Paige Turner November

 Edging towards the end of the year and towards summer, towards Christmas and all it allows us to manifest. Good luck and good sleeps to all those booksellers (and other retail workers) who face up to what Christmas means every day for about six weeks before the actual day itself.. And I wish you ALL a fine reading season. Tonnes of things still happening….

Seasonal Poets: The Spring Reading is on 12th November, 6pm at the lovely Hadleys in Hobart. Anne Morgan, Ross Donlon and  Edith Speers are reading. Edith was a Poet in Residence when I was at school and the introduction to her poetry was gently seismic. I plan to go along to hear her again, so many years later.

Poet Gina Mercer is involved in a collaboration taking place later in the month, with three musicians in the form of Rubato Express, and the Derwent River, their muse and inspiration. Imagine it. The Derwent from Lake St Clair to Storm Bay. They have composed music in response to her poems, and, in her words, “at a recent rehearsal they played a piece they'd just composed to interweave with one of my poems about stingrays. And oh, I just about swooned with delight. It was the loveliest most stingray-ey music I could imagine... all ripply and sinuous and just brilliant.”
Diving Into The Derwent: music, poetry, images is happening at MAC on 25^th November at 2.30 pm. Tickets: $25/$20, with a homebaked afternoon tea included.

On 21 November, journalist Kerry O'Brien's Launceston launch of his recent memoir, Kerry O’Brien, a memoir ( I had to) is happening at St John Craft Bar, Launceston, co -hosted by Petrarchs Bookshop & UTAS. He will also be in conversation with Professor Richard Eccleston, of the Institute for Social Change, at the Stanley Burbury Theatre, UTas on November 22 at 6pm.

Josh Santospirito is pouring his generous energy into comics and zones again, with

November 16th starring the launch party for the Small Press Zine Fair.  This will feature Read To Me: a night of audio-visual storytelling with seven storytellers including our very special guest from Sydney Meg O’Shea who is a 2018 Ignatz nominee for “outstanding online comic”. This event is from 7pm at 65 Murray street. $5 entry with a bar and music. More details and full lineup here - https://www.facebook.com/events/435276646876657/

Pay heed too, the 2018 Small Press Zine Fair is on November 17, from 1pm at the Battery Point Community Hall, All welcome! Young and old. This is the sixth annual zine fair. https://www.facebook.com/events/224057454971379/

Tasmanian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s debut short story won the Hope Prize, of which the winning short stories are being launched in book form on 8 November at 6:30pm at Readings in Hawthorn, Melbs. The Hope Prize is the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s national short-story competition, judged by famous people and it encourages writers to explore resilience in the face of adversity.

Tasmanian writer Ben Walter, whose short form is mighty fine and has been most recently recognised in this year’s Best Australian Science Writing, for an essay about the bushfires in the Tarkine region, and also with a story included in Best Summer Stories from Black Inc should be picked up by a publisher who will be able to respectfully bring his longer form to a wider audience. Sorry if this is embarrassing Benny, but seriously!

On November 20 at 5.30, Tasmanian of the year, Scott Rankin from Big hArt is launching his platform paper for the Quarterly Essay,  Cultural Justice and the Right to Thrive.

 Bright Thinking is on 8 November, topic is Death. Hosted by Island magazine, Womankind magazine, New Philosopher magazine, Salamanca Arts Centre and poet store at the Salamanca Arts Centre. This is a good event to get some brain muscles philosophically churning, and to meet randoms.

The Society of Women Writers Tasmania Poetry Prize is open for entries and concludes on the 30th November 2018.  Information about entering is on the SWWT website: www.swwtas.org, or from the Competition Coordinator on wendylaing02@gmail.com. 

A Published Event has just launched the latest 'seam' of Lost Rocks at The Unconformity, along with walks and talks by three of the authors. Copper by Jerry de Gryse, Shale by Julie Gough, Copper by Raymond Arnold, Mudstone by Rory Wray-McCann and Lead Sulphide by Tine Melzer and Markus Kummer. All the details for purchasing are on our website http://www.apublishedevent.net/projects/lost-rocks or they are also available from Fullers Bookshop.

Let me finish with something mercenary. For a couple of hussles, I sell books. New ones, and second hand ones that you can find on my website ONHERSELECTION.bigcartel.com. I select the very best books, completely subjectively and tell you exactly why I think the 1988 David Foster autobiography, the 19XX Booker Prize winner, the El Salvadorean Nobel Laureate, the trashy-ness of Blue Lagoon (with the movie cover) are the books I would love you to read. Happy Christmas, top of the season to you.

Review - Lost Rocks

Basalt by Ross Gibson
Conglomerate by Ben Walter
Crystal Bone by Greg Lehman
Marble by Ally Bishop
Lost Rocks

Review – Rachel Edwards

“Suddenly a gray rock becomes ashen or clouded with dream. A ring around a rock is luck. To find a red rock is to discover earthblood”, writes Lidia Yuknavitch in her eviscerating memoir The Chronology of Water. Yuknavitch seeks to wade through her grief by surrounding herself with rocks.

Rocks, despite their profound variety are often used as a symbol of heaviness and lack of movement and, outside of geology and childlike wonder, their poetry can be lost or ignored.

Rocks, despite their profound variety are often used as a symbol of heaviness and lack of movement and, outside of geology and childlike wonder, their poetry can be lost or ignored.

Lost Rocks, created by A Published Event (Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward) ignites a creative fascination with a series of rocks and minerals and, in their own words “is an accumulative event of mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling.”

Lost Rocks is also a collection of forty books that are being published, slowly, over four years. The project was conceptually inspired when Phillips and Woodward found a discarded rock board at the Tip Shop in Glenorchy. They have commissioned forty books in response to these rocks. The latest four books (of eight released so far) are Crystal Bone by Greg Lehman, Marble by Ally Bisshop, Conglomerate by Ben Walter, and Basalt by Ross Gibson. The books share a clean and simple design; white paperbacks with red silhouettes of the rock on the cover. They are small in stature, have delicate newsprint pages and they wear the process of publishing almost literally on their sleeves, bringing the formal structure of a book to the fore, including a page titled ‘colophon’. The colophon is a publisher’s device to either provide a decorative reference to the publisher, or simply the information legally required when publishing a book.

Prominent Tasmanian writer and thinker Greg Lehman’s Crystal Bone is both a deeply personal story as well as a devastating austere account of this rock and the almost centrifugal importance of it for this island’s first people. It includes diverse writing styles and a poetic recounting of a story of a tyrelore, an island wife. The images that accompany the ‘Crystal’ chapter - simple line drawings of flints, sculpted for blade and palms and annotated with the name of the place from where they have been removed is quietly devastating. The illustrations provide a desolate contrast to the lost stories of these rocks.

Ross Gibson’s Basalt describes the motion and movement of lava which then becomes basalt. In the text he returns to the paradoxical movement of this rock; the pulses of a lava flow still evident where it is found in nature. Gibson is an academic and a poet and while Basalt is a fascinating read, it has a didactic tone and there is something about the melding of poetry and geological process that did not mesh well for this reader.

Ben Walter, whose continuously transcendental writing tackles the rock conglomerate. He uses his element elegantly, as a literary device. A walker falls and hits his head on a “fist of conglomerate”. It is a raw story of a death in the Tasmanian wilderness, an inadvertent tragedy that occurs during a walk with mates. Walter writes the bush like few others down here, his words lithe and with little sentimentality, poetically descriptive.

Ally Bisshop has sculpted a tale from marble – its history, magic and the the numinous space it inhabits for gods and men. She talks about its mining and like Lehman utilises a range of stories of styles to capture this heavy rock.

These books are part of a beautiful publishing work of art, one that travels through geological and human time – a slow burn, drip feed of small, versatile publications. There is something about the Lost Rocks collection seems to inspire writers to enter new territory; cross genres and enter exciting literary spaces. It is a brilliant concept and I anticipate the forthcoming books with a sense of exhilaration

Versions of this review have been published in The Mercury and Warp.