Friday Finds

I've been listening to so much Lesley Gore of late. She's such an awesome singer and a powerhouse and basically my favourite. People should listen to her immediately.

- Press releases from self-published authors. Kind of works as both a what-not-to-do and, well, a bringer of second-hand embarrassment. Have six easy tips for self-editing in response!

- 17 of the most screwed up relationships in fiction! These are great.

- Vanessa Murray wrote an excellent piece over for The Vine on the Problem with Porn.

- These pics of a young Hugh Hefner are all sorts of fascinating.

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Jenny Clements

Jenny Clements' illustrations are so great. Whether it's fanart, elementals or selkies (particularly the selkies, just fyi) her work manages to encompass so much expression and tenderness. It's all pretty wonderful.  Check out her stuff over on DeviantArt here.

Sunday Short: Death and Contraception by Kobi Blake-Craig

I hate it when someone says; I am sorry for your loss or even just sorry. I understand they want to be a compassionate human being and offer a bonus pillar of support; but I don’t understand what they are sorry about. They didn’t personally gather cancerous cells and shove them into his blood stream, nor did they induce a stroke. They also didn’t force me to continue a relationship with someone who had shocking taste in music and cancer. It all just happened, for some inexplicable reason.

Apparently I'm on a non-fiction kick for shorts this month, but Kobi Blake-Craig's piece of memoir on losing her boyfriend at seventeen is a pretty awesome piece of writing. Biting and sad and all in all lovely, she covers what grief means and why recognising it is, well, both unique and important.

You can read Death and Contraception over at Scum Mag Online.

Friday Finds

Totally late to the party on this one, but The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl is pretty great.

- If you've got a little bit of time up your sleeve this weekend (maybe while you're between sessions at QPF), check out this amazing bit of prose by Sophia McDougall on hating the strong female character. It's pretty powerful stuff.

- 4zzz Bookclub did an excellent interview with Junot Diaz as he heads to Brisbane. I'm seeing him on Monday as a part of BWF's Bookend event and seriously, I'm so excited.

- Bust has compiled a kind of hilarious list of 20 Male Celebrities You Didn't Know Were Ridiculously Hot Once. I sent it around to a few friends who all had varying degrees of horror until one countered it with this list of 27 Asian Leading Men Who Deserve More Airtime. This list features my movie boyfriend Lee Byung-Hun so you know it's basically the best.

- 40 Trashy Books that are Actually Worth Reading. Also, this game The Novelist is basically the best thing I've seen all week. Given my history playing The Sims (spoiler: my sims always die), I am predicting that my novelist's life will end in death and abandon and no novel.

- These abandoned houses in rural Iceland are pretty amazing. So are these leaf studies.

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Kelly Bastow

Kelly Bastow's artwork is making me chinhands all over the place. Beautiful and billowy and feminine, her work manages to tell loving, cohesive stories in a few frames. Her comics in particular are lovely. You can check them out at her website.

Your Guide to QPF

We're kicking off the festival season this Friday with Queensland Poetry Festival - a free, two-day celebration of poets and poetry held at the (rather lovely) Judith Wright Centre. It's always pretty great, but I figured I'd knock in some of my highlights below to give you an idea of the diversity, the titles and maybe nudge you in a few directions.

FRIDAY
The Official Opening from 6pm followed by Set Fire to the Air. Shane Rhodes! Eleanor Jackson! QPF has pretty consistently featured a brilliant singer-songwriter - last year having opened their festival with a set by the (rather tremendous) Holly Throsby. This year, Bertie Blackman will be taking the stage so you know it's going to be an awesome launch.

SATURDAY
First Thunder Spoke, 10:30 - 11:30. The combination of Ynes Sanz, Zenobia Frost, Sachiko Murakami and Aden Rolfe is pretty close to a perfect modern poetry line-up

Alchemy and Praise, 2:45 - 3:45. Tao Lin! 'Nuff said. Or, if you'd prefer. Breathe the Shadow, on at the same time. Betsy Turcot and Jennifer Compton are both pretty amazing after all.

Dancing in Abstract, 4 - 5pm. I'd honestly recommend anything with Nathan Shepherdson, but as he's launching his newest collection here, the day the artists stood still, consider it doubly recommended.

SUNDAY
UQP Launch, 10:30 - 11:30. I've long been a fan of Rachael Briggs, so her winning the Thomas Shapcott Prize this year for an unpublished poetry manuscript is kind of wonderful. The launch of the winning collection, Free Logic, is a great way to start your Sunday.

Language of Light, 11 - 12pm. This session has an excellent line-up, including the awesome Vuong Pham and Sachiko Murakami. Definitely one to check out.

Sharp Accelerations, 5 - 6pm. The QPF Filmmakers Challenge is always an interesting mix of vivid imagery and languid words. The showcase for this years finalists is sure to be great.

And, of course, how can you miss the festival close? Especially with a name like Kissing the Dawn, the end of the festival will stage some of the best and most compelling voices of the festival and say farewell to the rest in style.

You can check out the full program over at the website.

