Northerly Winter 2018

northerly FESTIVAL EDITION | Byron Writers Festival Member Magazine | Winter 2018

ALI ALIZADEH

JESSIE COLE

BRIGID DELANEY

AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC

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Contents Winter 2018 Features 010 Wellness potential Q&A with Byron Writers Festival 2018 author, Brigid Delaney 012 Head space How a theme of mental health is threaded through this year’s Festival program 014 Extract: Lisa Walker An excerpt from local author Lisa Walker’s new novel, Melt 016 Conjuring trick Children’s author Zanni Louise on how writing can be a source of real-life magic 017 Noongar dreaming Q&A with Australia’s literary man of the moment, Kim Scott 018 Coastal noir Christine Tondorf ponders Tim Winton’s contribution to the ‘Australian Gothic’

Regulars 002 Director’s note 003 News and events StoryBoard kicks on, Festival tickets for locals, flash fiction competition and more 006 The Books That Shaped Me Festival authors Chris Womersley and Jessie Cole on the literature that inspired their writing 008 Feature Poet Two new poems from Ali Alizadeh 020 Learning Curve Eleanor Limprecht on the relationship between writing and running 022 What YA Reading?

YA fiction reviews with Polly Jude

northerly

northerly is the quarterly magazine of Byron Writers Festival.

Byron Writers Festival is a non-profit member organisation presenting workshops and events year-round, including the annual Festival.

LOCATION/CONTACT Level 1, 28 Jonson Street, Byron Bay P: 02 6685 5115 F: 02 6685 5166 E: info@byronwritersfestival.com W: www.byronwritersfestival.com POSTAL ADDRESS PO Box 1846, Byron Bay NSW 2481 EDITOR: Barnaby Smith, northerlyeditor@gmail.com CONTRIBUTORS: Sara Foley, Kathy Gibbings, Polly Jude, Angela Kay, Gabby Le Brun, Eleanor Limprecht, Zanni Louise, Roslyn Oades, Katinka Smit, Christine Tondorf, Denise Winton BYRON WRITERS FESTIVAL BOARD CHAIRPERSON Jennifer St George VICE CHAIRPERSON Adam van Kempen SECRETARY Russell Eldridge TREASURER Cheryl Bourne MEMBERS Jesse Blackadder, Kate Cameron, Marele Day, Lynda Dean, Hilarie Dunn, Lynda Hawryluk, Anneli Knight.

LIFE MEMBERS Jean Bedford, Jeni Caffin, Gayle Cue, Robert Drewe, Jill Eddington, Chris Hanley, John Hertzberg, Fay Knight, Irene O’Brien, Jennifer Regan, Cherrie Sheldrick, Brenda Shero, Heather Wearne MAIL OUT DATES Magazines are sent in MARCH, JUNE, SEPTEMBER and DECEMBER PRINTER Quality Plus Printers Ballina ADVERTISING We welcome advertising by members and relevant organisations. A range of ad sizes are available. The ad booking deadline for each issue is the first week of the month prior.

Email northerlyeditor@gmail.com DISCLAIMER The Byron Writers Festival presents northerly in good faith and accepts no responsibility for any misinformation or problems arising from any misinformation. The views expressed by contributors and advertisers are not necessarily the views of the management committee or staff. We reserve the right to edit articles with regard to length. Copyright of the contributed articles is maintained by the named author and northerly.

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023 Book review Kathy Gibbings on Return to Tamarlin by K.M. Steele 024 Festival workshops 028 Competitions 030 Writers groups

Byron Writers Festival and northerly magazine acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of this land. northerly WINTER 2018 | 01

Director’s note By the time you open the pages of this edition of northerly, the wonderfully diverse complete line-up for the 2018 Byron Writers Festival will have been announced. We are excited to share the names of the authors, panels and commentators with you, talents one and all, chosen to create a most memorable Festival celebrating storytelling in all its forms.

As you peruse the pages of the 2018 program we hope you discover old favourites and enticing, energising new voices. Do look out for celebrated local authors with new books, including Jesse Blackadder, Jessie Cole, Robert Drewe, Jarrah Dundler and Joelle Gergis. Keep an eye out too for some inspiring internationals we are thrilled to be bringing to Byron, including Lloyd Jones, Miriam Lancewood, Sarah Sentilles, Hyeonseo Lee and Lemn Sissay. This issue of northerly features a number of Festival authors to whet your appetite – not least two exclusive new poems from Ali Alizadeh.

Don’t miss The Saturday Paper’s Bedtime Stories which was one of the most talked about events of the Festival last year. We’re also very lucky that Liane Moriarty is returning to Byron Writers Festival this year – you can catch her at the Festival on Sunday or at a special feature event at Club Lennox with the Lennox Arts Board on the evening of Festival Saturday, 4 August.

Special mention too of the partnership with Lismore Regional Gallery on a couple of fronts this year. Author and actress Ailsa Piper will perform her one-woman show Walking Home at the gallery, which brings to life her 1,300-kilometre walk through Spain, the characters she encountered, and the poetry that sustained her along the way. This coincides with the gallery’s current exhibition From Here to There: Australian Art and Walking, while Kate McDowell’s Wonderbabes will be performed in the Quad at the gallery on several occasions throughout the Festival.

And speaking of galleries, if you haven’t yet visited the Patricia Piccinini’s Curious Affection, a multi-sensory exhibition at Brisbane’s GOMA, I highly recommend it. Kids love it too so you can take the whole family. The emotion Piccinini arouses with her hybrid creatures challenges the boundaries of humanity and makes one contemplate what truly constitutes beauty.

In the last edition of northerly I mentioned our exciting Anzac competition for young people in the region. Well, in the intervening months we have commissioned six diverse projects that take in photography, dance, music and more. These talented young creatives will be appearing at Byron Writers Festival 2018.

Do share your insights into the Festival with family and friends, so we can welcome you all to the one and only special place that is Byron Bay – where stories take you!

Looking forward to seeing you at the Festival,

Edwina Johnson Director, Byron Writers Festival 02 | WINTER 2018 northerly

NEWS & EVENTS

StoryBoard: An update

SCU reporters gear up for another Festival

This year has seen StoryBoard, Byron Writers Festival’s acclaimed series of workshops for children, spread its wings even further with its variety of programmes and outreach. Gabby Le Brun reports on two special 2018 initiatives.

2018 will see Southern Cross University (SCU) students return for their eighth year reporting on Byron Writers Festival.

The team of student reporters are drawn from Digital Media and Communications and Creative Writing undergraduate degrees.

Publish Your Own Picture Book Masterclass with Zanni Louise: Term 1, 2018

mother, ‘but they crave it. I was so amazed to see how much they threw themselves into this project.’

Magic happens when you give a group of young writers an opportunity to create and publish their own picture book, as proven by this recent StoryBoard Masterclass at Ballina Library.

Journalism lecturer Jeanti St Clair said the experience for student reporters is eye-opening and enhances their professional writing skills.

Byron Bay Collaborative Book Project: Terms 2 and 3, 2018

‘The festival is a full-on three days, but everyone in the team finds it teaches them so much about reporting from a live event,’ St Clair said.

StoryBoard volunteer and author Zanni Louise challenged ten talented young writers to create a publishable book. Over five sessions, the writers, aged ten to sixteen, planned, developed, drafted, workshopped, illustrated and published eight stories, which were launched in April in front of family, friends and the press.

We heard Fletcher’s story about a heroic wasp, Aaisha’s lyrical rhyme about Little Lennie Lighthead’s search for light, Lucy’s tale of a boy starting school, Lachie’s story of a first soccer match, and Woonona’s pared back prose about a girl in jail struggling to keep her flower alive. Then there was Misha’s moving tale of a spiritling called Forever, Amelie’s entertaining story about the friendships within an art set and Gwen’s humorous adventures of Charlie the dog.

‘The kids never get anything this intense,’ said Lisa, Woonona’s

Fifteen enthusiastic young writers aged between twelve and sixteen are participating in a new publishing project working alongside Tristan Bancks and Siboney Duff, taking place at Byron Bay Library. This series of workshops has been designed, says Tristan, for young writers to ‘supercharge their creative toolkit and achieve their dreams as a writer.’ To apply, eager emerging authors submitted a sample of their work and a pitch explaining why they wanted to be part of the twenty-week project.

In July, StoryBoard will be undertaking a Western Tour to Kyogle, Tenterfield and Bonalbo – stay tuned for details. For a taste of the magic of StoryBoard, be sure to get along to the 2018 Byron Writers Festival Kids’ Big Day Out on Sunday, 5 August.

For more information about StoryBoard visit byronwritersfestival.com/ storyboard

Student reporters write three articles each day summarising festival sessions and ancillary activities. These are published on the festival blog. Students also live tweet the sessions on Twitter.

‘It means students really hit the ground running,’ St Clair said.

Each day begins with an editorial briefing at the SCU reporters centre, a small tent adjacent to the SCU marquee, where students are assigned sessions to cover.

Behind the scenes, St Clair works with the students as supervising editor, suggesting clarifications and helping students turn their initial drafts into published blog posts.

Digital Media and Communications student Sara Runciman travelled from Coffs Harbour in 2017 to join the reporting team.

‘By Festival’s end, we are churning out blogs and tweets like pros,’ she said. ‘I am looking forward to this year when we can do it all again.’

