BOORANGA NEWS
NEWSLETTER FOR BOORANGA WRITERS’ CENTRE OF
WAGGA WAGGA WRITERS WRITERS INC.
MAY - JUNE 2010
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
Writer-in-residence:
Louise Waller
The second writer to officialy visit the region in this year is Louise waller. Louise is an award winning Queensland poet who has
recently relocated from Yeppoon (central coastal Queensland) to
Verona Sands in Southern Tasmania.
Louise will arrive in Wagga on the 6th May before engaging in a
number of official duties. She will be giving a writing workshop
for Booranga members and Tafe students in Narrandera; she will
be the special guest at our regular monthly writers’ workshop at
Booranga; she will be giving a feature reading in Wagga, and (as
all Booranga writers-in-residence do) she will be working with
creative writing students at Charles Sturt University.
Louise has had her poetry published in numerous venues including foam:e, Blue Dog, Famous Reporter, Papertiger and notably The
Best Australian Poems 2009. She has also been a contributing editor of the online journal foam:e for a number of years. Louise has
been commended twice in the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Poetry Award and took second place for this award in 2006.
Since moving to Tasmania in late 2009, Louise and her partner Ray have purchased a small beach shack at lovely (and quiet) Verona
Sands. With views overlooking the beautiful and ever changing D’Entrecasteaux Channel, the location is inspiring and is currently
influencing her work on a series of poems based on the music of Gustav Mahler. Louise has titled the developing sequence ‘Figuring
shells with Mahler’.
Poetry Reading: Thursday 13th May, Wagga City Library, 5pm. Well-known visiting poet David Reiter will also be reading.
Monthly Writers’ Workshop: Sunday 16th May, 2-5pm, Booranga Writers’ Centre
Booranga Writers’ Centre (McKeown Drive) 2010 Office Hours:
Staff will be in every Monday (9am - 3.30pm), Tuesday (9 - 11.30am), Thursday (9 - 11.30am).
For enquiries (with a quick response) email us: [email protected]
Or alternatively email our director directly: [email protected]
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BOORANGA NEWS
MAY - JUNE 2010
2010 Calendar of Booranga Events
Recent Booranga Events
Throughout the latter half of 2009 and the first months of 2010 Booranga has been
running performance poetry workshops under the banner of ‘The Booranga Spoken
Word Group’. We have a small but committed group of performance enthusiasts who
have been coming along once a month to the Riverina Community College to hone
some writing techniques, as well as work on delivery. The first stage of this project
was the group’s first performance, a support slot for visiting performer David Finnigan. We were nervous but gave a good show of it. David Gilbey, Harata Syme and
myself were all very pleased with our performances and the audience’s ethusiastic
response.
David Finnigan (aka ‘Blind’ - pictured below) then presented a self-written one man
show, the half hour performance Sun Drugs (directed by Naomi Milthorpe). The
show amazed audience members - Sun Drugs is a mixture of performance poetry,
pop culture and absurdist theatre and it left everyone lucky enough to attend spellbound (although nevertheless consumed with laughter). If you hear of another performance of this show I cannot recommend it highly enough.
May
6th - 20th: Writer-in-residence:
Louise Waller
14th-16th: Ten x 10 Play Festival
June
30th Submissions close for
fourW twenty-one!
July - August
Writer-in-residence: Lauren
Williams
September
Write Around the Murray Festival
October
1st - 10th: Writer-in-residence:
Steven Amsterdam
The performances of the 12th April including the Booranga Spoken Word Group
were supported by a cultural grant from the Wagga City Council, and by organisational support from the Wagga City Library.
Look out for another performance as part of Albury’s Write Around the Murray Festival. Details in the next newsletter...
2
November
fourW twenty-one launches
JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MAY - JUNE 2010
Booranga Annual General Meeting
Booranga held its annual general meeting in the Wagga City Library, on Wednesday
7th April. The night was a friendly catch up with fellow members, and it also allowed
David, Sandra and myself to give everyone a run down of what has been happening over
the past year.