Sunday Short: The Suspects Wore Louboutins by Nancy Jo Sales

“Everything’s going to be O.K., Gabby,” said Dunn, who was still dressed for court in a brown suit. A former Playboy Playmate, Dunn—now married to Jerry Dunn, a production designer for television—is a masseuse and holistic health-care practitioner. Their house, which sits on a rolling, manicured street, is decorated with religious talismans and floor-standing statues of Buddha which Dunn said she got at the closing of a Thai restaurant.

With the release of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, Nancy Jo Sales' article The Suspects Wore Louboutins is getting a lot of traction again. I read it first years ago after having watched 'Pretty Wild' with my sister. It's a pretty awesome piece of journalism, exposing a sort of vapid, materialistic life pretty far removed from me in sunny Brisbane. All the kids in it are just so unreal it almost reads like a fantasy, like an MTV soap. It's pretty amazing. 

You can read The Suspects Wore Louboutins over on the Vanity Fair website.

Friday Finds

This Blurred Lines genderswap is giving me life right now.

- This campaign from the National Institute for Challenging Homophobia Education (NICHE) is pretty damn wonderful.

- Famous writers' small writing sheds and off the grid huts. I love, love, love Roald Dahl's and Virginia Woolf's.

- Hey, Pay Up is an excellent tumblr featuring writing journals and mags in Australia and what they actually pay writers submissions.

- And some photography for your Friday - New York city's hidden subway station and these amazing National Geographic photographs.

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Lauren Carney

Lauren Carney's artwork is high on the whimsy, full of fantastical creatures and pastel colourings. They're all pretty great, and she harnesses this rather lovely sense of narrative across her work that speaks to my myth-loving heart. Just a heads up if you're at work, there is a fair bit of nudity with her work. Check out her website for more.

ReForm School

There's something very Moonrise Kingdom about the first lookbook from LA-based designers, ReForm School. Between the beachy, desert landscape, tents and vintage-esque design, I feel like we're only really missing some fur hats, scout uniforms and a few kids on the cusp of adulthood to go full Anderson. All that aside, the photography shot (very capably) by Amanda Jasnowski in collaboration with Jimmy Marble is a sprawling, imaginative set which speaks to my wandering head. Plus the clothes are rather lovely.

Sunday Short: The Fall by Kaya Edwards

They walked to a bookstore and Amy stroked book spines with pale fingers, wondering how long the lady had had to wait for the next bus, standing in a station full of people who saw her fall, who saw so many colours and shapes moving from one arrangement to another so quickly and violently.

Kaya Edward's flash fiction story The Fall is a really interesting portrayal of an accident at a bus stop. It explores the impact of an incident and the nature of reaction and does so kind of beautifully. Check it out over at Seizure's Flashers.

Friday Finds

I'm really feeling The Staves at the moment, so here, have a (very lovely) music video. On that note too, Portable TV has an awesome list of 5 female vocalists you should be listening to (if you're not already).

- The photography of Amanda Jasnowski is doing things to me. Really, really beautiful stuff. Hana Haley's is also pretty wonderful.

- Writer Ian Sales has compiled a list of 100 Great Science Fiction Stories Written By Women, which is pretty aces. Check out the list here.

- Geekquality is basically my new favourite blog. They have an awesome post on YA fiction. And another on third wave feminism and the hard femme.

- Ryan O'Neill wrote a great post over on his blog about submitting short stories and contextualising rejections (because they suck, they do, but they're not without their uses).

- The Atlantic did a great article too on various writers' favourite first lines.

- 500 new fairytales discovered in Germany!

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Clay Rodery

Dark in both theme and tone, Clay Rodery's illustrations look almost like sketched stills from a HBO or AMC series. Blending a mix of bleak reality and gorgeous bodied drawings, Rodery's work twists up my insides in the best way and makes him an illustrator to watch. Check out more of his work over at his website.

Sunday Short: I Don't Need Anything From Here by László Krasznahorkai

"I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquility, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me"

I'd be tempted to class this work as a poetry rather than short fiction due to the lyrical nature of it, but hey, that's not what the author wanted. I Don't Need Anything from Here is a beautiful piece of writing by Hungarian author, László Krasznahorkai (try saying that three times fast). He conveys such tenderness throughout, a love of place and person, but a desire to drive distance between that too. It's lovely, albeit very short.

You can read I Don't Need Anything from Here care of Aysmptote Journal here.

Friday Finds

Some Mumford and Sons, The Vaccines, Vampire Weekend, The Staves and First Aid Kit covering The Beatles for your Friday.

- Connor Thomas O'Brien has written a really excellent post on paying writers and new online platforms. Definitely one to check out if you're actively contributing to any online blogs or journals.

- Literary agent, Ginger Clark has a new column over on The Toast! And it is super awesome.

- The London Evening Standard has a rather lovely interview with Zadie Smith up over on their website.

- The Atlantic has a great one too from Stephen King talking about opening sentences.

- Five rules for writing crime.

- These wordart book covers of classic novels are slaying me right now. So good.

- This Wall Street Journal article on Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, the nature of kawaii culture in J-Pop and how Kyary is turning it on its head is kind of awesome.

- This ad for HelloFlo is my new favourite thing also. Well, maybe second to this hammerhead shark ring.