Sara Foley

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NEWS & EVENTS

Margin Notes News, events and announcements from Byron Writers Festival Self-publishing workshop announced Why wait for that elusive publisher contract when you can do it yourself like a pro? Sign up for this Festival workshop to learn about the world of print-ondemand and global distribution with Debbie Lee and Robin Cutler from Ingram Content Group, taking place Wednesday, 1 August from 11am to 1pm at Byron Community College. A former publisher, Debbie will talk you through the process from written manuscript to production of files, including the importance of editing, choosing the right format and cover design. You will learn how breakthrough technology allows you to print just what you need, when you need it – no more guesswork on print runs, and no more boxes of books in your lounge.

The workshop is supported

by IngramSpark, and for more details and to book tickets, go to byronwritersfestival.com/ festival-workshops.

Discounted Festival tickets for locals Byron Writers Festival is looking after locals in 2018 by releasing

discounted Sunday Locals’ Passes.

The discounted ticket is for entry to the Festival on Sunday, 5 August, and will be priced at $80 – a saving of more than $50 on the regular ticket price.

Sunday Locals’ Passes will be available to residents of the Byron, Ballina, Kyogle, Lismore, Richmond Valley and Tweed council areas from Wednesday, 13 June, until sold out. The tickets are only available from the Festival office, and purchasers will need to present proof of address (maximum two tickets per person). Numbers are limited, so get in quick.

Anzac Projects commissioned Congratulations to the six selected Anzac project participants who have had their creative submissions commissioned and will appear at Byron Writers Festival in August. They are Amelie and Scout from Suffolk Park, Dominic from Wollongbar, Isabella from Bangalow, Lachlan from Banora Point, Miriam from The Channon and Mondo from Ocean Shores. For project details head to byronwritersfestival. com/anzac

Cover story The cover art for this issue of northerly is Fleeting Nature II by Mullumbimby-based artist Leora Siboney. Siboney’s exhibition Industrial Relations was among those on display for the opening of Lismore Regional Gallery in October 2017. To see more of Siboney’s work visit www.leorasiboney.com.

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Residential Mentorship Congratulations to the four writers who participated in this year’s Byron Writers Festival Residential Mentorship. The authors spent four days in May in the company of Marele Day in the Byron hinterland honing and polishing their manuscripts. The 2018 mentees were Nick Couldwell, Richard Everist, Nella May and Robert Walker.

Flash your fiction Byron Writers Festival invites you to enter our inaugural Flash Fiction Competition. Entries should be no longer than 200 words, and each story should include the word ‘hope’. The deadline for entries is Monday, 2 July, with winners announced Friday, 13 July. The winner will receive a three-day Festival Pass, while the two runners-up will receive a Sunday Pass. The top three entries will be published in the spring issue of northerly, while the top ten entries will be displayed across the Festival site. There is a $10 entry fee per submission, for full guidelines visit byronwritersfestival.com/ flash-fiction-competition

Sisonke Msimanga bound for Byron Our post-Festival events program is already filling up.

Byron Writers Festival will host a conversation with South African writer Sisonke Msimanga about her book Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile at Home on Thursday, 6 September. Then later in the year, we welcome crowd favourite Barrie Cassidy back to Byron Theatre for another Best of Insiders. Watch this space!

NEWS & EVENTS

Lambs of God set for TV adaptation Byron Writers Festival committee member and Residential Mentorship facilitator Marele Day is celebrating the news that her acclaimed 1997 novel Lambs of God is to be produced as a ‘big budget epic’ television series for Foxtel.

The production has recruited an impressive cast, including Ann Dowd, who plays the terrifying Aunt Lydia in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Australia’s Essie Davis, who starred in The Babadook and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. The series began filming in May.

Members, mentees celebrate success A number of writers associated with Byron Writers Festival have enjoyed award success and publication in recent months.

Mirandi Riwoe, who took part in the Residential Mentorship in 2013 and also appeared at Byron Writers Festival in 2017, was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Stella Award for women writers for her novel The Fish Girl. Alexis Wright ultimately won the award for Tracker.

Another former mentee and Kyogle resident, Jarrah Dundler (who took part in the mentorship in 2016), will see his novel Hey Brother published

by Allen & Unwin in August. Dundler will appear at Byron Writers Festival this year.

Local author Sandra Heilpern is also celebrating publication, with her novel Like There’s No Tomorrow recently launched in Byron Bay by local state member Tamara Smith.

In other news, member Michelle Morgan has been named the winner of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Spark Award in the Books for Older Readers category, for her middlegrade novel Flying Through Clouds.

Mamallapuram – Chennai India Warm Winter Seaside Writing Retreat 28 December 2018 – 6 January 2019.

Book early.

TRANSFORMATION: Novel & Storytelling Transform your novel writing with destination and character by day, and storytelling performance by sunset. Nine nights food and accommodation near beaches, heritage sites and arts festivals. £775pp inclusive, excluding airfares.

Day sessions at The Write Place with Dr Vayu Naidu – Novelist, Storyteller and Royal Literary Fund Fellow

Contact: vayu@vayunaidu.com www.vayunaidu.com

LAUREL COHN Editing and Manuscript Development ~ manuscript assessment and development ~ mentoring ~ editorial and publishing consultations ~ structural and stylistic editing ~ copy editing and proofreading

Needing writing advice? Hit an obstacle that confounds you? Wondering what to do next? An editorial consultation can help you find direction and keep you moving forward, whatever stage you are at with your writing project.

Jo Kennett – journalist, surf coach and radio producer – offers feedback on an editorial consultation: ‘My time with you has been such a help and far beyond my expectations.

It’s strange how you said so many things that I had fleeting thoughts about and you also managed to get it

all to coalesce somehow in my mind.

I feel as if you have given me the perfect guidance by seeing the heart of my story which I felt but couldn’t put my finger on. Thanks so much for setting me on the right path and I look forward to working with you again in the future.’

www.laurelcohn.com.au info@laurelcohn.com.au 02 6680 3411

And finally, northerly editor Barnaby Smith was recently named the winner of the Scarlett Award for art criticism.

Stacks of stories Among local storyteller Jenni Cargill-Strong’s latest projects is Just Write! Online, a creative writing session held over Skype

on Wednesday mornings. She is also overseeing Stories From The Club: Drawn from Life every second Sunday of the month at Mullumbimby Ex-Services Club, and Stories in a Circle, a more intimate storytelling event held at Heartspace, Mullumbimby. For more information on all events including times visit www.storytree.com.au northerly WINTER 2018 | 05

FEATURE

The Books That Shaped Me: Chris Womersley The book that sparked my affection for nineteenthcentury literature

The book that opened me to poetry

The book that taught me about compression

‘Preludes’ by TS Eliot

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Like any self-respecting schoolboy with a cassette of The Clash’s London Calling on high rotation, I didn’t much like the idea of poetry – especially anything written by some stuck-up dead bloke – when I was compelled to study this poem in late high school. As with any truly great literature, it’s not ‘about’ anything, or, rather, it’s not about any single thing but instead a whole bunch of things. There’s probably something about spiritual decay and loneliness and the general lack of meaning in modern life. That Eliot’s bleak vision spoke to me so loudly might say more about my sixteen-year-old self than the poem, but ‘Preludes’ – with its abstracted images of urban despair and grime, a work seemingly devoid of any hope – worked on me in mysterious ways, as it continues to do. Although not so apparent in this work, I always loved Eliot’s ability to move between registers of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Who could not be moved by its final lines? ‘The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.’

‘One day I was already old…’

A German woman I met in Brazil recommended The Lover to me when I was twenty-one years old and I read this little book so many times thereafter – probably once a year or so – that I can still recall its opening few sentences with ease. This is a slim, powerful book. It contains multitudes and bears revisiting much more than many other larger novels. The autobiographical tale concerns the affair between a fifteen-yearold French girl and an older, very wealthy Chinese businessman in French Indochina (now Vietnam) in the late 1920s. The girl’s family is impoverished; her father is dead, her brother is a bitter drunkard and the mother is perpetually on the verge of breakdown. The relationship between the girl and the businessman is, in part, a kind of grim leverage for a more comfortable life for them. The style is elliptical, lyrical and poetic.

Part sexual coming-of-age and part examination of the lingering effects of colonialism, the novel is like an illicit love affair of its own – sensual, maddening, melancholy, transgressive and occasionally quite brutal.

In her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, issued after the author Emily’s death in 1848, sister Charlotte describes Wuthering Heights as ‘moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath’. This wildness is one of the reasons I love this book and for me, Wuthering Heights was the gateway drug to nineteenth century fiction. A lot of the fiction written in those years has an unruliness and experimental quality, something that has been leached from over the years as the novel has become more codified into its various genres. Set on the Yorkshire moors, this is a love story, a horror story and a lot more besides. With an unwieldy Russiandoll style narrative structure, it concerns the torrid and elemental relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and her adoptive brother Heathcliff who, rather than the brooding, misunderstood hero of romantic fantasy, is actually a brute who is happy to hang a few kittens because he feels like it.

Chris Womersley is a novelist, short story writer and occasional reviewer and essayist. His novels include Cairo, Bereft and The Low Road. He will appear at Byron Writers Festival 2018.

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FEATURE

The Books That Shaped Me: Jessie Cole The book that made me believe I might have something to say Swallow the Air

by Tara June Winch Winch was in her early twenties when this book was first published.

The writing was so accomplished and the author so young — reading it made me realise that maybe I didn’t have to wait to be old enough to have something important to say. Winch has an incredible ear for dialogue and an extraordinary way with language.

The imagery in this book is rich and evocative, and the author wholly captures the feeling of what it is like to be young and searching, adrift in the world. Reading Swallow the Air as a younger person allowed me to imagine what I might write about if I didn’t have to wait. If I started right now, what story might I tell?