Guest speaker on the
evening was CSU lecturer Dr. Anna Poletti
(pictured right). Anna’s
PhD research focussed
on zine-making, and
as such her talk on the
evening also looked at
self publishing. Anna
is very knowledgeable
and passionate when it
comes to self-made book objects and everyone in attendance took
away some of her enthusiasm for making and enjoying books
Also on
in the Region...
Booranga Monthly Writers’ Meetings
Booranga remains committed to facilitating these meetings every month, and I’m sure our regular attendees would testify to the usefulness of them. Writing can at times be a solitary pursuit, and there is no way around this, but there is also no better way to get an
idea of how you are going, or to get a new perspective on your work, than to share it with some other writers. Over 2009 / 2010 I’ve
seen many of our members develop in confidence and benefit even just from the self-enforced deadline each month.
Our next meeting will once again be held at the Booranga Writers’ Centre, but please be aware it will be on a Sunday this time, 17th
May, 2-5pm.
Olivia’s Choice
There’s been a slight lull in member’s work coming into Booranga, so please do consider sending us something for Olivia’s Choice!
Poetry, short-stories, essays...the choice is yours!
(Send contributions of creative writing for Booranga News to [email protected] and place ‘Olivias Choice in the subject line).
In coming editions of Booranga News Olivia will be giving you prompts for new writing, as well as her feedback on your own submissions.
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BOORANGA NEWS
MAY - JUNE 2010
Local Theatre...
Ten x 10 Festival
In May 2009 Wagga School of Arts brought to the Wagga Community
“Ten x 10”, and the production was a critical and popular success. Across
Australia this ten minute format is proving to be popular not only amongst
“regular” theatregoers but to many folk who have never experienced theatre
before. Wagga School of Arts is committed to making this an annual fixture
and one that attracts audiences nationally. There is a strong contingent of
local writers (including Booranga member Kelly Shaw...) in the festival this
year as well as others from around the state and one from the USA. The line
up promises to be a combination of varied and interesting entertainment for
all.
The 2010 “Ten x 10” play festival is to be staged on the 14th, 15th May at
8 PM and 16th May at 3 PM at the Riverina Playhouse Theatre.
(David Gilbey recently launched the tenx10 festival - the occasional poem he ‘composed’ for the launch can be found on the next
page...)
Love Bites
Behind The Curtain Theatre Company presents Love Bites. Playing upstairs at Romano’s hotel, June 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19
from 8pm.
Love Bites is a comedy with bite exploring love, life and
everything in between. It focuses on the absurdities of love
and makes question of the choices we make in who we
choose to love and who we choose to leave behind.
Tickets are $25 (Adult), $20 (Concession), $15 (Student
pre-booked) and $10 (Student at the door). Ticket holders are entitled to a 2 for 1 meal offer in the main bar of
Romano’s prior to the show starting. Tickets are available
from the Civic Theatre Booking office in person, by phoning 1300 292 442, by visiting www.civitheatre.com.au or at
the door.
For more information on Behind The Curtain Theatre Company call us on 0420217469 or visit our FaceBook page
www.facebook./behindthecurtaintheatreco.
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MAY - JUNE 2010
New word to launch new festival – a world ‘first’ for Wagga (excerpted
launch speech by David Gilbey)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It’s an honour and a pleasure to be asked to launch SOACT’s second festival of 10 x10 plays.
What we are witnessing at the moment in Wagga is a kind of Renaissance: SOACT’s second festival of 10 x 10 plays. The word
‘Renaissance’ has about it the suggestion of a new discovery, a revival of old and forgotten knowledge, skills, authors. Of reanimating things that were lost. Of breathing new life into forgotten myths, literary and artistic forms….
And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, I call on you to celebrate with me this second festival of 10 x 10 plays as SOACT’s DECALUDE –
may it be glorious, multi-faceted, extravagant, witty, entertaining – and of course, fully subscribed!
To complete my launch, let me, like one of Shakespeare’s prologue characters, compose a sonnet (borrowed, as you will see, from
various sonnets of Shakespeare – nothing of my own work, except the assembly thereof):
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part
I summon up remembrance of things past
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow
And moan th’expence of many a vanish’d sight,
And art made tongue-tied by authority
And folly – doctor-like – controlling skill.
