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Sam van Zweden

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Crikey! A New Lit Blog!

I was sad to see Angela Meyer step down as lit blogger for Crikey, but it seems like everything’s panning out really well. Angela’s still blogging, on her now WordPress-hosted LiteraryMinded, and today saw the great reveal of the new Crikey lit blog, written by Bethanie Blanchard. Bethanie’s young, she’s friendly, and she’s everywhere at the moment. Her writing (including her first post on Lit-icism) sits on the edges of criticism and personal, and this makes it easy to read, but also informative and engaging.

As per everything-Crikey, the blog design is simple, lots of white space and a lack of flashing things. The banner for Lit-icism is pretty great. I’m looking forward to Bethanie’s time with Crikey and seeing what she gets up to on Lit-icism.

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La-la-la…

The wonderful folk at Verity La have been doing a series of posts on the topic of whether “a new archaeology” has been created by the rise of digital publishing.

There have been some great people saying some great things on the forum up to this point – I think I mentioned Jeff Sparrow’s post a few weeks ago, I found his piece particularly enjoyable. Today I joined all those great people… Whether I’ve said something great or not, I’ll leave for you to decide.

You can read my post here.

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Super-Early Heads Up

As you’ve probably gathered from previous posts and publications, I find non-fiction challenging and fun.

The most recent creative non-fiction I’ve read that excited me was by David Shields – his Reality Hunger blew my head clear off my shoulders, and The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead really made me think about family legacies and storytelling, as well as mortality and the way we write and speak about our own experiences. David Shields is exciting to read, and he’s exciting to watch speak. He has exciting ideas, and he presents them in new and exciting ways.

With all this love I’ve got for David Shields and his writing and his practice and his entire being, I screamed when I found that he’s a keynote speaker for RMIT’s  (November) 2012 conference, NonfictioNow. As an RMIT student I’m hoping to smuggle myself in backstage and get to meet the man. And if not, I’ll at least be able to drool on his brain from a distance.

So an early heads up – I’ll post again in a year when the conference is actually happening, but until then – get onto David Shields’ work so you’re all caught up by the time he’s in town.

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Good News!

Good news, folks! After the failure of REDgroup, much beloved book store Reader’s Feast shut down. While I’ve heard a bunch of different reports of why this happened, it seems like their closure wasn’t directly related to the failure of REDgroup – from some reports, the rent at their Swanston/Bourke Street site was increased to the point where it couldn’t be sustained, forcing Reader’s Feast out.

This morning I woke to the happy news that the store is now privately owned – which it’s always felt like anyway – and will be reopening shortly in the Georges Building on Collins Street. This news is great – Reader’s Feast not only have the regular range of books, but they also stock journals and smaller press publications that are often hard to find in larger book stores. On top of this, they also run a generous amount of events – book signings and author panels, as well as readers’ and writers’ festivals.

I’m glad to hear they’re back.

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Overload Call-Out for Volunteers

It’s almost that time again – only a few weeks until the 10th Overload Poetry Festival starts.

They’re looking for volunteers for front of house –  this is a great way to meet some really lovely people and make some poetry scene connections. And you get to see a bunch of really great gigs for free. GO!

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EVENTS! My goodness, EVENTS!

There’s just SO much coming up – my credit card’s getting a decent workout. As is the bit of my brain that controls excitement. I’d almost go as far as saying I’m perpetually excited by all the tickets I’ve got and things that are coming up.

Broadly speaking – two festivals. Melbourne Writers Festival and Overload Poetry Festival. MWF starts tomorrow, and Overload runs from the 9-17th of September.

Excited about the following:

– Tomorrow night’s keynote speech and opening of Melbourne Writers Festival by Jonathan Franzen, and general opening frivolities and Melbourne Town Hall.

– Liner Notes, 3rd September – always a thoroughly entertaining night where spoken word artists “cover” (write on the theme of) a particular album. I’m not a huge INXS fan, but I am a fan of the people involved in the event – Emilie Zoey Baker, Omar Musa, Catherine Deveny, Ben Pobjie… The list goes on. And The Toff in Town is a great venue for these kind of writing events, so it promises to be a great night.

–  Melbourne Poetry Map launch – 15th September, at Loop Bar. Last year’s event was really fun, they had a huge range of poets on places that were familiar, and some that weren’t so familiar. This year ten new poets have been commissioned to do ten new poems about ten new places around our fair city – poets include Luka Lesson, Amy Bodossian, Joel McKerrow, Geoff Lemon, and other boys and girls who kick poetry’s butt on a regular basis.

– This is the big one. Shane Koyczan. If you know the fellow and hadn’t yet heard, I apologize if I just made you wet yourself. He’s doing a few gigs in Melbourne – one is some sort of science and rationalism conference at Jeff’s Shed on the 18th, tickets are about $300 and his set is only half an hour. I’m sticking with the two other gigs he’s doing, with Overload. He’ll be at the Tell It Like It Is slam on Friday 16th September, and also at the Overload closing night at the Fitzroy Town Hall on the 17th. Tickets for the closing night are available online, so get onto it, you don’t want to miss this man – the closing event also has a huge lineup of our own Melbourne poets.

If you don’t know Shane Koyczan, try this on for size. Sorry about the uncontrollable crying you’re about to do. Let’s remedy that with some uncontrollable laughing from this one. And just for good measure, this one is one of my favourites. If you watch these and feel as strongly as I do about the man’s brilliance, I’ll catch you at the gigs on the 16th and 17th. (We can talk about how we *completely* dig Degrassi!)

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Goals: Making Them, Kicking Them, Putting Them Out in Public

In the spirit of oversharing, which I’m very fond of (and fond of the internet for), I’m posting some of my latest writing goals here so that you can all keep me accountable if I try to let them slide away into the abyss.

Having (just five minutes ago) finished timetabling my next uni semester, I’ve realised I’m committing to some big things here:

– I plan on reading at least one essay a week. This is pretty easy to do during the semester, but outside of it I tend to let this slide. I really want to expand my short non-fiction knowledge base, as it’s something I’m interested in writing a fair bit of myself. So. That.
– This second point is bigger: I’m committing to doing at least one writing exercise every day. Furious Horses style, only without the public sharing. Perhaps at the end of each week I’ll post on here the exercises I’ve done, and whether they’ve been helpful or not, because I know a lot of this site’s readers are writers, and you never can have enough ideas for writing exercises.
– Competitions! I want to start entering competitions. There’s money to be made, folks. And recognition to be given. Might as well give it a crack. If I don’t, crap people might win. And we can’t have that.
– Every quarter, I plan on sending off a piece to a publication which I don’t really honestly believe will accept me. This is how we make impossible things real. This is what happened with The Big Issue, and it’s inspired me.

I’m hoping that making these plans public will create some extra accountability. If I try to pretend this post never happened, give me hell.

 

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Going Down Digital

You know Going Down Swinging, right? It’s a pretty nifty literature journal, jam packed with tasty pretty things. It’s produced on decent quality paper. It comes with a CD of spoken word, which is cool because it recognizes that not all poetry is page-bound…

In this same tradition of not being scared to embrace different forms, Going Down Swinging are moving bravely forward into the digital realm, and it’s quite exciting. Other journals have moved this way already – Sleepers Almanac have an iPhone app. Many journals have an online component which complements the print, such as Meanjin or Kill Your Darlings. But online-only publications? Bravery.

The next issue (#31) of Going Down Swinging will be a digital publication which “mixes video and animation, audio, richly coloured visual art, photography, and interactive text” – so not a boring page-on-a-screen kind of switch. My brain can’t quite picture what this will be like, so I’m excited!

The launch for Going Down Swinging issue #31 will be happening this Friday (17th June) at The Builder’s Arms, 211 Gertrude Street in Fitzroy. It starts at 8pm, and there’s going to be poetry and story-telling a-plenty. There’s also a promise of baked-goods, and that’s a good reason to go anywhere.

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Marketing, Expanding, Not Spamming Friends

I’ve just started a Facebook fan page for this here blog.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how to expand my readership, and whether that’s something that’s important to me (answer: “No, not really, I’d rather have loyal and engaged readers than many, many not-caring ones”). I’ve also been thinking about what kinds of connections I form with people outside my immediate peer group, and how I do that. All these things are connected with my reasons for starting the fan page. It’s also a bit about egoism.

Also, I’m feeling somewhat merciful toward all those friends who don’t read my blog anyway and have been putting up with my “NEW POST!” spam for over a year now. (Sorry guys). And I want to give people a chance to communicate with me outside commenting directly on my blog – which is becoming less common anyway, probably because it’s a bit… tricky. So if people don’t want to comment on my blog, what’s their other option? Twitter? Ok, but not the ideal forum for real discussion. Facebook has “like” functions, which require almost no thought at all other than the “liking” impulse, but they still express what someone thinks with minimal effort. And, as I’ve discovered in talking to other bloggers, some people are certainly more comfortable engaging via Facebook. Unless you’re in my direct friendship circle, you don’t have an opportunity to do that. Up until now. And, as per previous posts, I have noticed I’ve got some readers who aren’t my mum or boyfriend.

So! Go forth and LIKE, yo!

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