The book that gave me permission to feel

The book that showed me the power of literature

Written on the Body

by Jeanette Winterson

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Even though I grew up in a household where the expression of feelings was relatively welcome, I still got the message from the culture at large (loud and clear) that women often feel too much.

All Winterson’s books throb with passion and life. They celebrate ‘big feelings’ in a way that is exuberant and unapologetic. Written on the Body explores an affair between an unnamed narrator and his/ her lover, Louise. The plot is loose.

Winterson plays with form, avoids a consecutive narrative arc, and often addresses the reader. Though these breaks from traditional storytelling weren’t things I was usually drawn to as a reader, when I happened upon this book, I felt I’d struck gold.

The language is fearless, beguiling and unabashedly romantic. I wrote out whole sections of it by hand to try and imbibe it. Reading Written on the Body gave me permission to feel big things, and to write about those feelings, no matter how terrifying they might be.

Jessie Cole’s new memoir, Staying, is about the importance of home, family and forgiveness and finding peace in a place of pain. She will appear at Byron Writers Festival 2018.

An amazing treatise on the effects of intergenerational trauma, Beloved was the first book I read that showed me the power of literature. It is the story of an African-American woman, Sethe, who escapes slavery in the South only to be rounded up by her ‘owners’. Sethe kills her beloved baby daughter so she will not be taken back into slavery, and the baby’s ghost eventually reappears in human form to claim her retribution. Of course, even as a kid I knew about the history of slavery in the USA, but I hadn’t ever stretched myself to imagine what it would have been like to be a slave.

Reading Beloved as a young adult, I could almost feel my mind bursting open to accommodate this new empathy and understanding. After reading it, I saw the world through different eyes. I was changed. I read all of Toni Morrison’s novels in my early twenties and was utterly spellbound. Recently, I reread them and was shocked by the darkness of her vision. As a young adult, this bleakness hadn’t been so striking to me, so the rereading was an interesting exercise in how much our own perspective can shape our experience of a body of work.

northerly WINTER 2018 | 07

POETRY

Feature Poet: Ali Alizadeh What We Want It’s time to mourn

properly. (And move on.) These are the things I couldn’t have: a boxset of Britains Deetail knights (we used to call them metal-based) silver, hand-painted plumage and breakable toothpick-sized swords. Mummy wouldn’t buy them

for me, promised to buy them for me one day, I now know (knew then too frankly) she couldn’t buy them for me (a teacher’s salary piffle then, as now) and never bought them for me. Don’t laugh to hear me say this lack defined the nature of desire for me. I longed, struggled (was I driven?) for the unattainable toy soldier ’s glowing cuirass (breastplate). What else? So many other things.

Is affection an object? Yes, so kindness, companionship (really, that’s all I wanted) from

what was her name? Sally? Suzy? So many in that grim working-class high school. When a (yes, child’s) heart is broken it’s not the triviality of breakage but the quality of the crack that remains. Why? I’d blame Mummy for this too, of course, though not my mother per se but the matrix of unfulfillable wants (we know that Freud has always been right) and the other objects? Fame, glorification in the eyes of the Big (frankly, pitifully small) Other of the Literary Establishment? Huh. Also fetishistic, false disguises

of the original emptiness where desire was born

out of the womb of detachment from the mother. So, let’s be emphatic about it: we don’t want to return there. That’s not what we want. The bourgeois (consumerist, sex-obsessed, fame-lovers) have built their empire of shit

on the promises of desire. Let’s mourn truly what we couldn’t have and no longer want. Let’s move on.

08 | WINTER 2018 northerly

POETRY

Hotel Grandeur A manhole at the centre of the grimy floor in the condemned room, the lowest level below our beauteous tower. Hotel Grandeur, boisterous guests flatulent after oyster brunch under a luminous dome on the air-conned roof. Do their nerves register the shudder stealing up the loosened legs of deckchairs? Not yet. It’s just a tremor, can be/is often ignored when champagne arrives, and for rich Muslim clients (marking our cultural sensitivity) mint tea in gilded glasses, gold trays, a deferential smile. Apropos our gender credentials, female -friendly ethical polyamorous porn on video-on-demand after midnight. A restaurant on each floor, a digital library with a fine selection of Chomskys for millennial radicals. Who will sense the subtle vibration that rattles the champagne flutes for a millisecond, a pulse at the tip of ivory chopsticks in the Afro-Asian fusion eatery by the solar-powered spa and fair-trade café? It must be from outside, maybe somewhere a faulty, mismanaged site collapsed, a levee broke, even a minor earthquake. Here we have an artisanal patisserie to press gourmet waffles for desert. And that manhole in the basement, maybe leads to nothing. Don’t know what’s under the rusted cast iron lid. Pipes, sewers or gas. Monsters are the stuff of horror movies. Aren’t they?

Ali Alizadeh’s books include the new historical novel, The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (Giramondo), the collection of short stories, Transactions (UQP) and the collection of poetry, Ashes in the Air (UQP). He’s travelled and lived in China, Iran, Turkey and Dubai, and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is currently working on a new novel about the French Revolution, as well as an academic study of Karl Marx’s philosophy of art.

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INTERVIEW

Brigid Delaney’s restless life As a columnist and former features editor with Guardian Australia, not to mention her stints with Fairfax, CNN and others, Brigid Delaney is steeped in the tenets of non-fiction storytelling. Her most recent book is Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search For Wellness, an immersive investigation into the fads and trends that we are sold in the name of mental and physical health. Her novel, Wild Things, was published in 2014 and deals with the murky world of university ‘hazing’ rituals, while her first book, This Restless Life (2009) was a prescient non-fiction look at our increasing pace of life and our fragmented professional and personal lives.

Ahead of her appearance at Byron Writers Festival 2018, Delaney allowed northerly an insight into her world as a writer and journalist.

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INTERVIEW

In terms of books and writing projects separate from your work with Guardian Australia, what are you currently working on?

For you, what are some of the important ways writers can maintain wellness in relation to their craft?

I am starting to think about a novel, a love story in three parts, told from the point of view of a woman. There’s no happy ending.

I’ll get cracking on it over the winter of 2018.

Get enough sleep, don’t compare yourself to others, support other writers, give yourself time to daydream your way into your story, give yourself plenty of time to read, allow yourself a fallow year between books to recoup creativity and if you are in a heavy writing period, make sure you do daily exercise.

Who are your non-fiction writing influences that have impacted both your books and your journalism?

Christopher Hitchens for his wit and fire, Joan Didion for her eye and style, Martin Amis for his expression, James Button for Australian journalism and the non-fiction (usually speeches) of Richard Flanagan. Plus, increasingly, podcasts are a great way of telling stories.

Can you describe how training and a career in journalism influenced the fictional writing style of your novel, Wild Things?

It was meant to be a long magazine news story but there were too many legal problems, so Wild Things became a novel and I became a lot freer. I was allowed to forget about the constraints and issues with writing journalism, and it was liberating.

Nearly a year on from the publication of Wellmania, what does ‘wellness’ mean for you now?

It’s just a marketing word that means very little to me personally.

Being happy and engaged is important to me right now – how I feel mentally is what I’m focusing on. As I write this, I am on holidays and denying myself nothing, walking all day, all over London – so things balance out.

Can you tell us a bit about the publishing journey for Wellmania?

How has being features editor with Guardian Australia helped your relationships with and access to publishers?

I’m no longer features editor of Guardian Australia – so it doesn’t help much! But I do have a weekly column which I think helps with having a public profile.

I did about a decade of research – much of which was travel writing and stuff for Sunday Life magazine – and then had so many notes and diary entries that a book was all but inevitable.

Both Wellmania and your first book, This Restless Life, can be said to be capturing a certain cultural mood of a period in time – yet you could say that This Restless Life has arguably become more and more relevant in the years since it was published.

When writing books like those two, does it ever come into consideration that your subject matter might be looked upon very differently within a couple of years, thanks to cultural and technological changes?

You are a close reader! Yes – I agree that This Restless Life was ahead

of its time. There is a vague fear that in the future the books will be very dated but I write these books because there is something in our present moment that I feel demands to be addressed. Usually I write something because I want to read it, and nobody else has written it. If it dates, then so be it.

In a recent essay, the critic Theodora Hawlin wrote, ‘The internet, and social media in particular, provides a mouthpiece whereby authors are able to become a key character in the lifespan of a text, with the power to continually revive and expand upon their works.’ How much pressure do you feel to complement a book’s publication with a strong social media or general online presence, and is that aspect of being a writer today something you enjoy?

The marketing of books is much less interesting than writing them.

That said, I use a lot of social media and push my books a lot. A publisher has invested in them, and they are in some ways a product that needs to be promoted. Also I want people to read them, so if I have to do a hundred dumb tweets then so be it. Interview by Barnaby Smith

Brigid Delaney is a senior writer for Guardian Australia. She has previously worked as a lawyer and journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald, the Telegraph (London), ninemsn and CNN. She is the author of three books: This Restless Life, Wild Things and Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness. She will appear at Byron Writers Festival 2018.

northerly WINTER 2018 | 11

Jessie Cole (left) and Trent Dalton (right) (Photo: Lyndon Mechielsen)

FEATURE

The good, the bad, the ugly: Festival to shine a light on mental health One of the key themes running through Byron Writers Festival 2018 will be mental health, with this year’s line-up designed to draw awareness to the wide spectrum of causes, effects and conditions in this complex area of our lives. Katinka Smit casts an eye over the program and details what to expect.

It seems someone is always talking about mental health these days, and for good reason: mental health issues dictate life for those affected by them. Byron Writers Festival 2018 will talk it up some more by featuring authors whose books traverse this difficult social terrain through an array of genres and perspectives that reflect the diversity of experiences.