My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore.
My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun:
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
May SOACT’s DECALUDE give life to thee.
5
BOORANGA NEWS
MAY - JUNE 2010
Grasping and Dissolving – Review of Adam Aitken’s Eighth Habitation, 2009, Giramondo
by Derek Motion
(The following is a short version of a review first published in foam:e 7 (edited
by current Booranga resident Louise Waller). The full version can be viewed at:
http://www.foame.org/Issue7/reviews1.html)
It did take me a while to get through Aitken’s Eighth Habitation. There’s a lot of
poetry within – 146 pages – but the stop / start manner I found myself reading the
work in came about, I think, more from a particular poetic style. The poetry so
often encourages you to think about a particular reference, to chase it up, and then
return later to ponder the poems some more. So I wasn’t propelled through the
book from start to finish, but this wasn’t a bad thing. I haven’t read Aitken’s previous collections before. I will now though, and I will be interested to note if this
density is a regular approach of his, or a product of the subject at hand. For now,
what follows is a more or less start-to-finish stroll through Eighth Habitation. After
reading through a few times it still seems like an apt way to approach the work. It
is a voyage.
What is an Eighth habitation? The back cover blurb declares it ‘the Buddhist notion of purgatory, a mythical realm where the meaning of human life is
judged’. There’s always the possibility a title is something applied after the fact,
something that luckily seems to fit the content, which I must admit is the way I title
a lot of my poems. But via light research (Google, of course) I gather that Buddhist
purgatories are progressive states of enlightenment one must be born and reborn
into. And the duration of each ‘habitation’ is dependant on karma being resolved,
and, I think the title has a deliberate depth. So what does it mean applied to a collection of poems? Is the arrangement of pieces an
attempt to understand the process, or a simple task of documenting an inevitable process of personal flux? I previously wasn’t aware
Buddhism covered a notion of ‘purgatory’. But I will allow that it seems an interesting concept, and attempt an understanding of
Aitken’s work that includes this.
The book is broken up into three sections. The first is aptly titled ‘broken / unbroken’ as if to remind us the book is broken up
into parts. All existence is as made concrete by a poem is broken into lines (sometimes seemingly arbitrary lines; sometimes musically precise breaks) but these poem-objects are part of a whole too at the same time, an unbroken oneness. It’s also similar to the
title of a Jill Jones’ book of a few years ago, and I wonder if this is a nod to her work, an identification of similar pursuits I think the
writers might share. Jill mentioned the idea of ‘self-discovery’ when we were on a poetics panel together last year. She was citing it
as a positive thing poets can allow into their work. This idea returned to me again and again while reading Eight Habitation. I think
there’s a link.
The poems open with a ‘fin de siècle’, an invocation of ending at the beginning. The term brings with it all the connotations
of an era ending, of decadence and opulence on the brink of being shaken up, yet Aitken also captures a broader sense: an ominous
undertone stemming from this opulence, and the anticipation of change. Is this general sense conflated into personal detail, represented by a woman, a lover, ‘the slender young émigré’ at the centre of the poem? Perhaps she presages change in a more definite
lifetime (a poet’s) using the titular conceit. I thought so at first, but similarly thought her to be an image from the past, painted filmed
or photographed, then imagined into a poem-life. We are left with the paradoxical notion of preferring our own lifetime when the
poem attempts to
…leave you
once again thinking this had been the best century ever
and you were haunted by what she could not forget,
already beyond your knowing, what she is and was.
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MAY - JUNE 2010
All we know is that we cannot step inside the thoughts of another – we can only approximate true connections through shared art
and communication. And which century was the best? This one, or that? After reading this poem it reminded me of Tali White singing ‘…I prefer the twentieth century’, in the Lucksmiths track of the same name. The nostalgic tone of that of that line while sung
suggests that things seemed better before, but only here, from this particular vantage, on the cusp of change (the twenty first century
barely begun). Aitken’s book of poems immediately indicates the intention to ‘inhabit a range of perspectives’ – this first poem admitting to the complexity aesthetic judgment entails in the face of time. Like the last line suggests, an understanding of anything that
is not you and right now (firmly situated on your own dynamic cusp) is somewhat ‘beyond your knowing’. Not that that will stop us
wondering and searching. You can think of this human momentum with a sigh… or wait, defiant jubilation: Nothing’s gonna stop us
now!). We persist and inhabit.
