Your Mid-Week Art Break: Philippa Rice

Philippa Rice's illustrations are goooorgeous and totally charming. You can check them out over on her website here.

Friday Finds

Tom Hanks performing slam poetry on 90s sitcom 'Full House' might be the best thing I've seen all week.

- Bethanie Blanchard of Lit-icism has written a great article on literary prizes and their importance.

- Speaking of writerly things, this is an excellent post on goals, conflicts and stakes. Super, super handy stuff if you're thinking or working on a project.

- Lastly today, these illustrated throws are beautiful.

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Rachael Hunt

Go and devour Rachael Hunt's awesome portfolio. It is the best kind of whimsy explosion.

Sunday Short: Hotels by Josephine Rowe

I normally try to get these to you much earlier in the day, but this one escaped me unfortunately. My weekend's been a little explosive. I've recommended Josephine Rowe before, but she's stilll fresh in my head after NYWF so you can have another one. It's Rowe's prose, more than anything else, that makes her such an exquisite read.  Her ability to swell up intense bouts of emotion in such short pieces of writing is a skill I admire so, so much.

They drink steadily in the first few days. Glasses stationed around the room with dried half-moons of lime in the bottom. So hot out that the tint is blistering off the windows of cars in the street. But that is out in the great, dusty world that they are not a part of for the moment. The insides of the hotels are cool and stark, and there is nothing to remind them of themselves. Their luggage lost in the mirrored halls of wardrobes. The bed a vast white plane where nothing terrible has ever happened, where they lie naked on the bright sheets and he tries to lift the bruise from her face with remedies he has heard or read about. Butter, honey, kaffir lime. And although she knows none of it will work, she smiles and lets him. The bruise remains and blackens, but they wake each morning to clean light with only the slightest recollection of the dreams they have climbed out of.

Hotels is a lovely short, and one you can check out over at the Meanjin website.

Friday Finds

The teaser for the newest season of Misfits came out over the week, and whilst it's a bit of a nothing-trailer, it's still a good glimpse at a few of the shiny new faces on the show. People seem to be in two-minds about the new characters, but I'm excited for some fresh faces, especially given my not-so-secret love for Rudy and Joseph Gilgun's face generally, and his introduction to the show last season was so great. I'm also excited to see more powers because they've been pretty inspired on Misfits, and that fact along with all the other tropes that the series owns (time travel! star crossed lovers! daddy issues!) push most of my TV buttons.

- This is a great article on the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women.

- I'm a half in-love with these photos of abandoned mid-century modern homes. There's something both creepy and whimsical about houses that have been so lived-in and are now just so empty, like echoes of the lives spent there previously.

- Ra Ra Superstar, a local boutique over at Paddington, has recently started utilising their blog in some pretty awesome ways. Their Tuesday post was all on Japanese Fashion and it is so, so great.

I'm in the process of frantically getting my novella ready for Seizure's Viva la Novella competition, so my posts may be a little lax the next two weeks. The regulars are all teed up though, so you can expect those guys to resurface. Happy weekend, everyone.

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Holly Leonardson

Holly Leonardson is a Tasmanian artist specialising in collage based prints, and man, she outputs some beautiful stuff. Her re-purposing of vintage photographs are entirely charming and really, genuinely lovely. You can check out more of her stuff over at her blog or buy some of it on etsy.

The Horror, The Horror: On the Hunt for Feminist-Friendly Horror Films

My housemate, Emma and I tend to hack and slash (ha) our way through the horror section of any video store with a sort of reverence that normal people reserve for political debates or reality shows. This surprises a lot of people, I imagine partially given I’m 5’2 and have a passion for  fuzzy animals and pink kitchen utensils, but mostly due to the fact that I am a raging feminist and the horror genre doesn’t really lend itself to feminist values. Or, you know, any woman-not-as-meat-bag-values - you gotta keep in mind that one of the most popular subgenres in recent times is torture porn. Which brings up a good point, because horror isn't simply a genre that glorifies sexism and misogyny by language, character or tone, but by punishment and overtly sexualised violence. From Rosemary's Baby to Hostel, an enormous portion of horror relies on getting their lady characters naked, covering them in bodily fluids and generally putting something inside them, whether that be human/ghostly/devil penis (this is occasionally consensual, usually dubcon, frequently explicitly non-consensually) or knife or some other horrifying phallic device.