Trent Dalton has built his career as an award-winning journalist by respectfully bringing the darker sides of humanity to light, and he confesses to processing his own past vicariously while doing so. After 12 | WINTER 2018 northerly

years of writing from the outside, he decided to dive into the almost unbelievable circumstances that shaped him. His debut novel Boy Swallows Universe works through themes of brotherhood and the effects of dysfunctional family relationships while growing up.

He describes his autobiographical novel as an attempt to turn ‘all my own secrets … as respectfully as possible, into a novel’. The story follows its young protagonist in a coming of age tale that resists offering moral guidance, the boy’s life singing with a strange beauty

shaped by an older brother who one day just stopped talking.

Local author Jarrah Dundler’s upcoming YA novel tells of brotherhood and family gone wrong, drawing upon his own experiences of depression and the experiences of friends and family dealing with mental illness.

The Vogel-shortlisted Hey Brother tells the story of a family in full meltdown through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Trystan. As if being a teenager in a small town isn’t enough, his gung-ho brother Shaun goes off to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, and returns

Sarah Wilson (left) and Jarrah Dundlar (right)

FEATURE

changed and withdrawn. The novel prods at the ways a disintegrating family might triumph in finding new ways to be.

Sarah Krasnostein’s multi-awardwinning biography, The Trauma Cleaner, builds a picture of Sandra Pankhurst, a transgender woman with a childhood history of deep trauma who, having survived and triumphed over some of life’s worst tragedies, built a business cleaning up at the terrible end of ruined lives.

Sarah originally wrote a long-form essay on Sandra Pankhurst for The Guardian, but Sandra’s way of treating her clients with dignity and compassion fascinated the author and demanded more. Krasnostein depicts Sandra Pankhurst as a living embodiment of grace, whose generosity of care behind closed doors comes from a place of deep empathy. Hers is the wisdom of survival.

Jessie Cole’s own story in her memoir, Staying, has been a long swim towards that wisdom.

Jessie’s idyllic youth as a barefoot child of the bush was smashed to pieces by her older sister’s suicide, compounded six years later by her

father’s, who never recovered from his daughter’s death. It took her two courageous novels to circle close enough to her own story to tell such deep family trauma from a personal perspective.

But not all mental health issues have a clearly discernible cause, and this can be a source of considerable stress for those who struggle with issues like anxiety and cannot pinpoint a traumatic event to blame it on or to heal from.

Sarah Wilson has spent most of her adult life in ‘damage control’ against chronic and at times debilitating anxiety. Her breakaway, diary-style book First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, drills down into her quest to get to the bottom of it, and all the ‘fixes’ she has attempted over the years. Sarah re-writes the traditional concept of anxiety: rather than it being something awful that controls our lives, she comes to realise that it could be an experience that empowers us, that becomes a spiritual journey.

For her, the real success in dealing with anxiety is accepting it for what it is, rather than trying to banish it or fix it.

In a similar vein, Matt Haig’s upcoming Notes on a Nervous Planet digs around in the causes of broad-scale anxiety, a quasicompanion book to his earlier, self-exploratory Reasons to Stay Alive. Matt struggled for years with depression and concedes that he’s actually a writer because of it. He sees depression as an essential part of life without which life would be rather bland; it’s an important conversation for people to have, to admit to depression, to air it and get it out, but it’s not something that needs to be scoured out from humanity. It is a source of pain, but it’s also the source of all the good that comes from it.

What emerges through each of these stories is an essential thread: what shapes us, makes us. There’s strength to be found in it, and maybe a bit of beauty.

Trent Dalton, Jarrah Dundler, Sarah Krasnostein, Jessie Cole, Sarah Wilson and Matt Haig will all be appearing at Byron Writers Festival 2018. For details and tickets head to byronwritersfestival.com

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READ

Extract: Melt by Lisa Walker According to Northern Rivers-based novelist Lisa Walker herself, her new novel is a ‘fish out of water comedy set in Antarctica with a killer seal, a secret igloo and a strangely sexy bearded scientist. It’s also about climate change.’ Here we offer an extract from this topical romantic comedy, available now through Lacuna Publishing.

Chapter Fourteen: The krill issue I am seated at a table with the scientists. Lucas is back in his favourite jeans and T-shirt and his book rests on the table next to him. He must be a keen reader.

He introduces me to Maria, the krill woman. She is not small with waving legs as I had imagined.

Maria is from Holland. She has smooth brown skin and shiny blonde hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead. She is tall and shapely and seems devastatingly intelligent – scarily so. I resolve to avoid her if possible.

Maria and Lucas are having a rapid-fire conversation about icecore samples. I know from Polar Fun for Kids that scientists drill deep holes into the ice to learn about past climates – the site was a little short on detail. My knowledge of ice-core samples isn’t enough to get in at the ground floor on this conversation.

‘One hundred and fifty per cent?’ says Maria.

Lucas nods, his beard going up and down. ‘In the last hundred and fifty years.’

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What is it with scientists and beards? I try to imagine what he would be like without hair all over his face, but fail.

‘I knew it was bad, but I didn’t think carbon dioxide had gone up that much,’ says Maria.

Carbon dioxide. Now at least I know what we’re talking about – climate change. I think of Nathan Hornby and his climate science is crap comment. The Minister is at a table up the other end of the room with Mike, the station leader – fact-finding, no doubt. Adrian is perched on a chair at the same table. Of all the dining rooms in all the world, Adrian has to turn up here. At least I’ll be able to relax once he goes home tomorrow.

It’s bad enough being Cougar, but having Adrian watch my performance is doing my head in.

No doubt he will compare the two versions of Cougar in his head and find me lacking.

I open and shut my mouth a few times as Lucas and Maria continue their conversation. Rory glances my way and flickers his eyebrows.

I know what he means. Cougar would not sit here mutely. Cougar would be the centre of attention.

Cougar is like Alexis from Dynasty, she always makes her presence felt. I rack my brain to recall what I know about climate change, but suspect there is no way to dumb down this conversation enough for me to make a contribution. I now wish Mary was here. Annoying as she is, she would be able to brief me on the best tactic to take control of the situation.

As we finish dessert – luckily sticky date pudding is on the menu for Cougar – there is a break in the conversation. Rory gives me a meaningful nod. I clear my throat.

‘Ahem.’ Maria and Lucas turn to me.

I straighten my spine. ‘I’d like to brief you on my program. Then we can be sure we’re all on the same page.’

Lucas’s blue eyes crinkle. ‘Are you planning to include climate change in your show?’

I am jolted out of my happy sense of taking control. I have no idea what he is talking about. This

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show is about Antarctica. It’s about ice and penguins, snow and seals.

That’s what you always have in shows about Antarctica. No-one is interested in climate change – and certainly not at seven thirty pm on a weeknight when the alternative is watching Kitchen Talent on Channel Four. Climate change is boring. The ABC might get away with it, but our audience has a trigger-happy grip on the remote control and they’re not afraid to use it. I’m about to tell him this, but he continues.

‘All we get is documentaries about ice and cute little penguins.’

Lucas snorts. ‘It drives me crazy. When are we going to see some real science? You are a glaciologist?’

I nod – whatever that is.

‘Good. Then you know all about it.’ He smiles. His teeth are very white.

I cough. I’m keen to divert the conversation away from my broad knowledge of glaciology.

Lucas taps his fork on his glass and the hum in the room lowers.

I wasn’t expecting the whole room to listen in. Even the Minister’s table is turned my way.

Even Adrian.

‘Cougar is going to brief us on her program,’ Lucas announces.

‘I expect this will be of interest to everyone.’

There is much scraping as everyone swivels their chairs to face our table.

Rory raises his eyebrows at me.

I get to my feet. For some reason the music from Dynasty runs through my head. I think of how when the show starts they run a rapid recap of recent developments. It’s not your baby!

Give it to me straight, doctor! He’s not dead!

Lucas’s eyes are focused on me.

Maria’s head is cocked to the side.

Adrian looks alert and ready to rate my performance. The Minister folds his arms as if awaiting a controversial policy announcement

from the opposition. And I think it is this that sends me off in an unexpected direction – shoot first and take aim later.

I take a deep breath. ‘Hurricanes are increasing! Bushfires are raging! Polar bears are at risk of extinction!’ Polar Fun for Kids filled me in on the polar bear situation. It seems the thin sea ice in the Arctic is leading to polar bears having difficulties in catching seals.

Rory is wide-eyed. It’s hard to know whether he’s impressed or alarmed. Lucas and Maria seem puzzled but interested. Maria opens her mouth, but I hold up my hand. I am Cougar. I have the floor.

I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but I haven’t finished yet.

What would Alexis do?

Lisa Walker’s previous novels include Sex, Lies and Bonsai and Arkie’s Pilgrimage to the Next Big Thing. She will appear at Byron Writers Festival 2018.

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FEATURE

To cast a spell: Zanni Louise on the magic of writing Ahead of her special writing retreat designed to foster inspiration and imagination, local children’s author Zanni Louise discusses the magic of the written word, and how writing can happen anywhere, any time – if you let it.

Writers are practically wizards.

They make people. Worlds. Solve any problem with the stroke of a pen, or strike of a key.

But the real magic of writing is deeper and more mysterious. I am not into voodoo, but I have experienced, first hand, the magic of writing.

From a young age, I’ve lived in a world of words. I tell myself stories from the moment I wake, until I crash out at night. Words, characters, and worlds kept me entertained, and provided me with boundless social opportunities as a kid. They still do.