‘Fable’ inhabits a perspective just as distant, skirting around first comings to Australia in general – and fittingly after a fin de
siècle introduces the general concepts of memory, change, but moved to a geographically particular view. This places me in NSW,
with the Googleable idea of the Pig & Sows reef… The way that things are interpreted as instances of being claimed seems to me at
stake in Aitken’s work:
Another’s lack seemed
no more than their own.
All land codified
as the visible.
And similarly, in ‘At Rozelle Asylum’ the actual quartermaster mentioned is hard to find, but the meaning is there – the marks we
leave are the representations of us. The story etched in the past, in this poem too, is a ‘historical footnote, crazed misfit’
‘A biography of 13’ gets more specific, introduces the poet’s father, and, amazingly, a brief image of his grandfather, the inventor
of VB. The interesting connection here for me is that searching out of people or ideas in any form, numeric, familial, might be a
generative method? In their song ‘16 military wives’ The Decemberists use numeric analogies to get at a greater idea (America can’t
say no), but also I suspect as a mode of discovery – in their case the numeric method makes the images more particular, thereby illuminating something more general (America’s political and cultural rhetoric is at times suspect, but so often reduced to the anodyne
soundbyte, represented by the solitary anchorperson on tv going ladedadedada…). For Aitken the connections searched out via the
number thirteen lead him to familial connections, especially down the male line, leaving him with the story of his father:
I think of how to honour a tattooed grazier
who became an auditor of destruction;
how he went to hell and back again
like a number 13 horse…
It’s as if the image and placing of his father has been discovered, or re-awoken, and this then takes over narrative arc of this collection. Because ‘Ionian’ then follows the thread of war, announcing it as key concern. A documentary method is this time the spur.
Vague idea forged of rumination leads to a stricter mode of research, and so on, thought and poetry dancing in cyclical fashion.
‘Ionian’ (one meaning pointing to the Western region of Asia, colonised by the Greeks) shows a long history of battle cannot be
ignored. There is an ingrained process at work. Are all battles alike (personal or national); are all histories alike?
Aitken’s concerns never forget that personal viewpoint. At times I wonder who the references are directed towards – is this the father
figure, or the historical figure? – but regardless of the exactness there’s always a personal immersion. I’m not sure who this botanist
is, but does it matter?
My mind aslant with your haunting
they said that you’d been thrown
off the edge,
whom I imagined I once knew
Are we all explorers still? Like George Bass (I was in Kiama recently – he therefore becomes the dominant seafarer occupying my
mind) doomed to a fate of expedition, but final ignominious loss...
7
BOORANGA NEWS
MAY - JUNE 2010
I liked many of Aiken’s obvious writing tactics throughout this collection. The ‘Postcards (after Michelle Cahill)’, employ the idea of
using another poet’s response as a springboard to further personal enquiry: ‘Who knows if suffering’s inquiry leads you anywhere /
but back to suffering?’…then ’And yet, you’re right Michelle. the children / still wave here… The flux of the form carries this mode
of speaking to a reader. We read Cambodia as simultaneous poets, drifting alongside Aitken as he discovers. Sometimes there is no
agency at all in what we must consume. In ‘A note on the river’ he writes ‘no-one / writes or can // this my accident / of passing by’.
We pass by with him. We wake to alternate takes on the aubade also – compelled to negotiate the various perfections that are, or are
not, present in the world, in Cambodia.