Joey Comeau of A Softer World fame recently compiled a list of good, rape-free, trigger-free horrors and it really is an interesting exploration of a minority field of the genre. Emma and I are in the process of getting our hands on the ones we haven't seen, but I find myself disagreeing with quite a few of the ones on the list that I have watched already. Let the Right One In for instance, (which after a few comments akin to mine has been removed from the list) I believe has heavily implied sexualised violence. I also argue whether or not The Ruins can be considered a good film (Spoiler alert: it's not). 

The list is a good one though, and it's been making me think a lot if I can name any sort of addition, can supply some sort of alternative in time for Halloween. I could name a dozen Hitchcock films for sure (A Shadow of a Doubt, people, watch it), but I'm not sure if they classify as horror as much as they do thriller, even if they deal with horrific themes. 
I also always want to include Scream, The Last House on the Left and the original Nightmare on Elm Street in any horror list of recommendation I make, but whilst I certainly think all three have compelling female characters and even some feminist-friendly values, they're all definitively about the effect sexualised violence has had on a protagonist. The Others, which is included in Comeau's list, is certainly a good one that escapes the rape-trap, involving a pretty awesome lady lead. Likewise with the first Paranormal Activity (that said, there is certainly rapey-implications in this one, and definitely all-out rape in movie 3). Comeau's post certainly inspired some thought into the genre though, and Emma and I are going to be on the hunt for some better feminist-friendly horror. Do you know of any yourself?

Sunday Short: Up High in the Air by Laura van den Berg

Just after the Fourth of July, my mother called to tell me she thought her hair was on fire. She lived in Nebraska, alone since my father drowned in the Platte River two years earlier. I hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving and, for the last month, hadn’t returned her calls.

“What do you mean you think your hair is on fire?” The apartment my husband and I shared was near the L and the floor shuddered beneath me as a train passed.

“I can smell the smoke,” she said.

“Do you see flames?”

“I can smell the smoke,” she said again.

“Maybe you should call the fire department.”

“I think I’ll go outside for a while,” she said, and hung up.

I walked down the hall and sat in the linen closet.

I'm a little bit in love with Laura van den Berg's short  story 'Up High in the Air', published back in '09 by the Boston Review. There's a total heartbreaking tenderness that dominates the tone of this story about a woman teetering on the line between control and chaos. With a drowned father and a mother slowly losing her mind, Diane has given up on her marriage to her recently unemployed husband and temporarily takes up with one of her university student's, Dean. It all sounds melodramatic, but the result is a story so much focused on the ebb and flow of shifting relationships and psyches more so than on the drama of the narrative. It's a beautiful, beautiful piece.You can read it here.

Friday Finds

After the internet-explosion over the last few days, how could I not start this FF with Julia Gillard's address? There is a lot to love about this, and whilst people are (rightfully so) pointing out her hypocrisy regarding the  GLBT community, this still means so, so much politically in Australia right now. This is a balls on the table take-down of a pretty nasty man, and given the recent influx of misogynistic attitudes politically and socially, this was an owning well-deserved. There's a really great round up of all of this stuff (and a whole lot more) over at The Wheeler Centre site by Clementine Ford, and it's definitely worth checking out. 

- On a completely different note, the most recent AWM Speakeasy interview is with literary agent Sophie Hamley. It's a great insight into where agents see themselves in the industry and what she herself looks for in a work and, maybe more importantly, in the authors she chooses to represent. Things to take away seem to be a) don't be too precious and b) don't be too crazy.

- 10 Tips for Generating Killer Science Fiction Story Ideas. I'm always a fan of io9's writing tips, but this list is a particularly good one. Tip 7 is especially great:

 7. Get into a fight with a famous science fiction author

Not literally. Do not go punching Vernor Vinge in the face and then claim I told you to do that. But sure, get into a fight with Vernor Vinge with your stories. Find something about how Vinge depicted cyberspace everting in Rainbows End, and write a story that shows how you think he should have done it. Don't like how Max Barry depicted cybernetic enhancements in Machine Man? Stick it to Max Barry by writing your own take on the subject. A lot of how science fiction has advanced, as a field, is authors trying to one-up each other and responding to each other's takes on the same basic ideas. Even if you don't prove everybody else wrong, you might get a really great story out of it. (Again, do not actually get into a fight with anybody.)

 - I'm basically in-love with this article on Angry Nerds & Sex, written by Siobhan Rosen.