I am never quite sure where these characters, worlds and ideas come from. How does the brain, unconsciously, create a compelling story while you sleep? In another life, I’d study neuroscience, and maybe get to know the answer to this. But for now, I trust in the process. The imagination is a spectacular and mysterious force.

The trick is harnessing the imagination and giving it space to flourish into an artform an audience can connect with. I feel there are a few simple rules.

Cultivate magic We are all born with muscles. But a small portion of the population manages to inflate those babies like balloons. You know why?

Because they work them.

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Your imagination muscle can be worked too. When I was young, I was a walking talking imagination factory. Then I got to studying and working and worrying, and imagination took the back seat.

Like lots of people, having kids was a chance for me to reopen the factory, and get the cogs working again. I had unstructured time. I had boredom. I had mini-imagination machines hanging around me 24/7.

My imagination reactivated.

The cogs of the imagination factory are well oiled too, which means words and ideas flow easily. I write continuously. Educational material.

Business blog posts. Emails.

Manuscripts. On the average working day, I churn out around 5,000 words. And then, in the down time, the magic escapes, whether I like it or not.

My newest picture book Errol! was an escapee. Errol came at me from an unusual angle, in the form of a roughly sketched penguin, on a line across my notebook.

I knew early on, that Errol had legs.

More than stumpy little penguin legs. Errol, as an idea, as a character, had potential. I developed then submitted the manuscript to Scholastic, and it was contracted quite quickly. Errol! is now a reallife book, with artwork by Philip Bunting. A second Errol book has been contracted for next year.

With only fifty words, Errol! seems simple enough. And I guess, in many ways, it is. But there’s a rich world beyond Errol! – a laying down of countless words and ideas, which paved the way to the apparent easiness of this story.

Errol! for me was play.

Experimentation. And being brave enough to send this odd little idea to a publisher. Good books and good ideas don’t just happen. They grow. And magic does too, especially if we give it enough attention, and use those imagination muscles often enough.

Create space for magic We’re all busy. But part of the magic of writing is that it can be done anywhere. You don’t even really need a pen and paper. Your head will do.

But we need to create space in the busyness. Carry a notebook. Create a folder on your computer. Trade ten minutes of Facebook time for ten minutes of idle imagination meandering. Nature helps. Peace and quiet does too.

But to be honest, I get most of my writing work done amidst the chaos of life. If I waited for the perfect opportunity, I’d never write a thing.

To learn more about Zanni’s writing retreat and her books, go to www. zannilouise.com

INTERVIEW

Playful and generous: Kim Scott’s Noongar heritage Kim Scott’s appearance at Byron Writer’s Festival 2017 marked the beginning of a bumper twelve months for the Perth-born novelist. Scott’s novel Taboo won him both Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers Prize at the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in April, to go alongside the two Miles Franklin Awards that already sit on his mantelpiece. He spoke with Katinka Smit about Noongar culture and language (originating from the south west corner of Western Australia), which so deeply inform his work.

You once commented, ‘the literary thing is about shifting ways of thinking… You can reach out a long way through the English language informed by a different way of thinking.’ Has learning Noongar impacted how you’ve viewed the possibilities of writing in English?

Yes. It encourages me to be playful and generous. Working with some of the older Noongar language texts, I’m surprised by the playfulness and the enormous generosity; it’s a really strong reservoir of Noongar heritage, a ninety-nine per cent Noongar context. Working in Noongar language has helped me to read the archives differently. One text talks about a sailor looking through a telescope – a cultural leap into looking through the eyes of the Other writ large, and a readiness to take on new cultural products and play with them. To me, that makes it very contemporary and it makes me think, how would my old people write a novel now? How are they trying to story things?

Some of the stories I know have archetypal through-structures, a bit like Greek epics. There’s a commonly repeated structure: an

individual failing in a contest or challenge, being killed – often by an evil spirit – sometimes eaten and their bones thrown into the ash. The weather is sometimes co-opted into battle and kills the baddy. But the protagonist is still dead; the rain comes and lifts up their body or the bones and moves them. And then the water recedes, and they’re left as an imprint in the mud. Then a community member, expressed as a brother, comes along and either speaks to them or breathes into them, or what’s left of them, and resurrects them. So that sort of influenced Taboo, hopefully in a subtle way.

So there are stories of revival?

Yeah, through community and language. I wanted that to inform Taboo, even though we’re only just resurrecting these stories and language in the little community I know, a little sub-set of Noongar community. But I wanted that to inform a contemporary novel, so that I can speak like this and shine a light back on that other work.

Can you talk about how language revival projects affect identity?

It’s really big – the nourishing stuff of an identity informed by reconnecting with one’s pre-colonial heritage: language, story, place.

And then using that to rebuild and reshape community, a distinctive, authentic, home community of descendants. That’s something that’s separate from the whole of colonisation, except that you are rebuilding and recovering from colonisation.

Can you tell us about your Noongar books and language projects?

They’re extremely important to me, it makes me feel useful as a literary person. There’s healing even in reading the stories. I really value and believe in language and story being a catalyst for things. It feels fantastic when we sing old songs, which we’re starting to do now, resurrecting them and making sense of them. I like to think we’re making ourselves instruments for the spirit that’s in that language. I like the rhythms of Noongar language. It’s beautiful.

Taboo is published by Picador

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Tim Winton (Photo: Denise Winton)

FEATURE

Masculinity and alienation: Tim Winton’s Coastal Gothic In the wake of Tim Winton’s appearance in Byron Bay earlier in the year, local writer and Gothic expert Christine Tondorf considers how Winton’s oeuvre, including his new novel The Shepherd’s Hut, fits the label of ‘Coastal Gothic’.

For a long time I have thought of many of Tim Winton’s novels as Gothic or even Coastal Gothic. The Gothic is a genre that focuses on fears and personal disintegration, and Gothic stories play out in locations that are unsettling, uncanny, tainted. The central characters in Winton’s stories are usually damaged men mourning, or estranged from, a woman. These men frequently find themselves alone and hurting in remote coastal 18 | WINTER 2018 northerly

landscapes – and they’re often menaced by grotesque characters.

In Winton’s first novel The Open Swimmer (1982) there was Jerra, a young man struggling to come to terms with a friend’s suicide.

He retreats to a seaside camp in search of healing, but encounters a grotesque old man living in a beach shack. In Eyrie (2013), the main protagonist is Tom Keely, a failed environmentalist with a drug

and alcohol problem, now holed up in a Fremantle high-rise – below him is a sea of depravity: criminals, drug pushers, misfits. Breath (2008) introduces us to Pikelet, a young tearaway estranged from his parents who pushes himself to the limits in the surf after falling under the spell of a charismatic older surfer. As Fiona Capp wrote in a recent review of Simon Baker’s film Breath, the movie offers a more ‘optimistic take’ on the novel, as

FEATURE

in the book Pikelet is ‘emotionally and psychologically crippled by his teenage encounter with hippy surf guru Sando’. Winton’s new novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, is neither as coastal nor as Gothic as The Open Swimmer, Breath or Eyrie, but his focus is again on a male in crisis. The Shepherd’s Hut, however, veers away from the Gothic when the troubled key character, Jaxie Clackton, stumbles across a dilapidated humpy and meets Fintan MacGillis, a priest in exile, who shows the forlorn teen kindness.

Growing up with a violent father (his mother lost to cancer), Jaxie is on a desperate pilgrimage, crossing the arid salt lands of the west, to unite with his young girlfriend. Like many of Winton’s broken men, Jaxie reminds me of Gothic anti-heroes.

I think of Frankenstein’s monster, denied a mate, roaming the Arctic Wilderness, or Heathcliff who after Cathy’s death desperately searches the moors for her ghost. These are damaged men, estranged from the feminine and banished to a wilderness. Gothic scholar Kate Ellis testifies that the Gothic focuses on crumbling castles (or crumbling homes) and homeless protagonists who wander the face of the earth: ‘It is the failed home that appears on the pages, the place from which some (usually fallen men) are locked out and others (usually innocent women) are locked in.’

And she goes on to say that ‘the male exile is no more empowered, ultimately, by the division than the female prisoner’.

At Byron Bay Community Centre in March, Winton explained that the central theme of The Shepherd’s Hut was ‘toxic masculinity’. Everything Jaxie has learnt from his father about being a man is corrupt. His role models are brutes trading in

force. Toxic masculinity is at the core of many classic Australian Gothic texts, for example Wake in Fright, Wolf Creek, Mad Max, even The Dressmaker.

Winton believes this alphamasculine culture was inherited from our colonial past. The Irish Fintan refers to Jaxie as his ‘wild colonial boy’. Australia’s earliest Gothic colonial writers also explored the theme of toxic masculinity. Barbara Baynton wrote about rape and murder in ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (1896).

Price Warrung describes the heinous torture of a convict supervisor in ‘The Pegging Out of Overseer Franke’ (1892). But in The Shepherd’s Hut the kindly Fintan MacGillis is an antidote to male brutality. Fintan offers Jaxie friendship, love.

Australia’s natural environment is, in a sense, also a victim of male brutality in Winton’s novels. His stories unfold in a battered postcolonial landscape. The Shepherd’s Hut is narrated by Jaxie, who describes an abandoned miners’ camp as a bloody mess, ‘like they’d been in a war on and everyone had just packed it in, like suddenly they were fed up and fucked off’. I see this as country seized from the indigenous owners and disrespected by belligerent white men. So gently Winton reminds us that Australia is a broken land inhabited by broken people, for example when Jaxie comes to his first salt lake: I had the urge to lay down in all that soft purply-pink samphire. I heard people say you can eat it.