I’ve heard the author Alice Pung talk about the genocide museum in Cambodia before, the Tuol Sleng Prison, describing her
family’s link to the region. At the same time she explained why she has never written of it herself. She claims a novel that goes to this
hell (I am paraphrasing loosely, with the lack that passing time grants us) is not her story to tell. Accordingly I found it interesting
to see Aitken attempt this. Throughout this book, I read the poems as his story, even going so far as to see him on a journey, one that
could have been spelled out for us with the addition of diary entries. (And previous poems, like ‘Archive’ and ‘Translations from the
Malay’, feel like gestures to the more traditional mode of interpreting a travel experience. The words of others are interesting interludes, interesting jabs at poetry. The words of ‘Archive’ cannot be the words of Aitken, if the date is to be believed. Is this a diary from
his father’s military service? The Ionian pursuit? so many questions. A nice spare prose though becomes poetic, and further fills the
journey: ‘Danced with my first Asian’….) I assumed Aitken went to S21, the genocide museum where thousands were killed under the
Pol Pot regime, and then described the visit poetically. In fact we know traveling in this way is important to Aitken as it is shown on
his blog. But it doesn’t have to have happened this way – we read it as such because the story is created in poem and arrangement. The
affect is telling. In a poem like ‘S21’ Aitken seems only to be able to describe things optically, mechanically, and then question any
proper role his words can have in this:
Someone who’d been to Belsen
had written ‘Justice’ in the visitor’s book.
But this was a rustic and ham-fisted machine
with no industrial prototype.
I too have to write, wondering where I am
on the chain-link of paranoia…
It is fitting that ‘The 32 Hells: A Sampler’ follows this – a footnote to a museum to hell in this realm, a musing on the hells to confront
us in others. I gather our karmic debt will right, but not easily.
I was left feeling as if the writer’s self had unraveled over the course of this collection, this voyage. We are introduced to a
mode of personal and historical probing, but eventually left imagining ourselves as but dream versions of ourselves. Aitken questions
the other man in a lover’s dream in his final aubade: ‘what’s he got / that I haven’t / and if its really me’. In ‘Pol Pot in Paris’ he finds
an empathy with the monster, thinking ‘We could have been lifetime friends, together / rooting out evil, picking mushrooms, / sipping
coffee…’ reminding me a little of the necessity of seeing the darkest of aspects in ourselves. A radical leap that makes sense, like the
final lines of the Sufjan Stevens’ song ‘John Wayne Gacey’, where he sings ‘And in my best behaviour / I am really just like him /
Look underneath the floorboards / for the secrets I have hid’. With these various dissolutions I think the poetry of Eighth Habitation
achieves some of its aims for poet and reader alike. No, I didn’t know at all times what Aitken was doing. I even suspect that it only
became clearer with the writing of this review. But his poems are formally beautiful (never unruly), and despite this contain a mess
of allusion and thought. I guess in a way I now identify with Aitken, in the act of identifying with a figure in a photograph, posing an
‘impossible’ question to them both:
To forget or not to,
to write or not to – therefore live –
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MAY - JUNE 2010
PUBLISHING, COMPETITIONS and OPPORTUNITIES
Poetry
awarded for Highly Commended and
Cordite Poetry Review 33: Creative Commons
Entries to be in English, the original unpublished work of the
Commended places. Maximum of three entries per entrant.
entrant and not to have won a cash prize in another competition.
Submissions close May 31, 2010
Online August 2010
Entry Fee – $5 per entry.
Guest Poetry Editor: Alison Croggon
Closing date – 31st May 2010.
Contributors may submit up to five poems on any theme.
Send entries to:Competition Secretary – Boree Log
With this issue, for the first time, Cordite will also be seek-
←(please include ‘Boree Log’)
ing to publish successful contributors’ works under a creative
Eastwood/Hills FAW
commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike) license,
PO Box 4663
meaning that we (and others) will be free to remix these
North Rocks NSW 2151
works. More details will be provided to successful contributors before the issue goes online, however all contributors will
be asked at the time of submission to acknowledge that they
are aware of this special requirement.
2010 PressPress Chapbook Award
Cordite will be trialling an online submission form, accessible
The PressPress Chapbook Award is for an unpublished chapbook length manuscript of poems. The winning manuscript
will receive $600 and chapbook publication with PressPress.
on the website: http://www.cordite.org.au/submit-to-cordite-33-creative-commons/
The Award will be announced in July 2010 on the PressPresssite.
