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This month’s Dog-Eared Readings took place in the elegant Stirling Hotel up in the Adelaide Hills and featured Corrie Hosking, Molly Murn and Rebekah Clarkson in conversation with Pip Williams, hosted by the brilliant Rachael Mead and equally brilliant Heather Taylor-Johnson.
Corrie was first to read who shared an excerpt from her next work as yet unpublished and being the inaugural winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2002. Accompanied by drawings of insects and birds, Corrie took us back to our roots where nature is something to be mindful about.
Next up was Molly, who shared a collection of poems also unpublished that focused on place and the liminal spaces in between. Molly works at the Matilda Bookshop in Stirling, a gorgeous store with beautiful books and I’ve heard Molly read before at a literary festival, so it was good to see and hear her again.
After the break, Rebekah chatted to Pip about her thoughts on various quotes by other writers, her writing practice and the thinking behind her books. I’m always fascinated to hear how other writers work and Pip’s goal setting of one word a day means she never fails! Continuing the theme of unpublished work, Pip shared the same and having read The Dictionary of Lost Words, one of those books I didn’t want to end, I’ll buy her next, The Bookbinder of Jericho, when she reads at Writers Week starting shortly.
Being up in the hills brought a different audience and it was wonderful to celebrate the incredible local writers who generously shared a blend of prose and poetry that we’ll no doubt see in print soon. The next readings include one of my favourite poets, Andy Jackson, so absolutely not one to be missed.
A spectacular line-up graced this month’s Dog-Eared Readings – Lisa Hannett, Jelena Dinić and J.M. Coetzee in conversation with Shannon Burns – at the Howling Owl in Adelaide.
Facilitated by the effervescent Heather Taylor Johnson and Rachael Mead, the crowd was at capacity unsurprisingly, eagerly awaiting an evening of prose, poetry and memoir.
First up was Canadian-born Australian writer Lisa, who shared a visceral short story called ‘The Honey Stomach’ from her new collection The Fortunate Isles just published by Egaeus Press. Lisa writes speculative dark fiction and this prose showcased all the hallmarks of the genre, set in the fantastical world of Barradoon. With myths and folklore the focus, it bristled with tension, not unlike the bees frequenting it, the nectar-collecting an almost sated violence, culminating in the mother showing her children how it’s done.
Next up was Jelena, who began by asking the audience what inclusion means to them, stemming from her work with the CALD community and leading a multidisciplinary team. Jelena read poems from her latest collection, In the Room with the She Wolf from Wakefield Press, that won the Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2019. This work speaks of how family, culture and place intertwine but also of fractures, where countries no longer exist and post is ‘snatched from the dangerous man on the motorbike’.
After the break came John chatting to Shannon about his memoir Childhood (Text Publishing), continuing the disconnect where Shannon’s most formative years were spent being passed between his fractured parents – a mother who loved violently and a father not at all. They touched on ethics, discussed truth-telling versus storytelling with Shannon of the firm belief his work is the latter, and what you lose moving from working class to middle, a rather thought-provoking and poignant perspective on that inevitable social divide.
So I’ve read Jelena’s collection, am two-thirds through Shannon’s book, have yet to read John’s Booker Prize winning one and must order Lisa’s, which looks to be a gift in itself with its hardbacked intricate design. While my kindle was good for emigrating here and I am mindful of the trees it takes, give me a physical book any day.
Yesterday held a wonderful afternoon of poetry with the brilliant Mike Ladd and Rachael Mead, bookended with music by classical guitarist Alain Valodze.
Part of the annual Nature Festival, the event was held in Prospect Community Garden, with Mike and Rachael taking turns to read poems that either responded to each other’s or continued the thread in some way.
Both shared pieces that focused on place, belonging and home. Mike read ‘What the creek said’ and spoke about water having legal rights, alongside poems about his mother, flying in over the Coorong from the Eastern states and ‘Black Swans Mating’ from his collection Invisible Mending published by Wakefield Press to illustrate how nature never fails to surprise. Rachael fell back to the days of walking down Rundle Street with her dad when she was a young girl, then fast forward to turning 13 in the year Return of the Jedi hit screens, living in a bushfire zone and one of my favourite poems from her collection The Flaw in the Pattern (UWA Publishing) called ‘The dog, the blackbird and the anxious mind’.
Both are passionate about the environment and draw attention to the damage being inflicted and the beauty it offers regardless. Paired with fruit and cheese platters and Alain’s dulcet tones, who’s featured at WOMADelaide no less, all in an abundant garden, it really was a wonderful afternoon well spent.
August is Australia’s poetry month, deemed so by Red Room Poetry, a leader in commissioning, creating, promoting and publishing poetry in meaningful ways. And it was busy.
Launched in 2021, Poetry Month aims to increase access, awareness and visibility of poetry, with Red Room Poetry hosting a variety of events, such as readings and workshops, and providing prompts to generate those all-important words. There’s also a poetry showcase in each state and one of the many wonderful aspects of this initiative is the ‘pay what you can’ ethos.
The first event I signed up for was an online book club, with Andy Jackson, Ellen van Neerven and James Jinag, facilitated by the effervescent Felicity Plunkett. Each shared passages and reflections on a favourite book of their choice with some wide-ranging and collaborative selections. Andy’s and Ellen’s fantastic work I’m familiar with, Human Looking and Throat being their latest collections respectively, but James I wasn’t, so it was great to hear his thoughts on the texts shared and learn about him.
Next up was an online workshop with Andy Jackson through Writers SA called Un-alone Poetry, where we delved into self-portrait poems with Andy sharing some from his latest collection that brings together the voice of the disabled. I’ve participated in Andy’s courses before and this was of the same brilliant ilk, perfectly balancing time to read and reflect with the opportunity to write and share. We even indulged in some collaborative poetry by being paired and swapping lines via the chat function in Zoom, that delivered some surprising results.
The Dog-Eared Readings are brainchild of two beloved poets, Heather Taylor-Johnson and Rachael Mead, with the inaugural one taking place mid-week at The Howling Owl. Backed by a grant from Arts SA and with free drinks very kindly provided by Red Room Poetry, these readings aim to fill the gap left by Ken Bolton’s Lee Marvin series and offer the same imitable blend of poetry and prose. First up was Stephen Orr reading from his novel Sincerely, Ethel Malley, followed by the krumping (a new performance style I discovered!) Matcho Intrumz Cassidy and finished with Dominic Guerrera in conversation with Natalie Harkin who shared poems from her latest collection Archival-Poetics, a gift of poems (literally) that reckon with the State’s colonial archive.
Another online workshop, The Speculative Poet, with Sally Wen Mao completed the month for me, in which we explored blurring the boundaries between fact and magic, research and conjecture, with poetry the perfect form with which to do so. Sally shared slides and some insights from the infamous Toni Morrison on speculation, as well as a few of her own poems, with ‘Nucleation‘ a particular standout for me. Sally’s award-winning collection, Oculus and forthcoming, The Kingdom of Surfaces, both from Graywolf Press, are the latest additions to my ever-growing wish list.
What I love about projects and events like these, apart from showcasing the fine work that’s out there, is their ability to inspire and connect, and for me generated several ideas for the next full-length collection I’m working on, as well as introducing me to new poets and forms. So next year, I must remember to clear my calendar for August again, give the poetry room to breathe.
It’s been an eventful week. Wednesday I went to the launch of Jill Jones’s latest collection at Goodwood Books and Saturday to Poets and Pizza at Coriole.
Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems is Jill’s thirteenth collection who is one of the most prolific poets I know, not to mention amazingly talented and widely read. Published by Puncher and Wattmann and introduced by book curator and arts consultant Sarah Tooth, Jill began with the beautiful poem ‘mother i am waiting now to tell you’ about things unsaid, which she read with her wife Annette, alternating the left with the right justified lines on the page. And then followed a Q&A style session, with Sarah asking how Jill got into poetry who shared her inspirations, which includes Kenneth Slessor and lines from his infamous poem ‘Five Bells’ that left an impression:
Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down.
And it’s this same sense of profound reverie that’s so evocative of Jill’s work, pulling you in and under to a different line of sight. Jill read several poems, including an ekphrastic one literally split into snippets of art and most notably ‘Unbuttoned’, which opens with ‘If I have to earn some skin does it have to be new?’ then proceeds to explore ways to obtain this, culminating in this rather haunting undress:
Or shall I unbutton and fold
what’s left, step out of my nerves
and my veins, leave everything
– corpse, crevice, carcass, shell –
but keep my breath for
the impending and tremendous air
that’s beyond howling when
I touch it to my old pelt?
The bookshop was packed and the line for a signed copy snaked to the door. Originally hailing from Sydney, Jill is now a permanent part of the Adelaide poetry scene, for which I’m immensely glad.
Two of my favourite poets read at Saturday’s event – Rachael Mead and Louise Nicholas – along with Kalicharan Nigel Dey and Bruce Greenhalgh, facilitated by another wonderful local poet, Jude Aqualina. First up was Bruce, whose clever and compact repertoire focused on rhythm and rhyme, both entertaining and far-reaching, in which he explored various aspects of the human condition in a relatable way.
Rachael followed, beginning with ‘The wild grammar of leeches’ from her collection The Flaw in the Pattern by UWA Publishing, with the poem part of a sequence about trekking the Overland Track in Tasmania containing these gorgeous snippets:
I shed my clothes like an awful first draft,
…look down to find my body being edited, its pages
harshly corrected with black punctuation.
…full of stolen content they race end for end
across my skin, challenging my sensitive narrative
with their bold-third person revisions,…
Rachael also shared a poem inspired by the #metoo movement and another comprising a series of broken questions, the kind you hear every day, but in this context, stick.
Louise followed the break with a selection of poems centered around family and memory, sharing the rather poignant ‘Echolalia’ from her collection The List of Last Remaining published by Five Islands Press, about her graceful name-giving and how it changed after her mother’s death:
So when she died
my name for a time
lost its grace
became shape without shadow
question without answer
and even now
if I were to stand on a mountain top
and shout out my name
there’d be no echo
calling back.
Louise also shared entertaining poems about the year she was born, the wife of the man who invented the pap smear and about her children who were in the audience, but presumably forewarned.
Nigel finished the set, urging us to dance and sing, delivering his poems in a unique way, his previous acting career clearly evident in the way he performed and engaged with the crowd.
And now I’m planning my own event to launch ice cream ‘n’ tar, which offers a somewhat surreal perspective on the ever-shifting climate and lack of inaction. Every little helps.
Port Adelaide hosted its inaugural writers’ festival this weekend themed ‘Living Landscapes‘ in the historic Hart Mill Precinct, with an impressive line up and books courtesy of Matilda Bookshop.
Hosted in conjunction with Writers SA, the program comprised talks and readings examining our relationship with the environment and the role it plays in art, followed by a series of workshops to learn the craft of nature writing. The venue was perfect, set beside the beautiful Port River, home to a variety of life, including dolphins.
I attended the afternoon sessions, the first a panel discussion on ‘Writing the Changing Landscape’ with Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inga Simpson and Jill Jones, facilitated by Writers SA Director, Jessica Alice. It was fascinating to learn about their connection with country, the living world around them and how they capture and express this in their work, often giving voice to the damage we’re doing. Ali spoke about healthy moments and how childhood homes become unrecognisable. Inga grew up on a farm and sought solitude to develop her work. Jill shared examples of mindful suburban walking without distraction. There was talk of the creature’s we’re responsible for, how nature is giving us the solutions and a request for us to be curious again. But the most profound words for me were these when discussing those in power:
Just because you have the money, doesn’t mean you hold the riches.
Ali Cobby Eckermann
The next session was a conversation between Molly Munro and Hannah Kent exploring ‘Nature as Character’. Molly echoed attendance to country and explained how Kangaroo Island, the setting for her latest work, is the last spiritual stopping place for indigenous cultures in South Australia. Hannah referred to the ‘livingness of things’ and shared her intimate connection with the landscape of Iceland where her first novel was set. Both stressed the importance of place in their work, how it must be more than a backdrop to a story to engage not just their readers, but themselves too. They also shared writers who have influenced their writing and that’s one of many things I love about these events, the reading recommendations you leave with, where you discover new writers and work, thought and theory.
I had booked Rachael Mead’s workshop – ‘Writing the Landscape anew through Poetry’ – today, but a deadline snuck up on me so unfortunately I had to cancel. Yesterday was a memorable afternoon, which left me deeply thoughtful, reminding me again how glad I am that I grew up when I did, with a childhood outside exploring nature, back when seasons were sure of themselves.
J V Birch 