Maybe the olden time blackfellas did. Nowadays, them people, all they eat is chicken and chips.

At the Byron event, Winton apologised for the abrasive

voice of this novel’s narrator, but Jaxie speaks with a street-smart eloquence.

Some scholars have argued that the first (eighteenth century) Gothic novels about women locked in castles and menaced by toxic men are also the earliest feminist texts. In the past year the world has witnessed the rise of the #MeToo movement – a new campaign against noxious masculinity, but rather than just vilifying the ‘toxic male’ Winton tries to provide some insight into what shaped him. He is also asking questions about what it means to be a man today. In many ways feminism has focused on the plight of women – unequal pay, limited access to childcare, underrepresented in executive positions and parliament – but to achieve a more equal, respectful society is Winton nudging us to also ask: what does it mean to be a man in contemporary Australia?

To read an exclusive interview with Tim Winton conducted by Christine Tondorf about the Gothic in his work, head to www.byronwritersfestival.com/blog

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LEARNING CURVE

Learning Curve: Writing and running From the long walks of Rousseau and Thoreau to Murakami’s marathons, exercise has long been a crucial aid in the creative process. Here, Australian novelist Eleanor Limprecht discusses how the discipline and psychology of running can help with your writing.

I have run a couple of half marathons in Sydney: twentyone kilometres through the eerie quiet streets with the only other sound the rhythmic breathing of others, feet hitting bitumen and the occasional shout of a spectator.

When I wasn’t focused on putting one foot in front of the other I gazed around in pained wonder.

Who were all of these other people crazy enough to get up at 5am and slog through the streets of the city with thousands of others? Crazy enough to spend months logging long training runs and to have eaten a plate of carbs and drunk a litre of water before going to bed by 9pm the night before? They are everywhere. It is strange to count myself among them.

But perhaps not so strange.

I’ve been thinking lately, having written three novels, that there are symmetries between long-form

“Exercise improves my work – they feed into each other.

My best ideas for writing come when I’m running.”

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writing and long-distance running.

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami wrote a memoir of distance running in 2008, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He writes: Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned from running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate – and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in by abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different.

Australian writer Benjamin Law also talks about this: how exercise and writing feed naturally into each other. He said in an interview in 2013: Writing involves you being completely, revoltingly sedentary

while your brain works overtime.

But when you exercise, it’s the complete reverse – you more or less become brain dead while your body works like a bastard to not drown/collapse on the treadmill/ die. Then after I exercise, I always come back to my laptop and it’s like I’m seeing the story for the first time. I know what I need to do.

My first half-marathon was in 2003. I wasn’t writing, I had just moved to Sydney and I was twentyfive. The race itself was awful. I was exhausted halfway through and pushed myself just to finish, wishing every moment that I could quit. I finished in two hours and fourteen minutes and I hated every second. Why do something that you despise?

Back then I had desire but little discipline. If I wasn’t good at something immediately, what was the point? If I had not become a writer, I don’t think that I would have the same focus that I do now. In my second half marathon I finished in one hour and fifty-eight minutes. Here are ten things writing has taught me about distance running – in no particular order.

LEARNING CURVE

1

I’m not in it to win it. I’m never going to be the fastest runner or the most erudite, celebrated writer. I am motivated to see myself improve.

2

Big goals are best approached in bite-sized chunks. When writing a novel I try to write 1,000 words every weekday. When training to run twenty-one kilometres I run five to ten minutes longer every week.

3

It is a solitary exercise but it helps to have friends doing it as well. I have writer friends and runner friends, and with both I can commiserate when things are tough, and celebrate success.

4

Some days it is wonderful and easy, others it feels as though I am moving through a swamp. I never know what kind of day it is going to be.

5

I need goals. A short story by the end of the month, a novel by the end of the year.

A ten-kilometre in June, a halfmarathon in September. They need to be realistic though.

6

I need endurance and every bit of stubbornness I can find to achieve those goals.

7

Exercise improves my work – they feed into each other. My best ideas for writing come when I’m running.

8

If it isn’t hard, I am not improving. If it isn’t hard, I won’t have the same sense of achievement when I am finished

9

This is what I need to run: running shoes, some quick-drying, stretchy clothes.

This is what I need to write: pen and paper or my laptop.

The less complicated my requirements, the easier it is to not have excuses.

10

The joy of an empty stretch of road is like the joy of an empty screen on my laptop. Both are silent, open, and full of possibility.

A version of this article originally appeared at www. eleanorlimprecht.com. Eleanor Limprecht’s new novel The Passengers is published by Allen & Unwin and is available now.

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YA BOOK REVIEWS

What YA Reading?

Reviews by Polly Jude

Neverland

by Margot McGovern

Paris Syndrome

by Lisa Walker

Small Spaces

by Sarah Epstein

When Kit Learmonth is expelled from her elite private school she’s sent back to her island home. She thinks everything will be the same.

But since her parents died, her uncle has turned the island into a psychiatric treatment facility for atrisk teenagers. After her latest stunt, Kit finds herself one of his patients and the rules change.

Happy Glass loves Paris. She loves everything about it; the sights, the films and especially the romance.

When Happy wins a French Tourism Board essay writing competition about why she loves Paris, Happy meets Alex 1, Alex 2 and the mysterious Japanese eccentric, Professor Tanaka.

Tash Carmody has an imaginary friend. But Sparrow isn’t the kind of imaginary friend you’d want to hang out with. He’s dangerous and unpredictable. No one believed Tash when she told the police Sparrow had been there the day local primary school girl, Mallory Fisher, disappeared from the fair.

Alex 1 is the uber-sexy Frenchman Happy always dreamt of. Alex 2 is cool and quirky but has secrets. Professor Tanaka has Paris syndrome, a crippling mental affliction caused by the disappointment of visiting Paris.

When the Fishers move back to town years later, Mallory is fifteen and she doesn’t speak. Unwanted memories of Sparrow and the day Mallory went missing start coming back and Tash starts to wonder what’s real and what’s not.

Happy’s stuck in Brisbane, a world away from the romance of Paris she dreams of visiting with her bestie, Rosie.

This terrifying YA book is fast and fun. It will have you falling asleep with the lights on and checking under the bed!

Her island is fierce and rugged. It’s a mythical place where stories of mermaids, pirates and Peter Pan feel real. The patients are Kit’s friends Gypsie, Alistair and the dangerous newcomer who’s got a story of his own, Rohan.

Kit begins unravelling the mysterious stories of her past to help her future make sense.

Random House Australia / 320pp / RRP$19.99

Happy finds herself drawn to both Alex 1 and Alex 2 and things get messy!

Harper Collins Australia / 320pp / RRP$19.99

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Walker Books / 384 pp / RRP$19.99

BOOK REVIEW

The mystery of country Return to Tamarlin

by K.M. Steele Review by Kathy Gibbings

Return to Tamarlin is a gritty read. Yes, an overused word in book reviews, but this novel is full of grit: dust, dried grass, despair and resilience. It’s a book that will resonate with adults as well as young readers, as it scales the intense relationships between teenage girls, their dysfunctional family, and an unforgiving community.

December 1975. The central characters, Nancy and Mary, aged sixteen and fourteen, head into town with their parents, Tamara and Lionel. While the parents are visiting Nana Slender, the girls sneak into the cinema to see the iconic Australian film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, (based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel set in 1900) where a group of teenage girls disappear on a walk through wild, rocky country.

Similar themes of disappearance and mystery echo through Return to Tamarlin. The Limeholes, caves outside Coonabarabran, play the role of an alien landscape where Mary and Nancy go on to have a misadventure with a strange man. The next day their mother vanishes from their lives without a trace.

K. M. Steele (Kate, but there is another Kate Steele already writing) has previously published poetry and short stories, and this is her debut novel. Steele was born in Dubbo and spent her early years in Coonabarabran, so she knows the setting well.

Tamarlin, the farm where Mary and Nancy grow up, forms the backbone to this book. It is on ancient country. At one point Nancy describes it as uncaring, a place that will impose itself and its ways regardless of any attempts to shape it. The trauma that Nancy and Mary experience seems equally inescapable, and propels their fates as the shockwaves keep rolling on into adulthood.

The prose in the book’s early stages, exploring the emotions and confusions of adolescence as well as the divided loyalties and grief due to Tamara’s disappearance, has both an immediacy and sustained tension that is gripping. The writing loses some momentum in the latter part of the book, which shows snapshots of the sisters’ lives over the next twenty-five years. Perhaps the story could have been telescoped into a tighter timeframe to maintain the tension. I also had problems with the resolution to the novel – it didn’t seem to grow organically from the story that had preceded it. I also felt that the mysterious stranger’s quest, which triggered the ending, lacked credibility.

Maybe a Picnic at Hanging Rock finale would have suited, leaving the mystery hanging in the air?

Ostensibly, Return to Tamarlin is a ‘who done it?’ but for my money it’s more a psychological drama. The cover shows a dreamy photo at dawn with two birds flying against the green-tinged sky, the silhouette of a horse grazing, and fancy old-fashioned writing. It suggests an old-style story set on a farm, a romance, an Australian Gone With the Wind? Perhaps that analogy is apt. Themes of connection to and alienation from the land, the ties and fractures of family and the winds of destruction are common to both.

I highly recommend Return to Tamarlin. Steele has created living, breathing creatures, against a stark but stunning backdrop, and I was wrapped up in the drama of their lives.

Steele set up Campbell St. Press to self-publish her work but I believe this book could easily sit on a mainstream publisher’s list. I look forward to her next one.