Further details at http://members.ozemail.com.
au/~writerslink/PressPress/PressPress_Award_conditions.
html
The Boree Log Award for Bush Verse
Prize for a Ballad to be written in perfect rhyme and metre,
Closes 31st May
within a maximum of 80 lines, with an Australian bush theme.
First Prize $100 plus trophy and certificate. Certificates
9
BOORANGA NEWS
MAY - JUNE 2010
PUBLISHING, COMPETITIONS and OPPORTUNITIES
The Bridport Prize
Rolf Boldrewood Literary Awards
The richest OPEN writing prize.
Closes 17th September
SHORT STORIES: 1st prize = £ 5000 (approx. 7460 US$, 5590
€)
POEMS: 1st Prize = £ 5000 (approx. 7460 US$, 5590 €)
FLASH FICTION: 1st Prize =£ 1000 (approx. 1490 US$, 1118
€)
Competition for prose (max 3000 words) and poetry (max 80
lines).
First prize $500.
Further details available at: www.mrl.nsw.gov.au.
Closing date 30th June 2010.(24.00 MIdnight GMT)
Further details at: http://www.bridportprize.org.uk/
Lyric Writing Competition
Closes 30th September
Write the lyrics to a new hit single, music composed by James
Roche. Winning lyrics will be recorded and released.
Prose
Visit www.australianpoetrycentre.org.au for further details.
EJ Brady Short Story Competition
Closing date: 31st August
Nature Writing Essay Prize
Categories for short story (2500 words max) and very short
story (700 words max).
The Nature Conservancy Australia is giving you the chance to
win $5000 with publication in the journal Indigo.
Prize of $1500 for short story and $500 for very short story.
A new biennial prize for nature writing open to any Australian, for an essay between 3000 and 5000 words exploring the
author’s sense of place in Australia.
Fir further details visit: www.artsmallacoota.org.
Judged by Sally Blakeney and Mark Tredinnick.
Email [email protected] for guidelines, eligibility and entry
forms. Entries close 30th September.
10
BOORANGA WRITERS’ CENTRE
APPLICATION FOR 2010 MEMBERSHIP
Booranga (trading as Wagga Wagga Writers Writers Inc.) was formed in 1987 to assist and promote local authors and their
work. The group holds regular readings at local venues, conducts writing workshops, offers fellowships at Booranga, the Riverina Writers’ Centre at Charles Sturt University, and published an annual anthology, fourW, under the imprint of fourW press,
and is active in promoting writing and writers throughout the Riverina.
MEMBERSHIP PERIOD 1ST JANUARY 31ST DECEMBER 2010
ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP ($33) or CONCESSION ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP ($22)
6-MONTH MEMBERSHIP ($17)
GROUP MEMBERSHIPS ARE AVAILABLE
MEMBERSHIP ENTITLES YOU TO...
- Copy of fourW twenty Anthology
- Regular newsletter (bi-monthly) & e-list mailouts
- 10% discount at Book City, Wagga
- 10% Discount at Angus & Robertson Bookworld,
Wagga
* Membership prices are rising... Get in before
June 30th to get your membership at the old low
price!!
- 10% discount to RTC performances
- Member discounts to readings, performances & workshops
- Invitations to writing events & get-togethers
- Access to a network of writers, book enthusiaists &
other writers’ centres for information & friendship
- Use of Booranga Writers’ Centre resources, such as
library and computer
Note: Student Membership ($11) is now also available
for students under 21 years of age. Student members
will receive newsletters & discounted admission to
reading etc. but will not receive a complimentary copy
of fourW nineteen.
Please fill out and send application form to:
Wagga Wagga Writers Writers Inc. Booranga Writers’ Centre,
Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga NSW 2678, Phone/Fax (02) 69332688
Name:
Address:
Telephone:
Email:
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Enclosed is: $............. cheque/money order FOR: single / concession / student / 6-month membership (please circle)
undeliverable return to:
POSTAGE PAID AUSTRALIA
Booranga Writers’ Centre
Locked Bag 588
Wagga Wagga, NSW, 2678
POSTAGE PAID
AUSTRALIA
WWWW & the Booranga Writers’ Centre are supported by: