. Matt has been a long time friend and supporter of IP from the time that he served as Minister for the Arts in the State Government. He still has a soft spot for poetry, so I’m sure he was pleased to meet our four poets among the six new IP authors at the event.

Brisbane-based Andrew Leggett of course published his first book Old Time Religion with us way back in 1998, so we were especially pleased to welcome him back with his long-awaited second volume Dark Husk of Beauty. Also attending were Michelle Cahill (The Accidental Cage) and Paul Dawson (Imagining Winter) from Sydney, Libby Hart (Fresh News from the Arctic) and Bill Collopy (House of Given) from Melbourne and Nigel Turvey (Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars) from Darwin.

The idea behind the Soirée was to give our other guests the chance to chat with the authors informally, and from the buzz on the restaurant’s verandah and later on at the table inside, you could tell we were on a winner. The dinner was sumptuous, so our thanks to Michelle and the crew at The Corner Bistro for a wonderful night.

The next day, we got a bit more formal, but not much. We intended the Gala Launch to be more about performance than about speeches, and so it was. The Performance Studio at 4MBS was packed out for the session, and we recorded all six authors. If you couldn’t make it to the Gala, the good news is that we’ve posted it almost in its entirety as our inaugural podcast, so do have a listen!

Michelle Cahill was interviewed by Scott Levi live on ABC 92.5FM at Erina Fair on the NSW Central Coast. This was before her IP book, The Accidental Cage, was launched by Paul Crittenden MP at the Ourimbah Campus Festival Of Literature.

David was kept quite busy in the last week of November in Sydney with meetings with librarians, his Sell That Book workshop for the NSW Writers’ Centre, launches for Paul Dawson’s Imagining Winter at The Loft, University of Technology, Sydney and Nigel Turvey’s launch of Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars by Neville Wran at Dymocks, George Street. He was also featured at the NSW Writers’ Centre Publisher’s Book Fair along with Tilly Brasch, to speak about her book, No Middle Name, which won the IP Picks 2005 award for Best Creative Non-fiction.

David was double-booked so he couldn’t get to Michelle’s Gleebooks launch, but he made up for it at her reception that evening where he met poet Adam Aitken who launched The Accidental Cage at Gleebooks.

A fitting end to an exhausting but enjoyable Spring Season tour!

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Speedpoets returns to The Alibi Room (720 Brunswick St. New Farm) on Sunday March 4. The year kicks off with a bang with feature sets from international poet/singer/songwriter Andy White (The Music of What Happens) and local musician/word artist and owner of The Alibi Room, James Straker.

The Riverbend Poetry Series kicks off for 2007 on Tuesday February 27th. Doors for the event open at 6pm for a 6.30pm start. Tickets are $10 and include a complimentary glass of wine and sushi nibbles. Bookings can be made at Riverbend Books, 193 Oxford Street, Bulimba or by phoning 3899 8555.

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Deal 1: Want to cool off without adding to Global Warming? Order both of these books for a 20% discount.

Imagining Winter by Paul Dawson
Fresh News from the Arctic by Libby Hart

Do it before 1 March and and we’ll throw in free postage and handling (a flat $5.45 charge applies thereafter).

Quote YD:33_1 in the Comments field on the Orders page. You must order from the IP Shop via our orders page or by email to qualify. Payment by cheque, money order or EFT only.

Deal 2: Play bookshop manager and get 40% off any TWO of the following.

Fine Salt by Sally Finn
Popular Mechanics by Liam Ferney
I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me (PB) by Liam Guilar
The Diggings Are Silent by Wendy Evans
On Reflection by David Musgrave
Liars and Lovers by David Reiter

Order any THREE of the above and we’ll toss in a free copy of David Reiter’s award-winning Triangles.

Quote YD:33_2 in the Comments field on the Orders page. You must order from the IP Shop via our orders page or by email to qualify. 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. (See Your Deal in eNews 15 for full details.)

Offers available only to individuals.

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