Campbell St. Press / 236pp / $21.45

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FESTIVAL WORKSHOPS

2018 Festival Workshops Don’t miss your chance to participate in one of these once-in-a-lifetime workshops.

For details and to book visit byronwritersfestival.com/festival-workshops

EVERYBODY HAS A STORY TO TELL WITH ALAN CLOSE

NAIL YOUR PITCH WITH LAUREL COHN

PRACTICAL MAGIC WITH LAURA BLOOM

MONDAY 30 JULY

MONDAY 30 JULY

TUESDAY 31 JULY

10.00AM - 4.00PM

1.00PM - 4.00PM

10.00AM - 4.00PM

Habitat Byron Bay

Byron Community College

Byron Community College

$120 / $100*

$65 / $55*

$120 / $100*

‘No-one is boring if they tell the truth.’

Quentin Crisp

Everybody has a story to tell. This workshop will help you find that story and give you tools to write it. You can bring a project you’re already working on or come and see where the pen takes you.

*Byron Writers Festival members or students

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The key to a successful pitch and synopsis is a clear understanding of what you are writing and where it fits in the publishing world. This workshop offers tools to frame your work for different publishing opportunities.

In this one-day workshop, acclaimed novelist Laura Bloom will explore the principles of three-act-structure and character transformation. Participants will learn how to apply these concepts to their own work in order to create more satisfying, even magical, experiences for their readers.

FESTIVAL WORKSHOPS

‘IMPROV’ YOUR WRITING WITH HILTON KOPPE TUESDAY 31 JULY

DIRTY LAUNDRY: WRITING ABOUT YOUR FAMILY WITH MANDY NOLAN

ACTIVISM, COMMUNITY AND ADVOCACY WITH DAVID RITTER

TUESDAY 31 JULY

WEDNESDAY 1 AUGUST

10.00AM - 4.00PM Habitat Byron Bay

10.00AM - 4.00PM

1.30PM - 4.30PM

$120 / $100*

Byron Community College

Byron Community College

$120 / $100*

$65 / $55*

‘Improv your writing’(NB: that’s not a typo, Improv writing is what we do at the workshop!)

Finding writing too solitary or serious? Looking to be inspired?

This could be the workshop for you. A range of fun short writing exercises in a variety of styles will leave participants feeling rejuvenated, refreshed and ready to write.

Our families are full of secrets, dysfunctions, love and betrayal.

When it comes to looking for grand story plots sometimes what we’re after is right there in our backyard.

Mandy Nolan’s workshop will have you fleshing out those skeletons from your family closet.

David Ritter, Greenpeace Australia CEO, tackles Activism, Community Building and Advocacy drawing on the powerful StopAdani campaign, which is a focus of his new book The Coal Truth. He will also speak about past Greenpeace campaigns and workshop the question ‘How do we create change in the world?’

*Byron Writers Festival members or students

northerly WINTER 2018 | 25

FESTIVAL WORKSHOPS

2018 Festival Workshops Don’t miss your chance to participate in one of these once-in-a-lifetime workshops.

For details and to book visit byronwritersfestival.com/festival-workshops

BOOKS TO SCREEN: TURNING A BOOK INTO A TV SERIES

UNCOVERING SECRET HISTORY WITH PROFESSOR JENNY HOCKING

THURSDAY 2 AUGUST

THURSDAY 2 AUGUST

Byron Community College

9.30AM - 4.30PM

10.00AM - 4.00PM

$35 / $25*

Byron Community College

Community Centre, Veranda Room

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF SELF PUBLISHING WEDNESDAY 1 AUGUST 11.00AM - 1.00PM

$120 / $100* Learn about the world of print-ondemand and global distribution with Debbie Lee and Robin Cutler from Ingram Content Group. Why wait for that elusive publisher contract when you can do-ityourself like a pro?

Partner: IngramSpark

$120 / $100* Observe and participate in a unique behind-the-scenes reveal as an author, a TV producer and two leading screenwriters work together to adapt Tristan Bancks’ acclaimed young adult novel The Fall into a TV series.

Partner: Screenworks

*Byron Writers Festival members or students

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Every history hides a secret waiting to be found. Whether family history, a personal story, auto/biography or a moment of grand historical rupture. Whatever its form, there is always another story to tell. This workshop shows you how.

FESTIVAL WORKSHOPS

VOICE IN CREATIVE NON-FICTION WITH SARAH KRASNOSTEIN

HOW TO LIVE MORE AND SPEND LESS WITH RICHARD DENNISS

THURSDAY 2 AUGUST

THURSDAY 2 AUGUST

LIVING IN NATURE WITH MIRIAM LANCEWOOD THURSDAY 2 AUGUST 1.30PM - 4.30PM

10.00AM - 4.00PM

9.30AM - 12.30PM

Habitat Byron Bay

Community Centre, Cavanbah Room

Habitat Byron Bay

$65 / $55*

$65 / $55*

$120 / $100* More than just tone or perspective, voice is a signature. In this workshop, we will explore some of the many choices involved in the process of turning ourselves into credible and original narrators of true stories.

We are told that waste creates wealth. But wasting money on things we don’t need isn’t a good way to ‘create jobs’ or ‘create happiness’. Learning why we waste is essential to learning how to waste less.

Miriam Lancewood lived for seven years in the wilderness of New Zealand with her husband. They survived by hunting and gathering and slept in a tent. ‘What is freedom?’ she asks herself. Come and discover.

*Byron Writers Festival members or students

northerly WINTER 2018 | 27

Competitions THE MOTH INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY PRIZE The Moth prize is open to anyone aged eighteen and over. There is an open theme, with first place taking out €3,000. Word limit is 5,000 and entry fee is €12 per story. This year’s judge is award-winning author Kevin Barry.

This Ireland-based competition closes for entries on 30 June. For full details visit www.themothmagazine.com

ADELAIDE PLAINS POETS INC. POETRY COMPETITION This competition invites entries of poems to the theme of ‘Truth’ and features an open class (ages eighteen and over) as well as classes for primary school and secondary school students.

Poems should be no longer than sixty lines, while there is an entry fee of $10 for the first poem entered and $5 for those entered thereafter. Entries close on 6 July. Total prize money available comes to $700. For full details go to www.carolyn-poeticpause.blogspot. com.au

UNIVERSITY OF CANBERRA VICE-CHANCELLOR’S INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE This prestigious international poetry competition offers a first prize of $15,000, with the runner-up receiving $5,000. Poems should be no longer than fifty lines and 1,000 words in total.

There is an entry fee of $20 per poem and entries close on 30 June, while the head judge for 2018 is Wendy Pope. For full details regarding entry conditions go to www.canberra.edu.au/aboutuc/competitions-and-awards/ vcpoetryprize

IPSWICH POETRY FEAST COMPETITION This annual poetry competition gives poets of all ages the opportunity to compete for more than $6,500 28 | WINTER 2018 northerly

in prizes. A host of categories are available from age five and upwards as well as categories for bush poetry and local poets. Entries must be received by 5pm on 27 July. Entry is free for the junior categories, while there is a fee of $5 payable for Open Age categories. For full details visit http:// www.ipswichpoetryfeast.com.au/ competition.htm

ELYNE MITCHELL WRITING AWARD This competition invites both fiction and non-fiction entries of no more than 2,500 words that references the Australasian rural experience. The 2018 theme is ‘Reach for the stars – Strive for excellence’. First prize takes $1,000 in prize money and there is a $15 entry fee. Deadline for entries is Thursday, 23 August with the shortlist announced on 1 October. For further information go to www.elynemitchell.com.au

THE PETER BLAZEY FELLOWSHIP This Fellowship is awarded nationally to writers in the non-fiction fields of biography, autobiography and life writing and is intended to further a work in progress. Applications will be judged on literary merit and the winner will be supported in his or her work by a prize of approximately $15,000 and a one-month residency at The Australia Centre. The deadline for applications is 25 June, for full details of submission requirements go to arts.unimelb.edu.au/scholarships/ prizes-and-scholarships/peterblazey-fellowship

FAW TASMANIA 2018 POETRY PRIZE Poems of no more than sixty lines are invited for this competition. Poems should be original and unpublished – a $5 entry fee is payable and the deadline for submission is 31 August.

First prize wins $150 and second prize $50. For more information go to https://fawtas.org.au/competitions/

RICHELL PRIZE FOR EMERGING WRITERS This prize, awarded annually, was set up in memory of Hachette Australia’s former CEO, Matt Richell, who died suddenly in 2014. The prize is open to unpublished writers of adult fiction and adult narrative non-fiction. The winner will receive $10,000 in prize money and one year of mentoring with Hachette Australia. Extensive details of the award and submission requirements can be found at www. hachette.com.au/news/the-2018richell-prize-for-emerging-writers.

The deadline for submissions is 9 July.

BELLE OLLE POETRY AWARD The Betty Olle Poetry Award is awarded for traditional Australian bush poetry (with rhyme, rhythm and metre). There is an entry fee of $10 per form, with two poems permitted on a form. Entry is free for the junior section (under twelve years). The winner receives $500 with the runnerup taking $200. The winning junior poet wins $100. The closing date is 15 August, with further details regarding the competition available at www. abpa.org.au/events.html

SWWT ANNUAL SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2018 Organised by the Society of Women Writers, Tasmania, this competition is open to all short story writers for original, unpublished works of between 1,200 and 2,500 words. The theme for this year is ‘Life changing’.

There is $200 on offer for first prize and $50 for second. There is a fee of $10 for up to two entries. For entry requirements visit www.swwtas. org/249437482

PATRICK WHITE YOUNG INDIGENOUS WRITERS AWARD These awards are designed to encourage indigenous Australians from kindergarten to year 12, studying in New South Wales, to put their reading, writing and creative skills into action.