- This really cool infograph on revealing the business of ebooks. 

- Another great list (I swear this is the last), a woman in my crit group mentioned this, and it really is the best. The Different Kinds of People There Are

- Also, I am contemplating making these Saffron-Vanilla Snickerdoodles over the weekend, because holy shit, saffron-vanilla snickerdoodles. 

- Just to take you out, my most recent column is live on LipMag Online. It's on nudity in television. You can check it out over here.

Your Mid-Week Art Post: Stephanie Ramirez

I'm a little in love with the illustrations of Stephanie Ramirez, a Californian illustrator. She really does like a certain type of girl - lean, Caucasian and black-haired, but then again, I kind of love that design too. Plus, you know, I'm always up for some cat illustrations and narratives and felines feature heavily in a lot of her work. Check her stuff out over at Rocket Pigeon.

That Time I Went to TiNA: National Young Writers Festival

 I really didn’t know what to expect when touching down in Newcastle. My domestic travel is embarrassingly light-on, the only thing getting stamped in my metaphorical passport (because you know they don’t stamp that sucker for local) being Sydney and Far North Queensland. I’d spent a childhood country-hopping Europe and an adolescence setting roots in Brisbane, and even in my early-twenties, my travel has consisted of New Zealand and Townsville. Newcastle would, hilariously, be a step for me. A nervous one, because I’m a nervous sort of girl, plus for various health reasons flying for me is a sort of torture that can only be managed by disorienting myself with prescription drugs the week before take-off. The result being that I was marginally incoherent and boarding my Jetstar flight with a tension in my neck that wouldn’t give, an uneasiness in my fingers that left me gripping the pages of my book (Georgette Heyer, for those playing at home) so tight my fingers went bleach-white, and my face took on the appealing colour of someone seconds away from vomiting. This was apparently obvious to the elderly woman beside me who asked three times in the first 20 minutes if I was sure that I was okay, and then spent the next 65 very kindly distracting me from the fact that I was on a plane.

We landed with the familiar bump and rattle and cheery pilot announcement that goes with every safe arrival, and I was lucky enough to have people I knew at the airport shuffle me into a car and into the heart of the town where I was dispatched with an awesome lady friend who knew that the exact cure for my ailment was fresh air, a glass of wine and an Apple Danish.

The reason for the trip was the This is Not Art festival, or, more specifically National Young Writers Festival. The whole thing is a four day adventure of panel discussions, debates, workshops, readings and general piss-ups and shenanigans disguised as industry networking. There were collaborative novellas, radio plays, poetry slams and spelling bees. The festival is as much one of ideas of the way writing functions, as a community, as a craft and as an art, as it is about writing generally, and the thing came together like a particularly delicious rainbow layer cake.

Everything was engaging and interesting, compelling to listen to. I’m particularly blessed to have a job at Queensland Writers Centre which meant that in reality I didn’t learn a whole lot about industry that I didn’t know already, but I still enjoyed each session I went to. A testimony to the talent of the artists and coordinators involved. In particular, the panel on ‘Getting Published: How to Emerge and Get Established’ with Voiceworks editor, Kat Muscat, the incoming Lifted Brow editor, Sam Cooney, short story writer and my make-believe wife, Josephine Rowe and novelist, Courtney Collins was great and very insightful in respect to four very different people taking very different paths professionally.

In writing this, I realised how hard it is for me to recap the festival as a whole, as the long weekend passed in a bit of a blur, only partially alcohol-induced. I drifted in and out of events, helping out where I could and generally absorbing the town as a whole, engaging in every way it was just like Brisbane and every way it was nothing like it. Both of these things left me totally charmed. Maybe even a little in-love, infatuated with the sea-stained rocks and the boats that chugged industriously metres off the coast. One of my favourite afternoons I skipped out on the festival altogether and wrote for three hours on an old, open jetty in a bikini I’d bought from an over-enthused Bras’n’Things saleswoman, letting the salt off the water bristle my skin and tangle in my hair until it was all I could smell and taste for the rest of the night. These were the sorts of moments that made the festival for me, no single event, but rather the tapestry of the whole. The seconds I was there were like flecks of pottery making some hot, wonderful sprawl of a mosaic. It wasn’t all good, but the stuff that was incorporated the bad, gave shadow to the light and made it seem all the better (and really, how cliché is that?).  