There are three themes to write to: ‘What have I done?’, ‘Swimming’ and ‘The long walk’. There is also a group competition in which Aboriginal students working together with classmates can develop a shared poem, story or play. The deadline for entries is Friday, 28 September, with a major prize and two encouragement awards on offer for each school year. For more information visit www.aec.org.au/ wordpress/patrick-white-award

CITY OF ROCKINGHAM SHORT FICTION AWARDS Entries into the City of Rockingham Short Fiction Awards must be inspired by, drawn upon, or use the theme of the artwork Two Children at Beach

by Delon Govender (2003), which can be viewed by visiting the City of Rockingham website, and on the entry form. Stories should be between 1,000 and 4,000 words in length, and there are three categories: Open, Over 50s and Young Writers (10-17). Prize money is $1,000 for first place in the Open and Over 50s categories and $700 for Young Writers. Entry is free and submissions close on 13 July. For complete details head to rockingham.wa.gov.au/ Community/Art-and-culture/Writingand-literature

INKTEARS FLASH FICTION CONTEST This UK-based competition invites entries of 500 words or shorter to its flash fiction competition. The winner receives £250, the runner-up £50 and eight highly commended entries £25.

Entrants must be over eighteen years of age, and each submission must be

accompanied by an entry fee of £3.50.

For further details of the competition visit www.inktears.com/ffentry

ACU PRIZE FOR POETRY The ACU Prize for Poetry is open to Australian citizens or permanent residents of Australia aged eighteen or over – international students currently studying in Australia are also eligible.

The theme for 2018 is ‘Empathy’, with the competition judged by Chris Wallace-Crabbe. First place wins $10,000, second place $5,000. Poems should not exceed eighty lines and there is an entry fee of $25 per poem.

Entries close on 20 July, for full details visit www.acu.edu.au/about_acu/ our_university/catholic_identity/ acu_poetry_prize

ROS SPENCER POETRY PRIZE 2018 This poetry contest organised by WA Poets Inc. invites entries of up to sixty lines on an open theme.

First prize wins $701, with second place winning $299. There are also highly commended and commended awards. Entry fees range from $10 for one entry to $30 for four entries, with submissions closing on 29 June.

For information on how to enter go to wapoets.wordpress.com/rosspencer-poetry-prize/contest-entry

SCRIBES WRITERS POETIC LICENCE POETRY COMPETITION 2018 This competition features two categories: Traditional Verse and Free Verse, both of which are on an open theme and a maximum line count of sixty. Entry is $7 per category, with a deadline for submissions of 30 June.

First place takes $200, second place $100. For terms and conditions and to download an entry form go to www. scribeswriters.com/details-andconditions.html

BOROONDARA LITERARY AWARDS The Boroondara Literary Awards presents an Open Short Story Competition and Young Writers Competition for prose and poetry, both with a deadline of 31 August.

For the Open award, entries should be 1,500 and 3,000 words in length, with first place taking $1,500. For the Young Writers category, short stories should be between 300 and 500 words and poetry should be no more than 100 lines, with first place winning $300. There are several sub-categories within the Young Writers category ranging from school year five to school year twelve. For complete entry requirements go to www.boroondara. vic.gov.au/about-council/awards/ boroondara-literary-awards/enterboroondara-literary-awards

THE HORNE PRIZE The Horne Prize, organised by The Saturday Paper in partnership with Aesop, aims to nurture writers of longform non-fiction by offering this award worth $15,000. This year’s prize will awarded in December for an essay of up to 3,000 words on the subject of ‘Australian life’. Entries close on 17 September. Entry is free, for more information go to www. thehorneprize.com.au

AAWP/ASSF EMERGING WRITERS’ SHORT STORY PRIZE The Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP)/Australian Short Story Festival (ASSF) short story prize invites entries to the 2018 competition.

Entries should not exceed 3,000 words, with prizes including a ticket to the Australian Short Story Festival in Perth on 19-21October as well as accommodation and travel. Entries close 30 June, for full details visit www.aawporg.au

northerly WINTER 2018 | 29

Writers Groups Alstonville Plateau Writers Group

Meets second Friday of each month, 10am - 12pm. All genres welcome, contact Kerry on (02) 6628 5662 or email alstonvilleplateauwriters@outlook.com

Ballina/Byron U3A Creative Writing

Meets every second Wednesday at 12pm, Fripp Oval, Ballina. Contact Ann Neal on (02) 6681 6612.

Bangalow Writers Group

Meets Thursdays at 9:15am at Bangalow Scout Hall.

Contact Simone on 0407 749 288

Bellingen Writers Group

Meets at Bellingen Golf Club on the fourth Monday of the month at 2pm. All welcome, contact Joanne on (02) 6655 9246 or email jothirsk@restnet.com.au

Byron Bay Memoir and Fiction Writing Group

Dunoon Writers Group

Writers on the Block. Meets second Tuesday of each month, 6:30pm – 8:30pm at Dunoon Sports Club.Contact Helga on (02) 6620 2994 (W), 0401 405 178 (M) or email heg.j@telstra.com

FAW Port Macquarie-Hastings Regional

Meets 1pm on last Saturday of each month, Maritime Museum, Port Macquarie. Contact Joie on (02) 6584 3520 or email Bessie on befrank@tsn.cc

Gold Coast Writers Association

Meets third Saturday of each month, 1:30pm for 2pm start, at Fradgley Hall, Burleigh Heads Library, Park Avenue, Burleigh Heads. Contact 0431 443 385 or email info@goldcoast-writers.org.au

Kyogle Writers

Meets monthly at Sunrise Beach, Byron Bay. Contact Diana on 0420 282 938 or diana.burstall@gmail.com

Meets first Tuesday of each month, 10:30am at Kyogle Bowling Club. Contact Brian on (02) 6624 2636 or email briancostin129@hotmail.com

Byron Writers

Lismore Writers Group

Every Tuesday 10am to 12pm, Byron Bay Library.

Contact the library on (02) 6685 8540.

Casino Writers Group

Meets every third Thursday of the month at 4pm at Casino Library. Contact Brian on (02) 6628 2636 or email briancostin129@hotmail.com

Cloudcatchers

For Haiku enthusiasts. A ginko (haiku walk) is undertaken according to group agreement. Contact Quendryth on (02) 6653 3256 or email quendrythyoung@bigpond.com

Coffs Harbour Writers Group

Meets 1st Wednesday of the month 10.30am to 12.30pm. Contact Lorraine Penn on (02) 6653 3256 or 0404 163 136, email: lmproject@bigpond.com. www.coffsharbourwriters.com

Coffs Harbour Memoir Writers Group

Share your memoir writing for critique. Monthly meetings, contact 0409 824 803 or email costalmermaid@gmail.com

Cru3a River Poets

Meets every Thursday at 10:30am, venue varies, mainly in Yamba. Contact Pauline on (02) 6645 8715 or email kitesway@westnet.com.au

Dorrigo Writers Group

Meets every second Wednesday from 10am-2pm. Contact Iris on (02) 6657 5274 or email an_lomall@bigpond.com or contact Nell on (02) 6657 4089

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Meets second Tuesday of the month from 6pm to 8pm at Communities Hub Art Space on Keen Street. Cost is $5 for Hub members, $7.50 for non-members. For more details phone 0410 832 362.

Middle Grade / Young Adult Fiction Writers’ Group

Meets monthly at 2pm on Sundays in Bangalow.

Contact Carolyn Bishop at carolyncbishop@gmail.com or 0431 161 104

Nambucca Valley Writers Group

Meets fourth Saturday of each month, 1:30pm, Nambucca.

Contact (02) 6568 9648 or nambuccawriters@gmail.com

Taree-Manning River Scribblers

Meets second Wednesday of the month, 9am-11:30am, Taree. Call first to check venue. Contact Bob Winston on (02) 6553 2829 or email rrw1939@hotmail.com

Tweed Poets and Writers

Meets weekly at the Coolangatta Senior Citizens Centre on Tuesdays from 1:30 to 3:30pm, NSW time. Poets, novelists, playwrights, short story writers are all welcome. Phone Lorraine (07) 5524 8035 or Pauline (07) 5524 5062.

WordsFlow Writing Group meets Fridays during school term, 12:30pm-3pm, Pottsville Beach Neighbourhood Centre, 12a Elizabeth St, Pottsville Beach. Contact Cheryl on 0412 455 707 or visit www.wordsflowwriters.blogspot.com

Support northerly in 2018 northerly is a the official magazine of Byron Writers Festival. Published quarterly in March, June, September and December, it is widely distributed to members, community organisations, libraries, universities, schools, festivals, publishers and bookshops throughout the Northern Rivers and beyond.

Designed to be picked up, put down, passed around, dog-eared and scribbled on, northerly reaches a highly engaged readership of discerning arts enthusiasts.

Advertising rates (full colour, inc. GST) $100 $500

Back cover

$350

Inside back/front cover

Inside 2 column

Byron Writers Festival members receive a 25% discount on all advertising rates. To discuss your advertising needs, contact us on (02) 6685 5115 or email northerlyeditor@gmail.com.

Line up includes Manal al-Sharif · Eddie Ayres · Robert Drewe · Kitty Flanagan Peter Greste · Matt Haig · Jane Harper · Anita Heiss · Tom Keneally Hyeonseo Lee · Tracey Moffatt · Liane Moriarty · Tanya Plibersek · Tim Rogers Bernhard Schlink · Sarah Wilson and many more!