I was enamoured with the sense of community there too. A group of ridiculous and talented people being ridiculous and talented together. It was exciting, but brought out a shyness in me that I normally do a better job of hiding. I’ve never been the best at talking to strangers, and I tried to nip any awkwardness or reservations I had in the bud. But in the early hours of the morning, too many drinks and not enough food would leave me curling my nails into my palms and gnawing at my bottom lip until it chapped painfully beneath the tooth I chipped in fifth grade. The answer was always another drink. Too much to drink probably, but then again, I’m twenty-two, and this was a young writer’s festival, and I am maybe equally ridiculous and observing and felt at each event like the youngest and oldest person in the room. The whole festival actually I felt like that. Like baby Sophie and old lady Sophie were drag racing in my head, boxing with their fists out, gloveless, the realisation (or recollection) that I can be starry eyed and patronising at the same time and the hope that I came out as something charming in the middle. I am not sure if I succeeded. I am not sure if I mind.  

I flew out in the impossibly early hours of the Monday morning; with sleep clustering at the corners of my eyes like my clothes would be on my floor when I got home, big piles of unpleasantness. I’d fly home blissed out on a plane with post-festival feelings leaving my fingers strumming on an aero-fold-out tray and itching for a pen, for a keyboard that I could write on, and I’d get home and do just that. Write for far too long, not about the festival, but about the sea salt that was still dried in my skin and the big old buildings that were being constructed in my head and about the people that I’d met and the ones I’d already known. I’d write for a long time, and then I’d go to my day job, vaguely incoherent and in a camel coloured sweater that I thought I’d thrown out (because Christ, it’s ugly), and then I’d come home again and sleep for thirteen hours, not drunk, but inebriated still.

It’s been a week and a half, and I think I’m still inebriated. There are probably nicer words than that to use, but it’s the best one I can come up with. It was certainly an experience, one that I’m still having troubles forming words on (can you tell?). It’s one that I hope to do again next year.

Dahlia Fall 2012

To start you on your week, have a photoshoot for the Autumn Dahlia collection. Nice stuff is nice. Also, I'd basically wear everything here - it sends me in spirals of regret given that we are elbowing our way into spring instead of cooler seasons. (via Calivintage.)

Sunday Short: The Girl in the Storm by Ben Loory

There once was a girl who was lost in a storm. She wandered this way and that, this way and that, trying to find a way home. But the sky was too dark, and the rain too fierce; all the girl did was go in circles.

A lovely, lovely short piece by a lovely, lovely writer. Read The Girl in the Storm over at Ben Loory's website.

Friday Finds

- The Speakeasy blog is continuing their wonderful series with the editors of a variety of Australian lit journals. The most recent is with Zora Sanders of Meanjin, who I had the pleasure of hearing read at NYWF (she is seriously so, so funny). She has her professional hat on in this interview, but it's a great reflection of Meanjin and a good piece to read even if you're not a writer (but especially if you are). You can check it out here.


- Kill Your Darlings online contributions continue to win at life. One of their more recent ones, written by Stephanie Van Schilt talks about the phenomenon of Bitchface and argues the case of Smugface as a kind of dastardly and more sinister alternative. It's a pretty great post, full of awesome links, so you should check it out.

- Visible Ink has made a great post entitled 'Five Thoughts on Submitting to Journals'. It's a good article and one definitely worth the read if you're looking at submitting your work on a one-off or ongoing process.

- I am totally in love with Eat this Poem, a food blog where each recipe is inspired by a poem. It's really, really beautiful stuff. This coconut one is my favourite so far.

- These stylish cover designs of Harry Potter textbooks are super great too. I've been a huge fan of the series since I got the first book for my eighth birthday, and I get awfully inspired by the degree to which the fandom engages with the series, and this is such a great and beautiful example of that. The fact that the series can inspire such creative output from its readers is awesome.

- To take you home this weekend, check out these 15 topics to get you writing.

Mad Men

This behind-the-scenes photoset by photographer James Minchin is just so, so beautiful. The show generally is so much about the nostalgia we have as a society for a bygone era, and this whole shoot just embodies that so well. It's beautiful. Plus, Jon Hamm. 

Your Mid-Week Art Break: James Harvey

Your mid-week art break, coming at you a little late in the day, is James Harvey. He's a pretty awesome illustrator with a great sense of character and an even better sense of the surreal. Check him out over here.