Page Seventeen

Fellow Seventeenies, I’ve been a little quiet lately. My only excuse is that I’ve been crazy-busy with a new job, which I’m backing as a good excuse simply out of the authority of being the blog-writer and editor. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So if there’s any correspondence I haven’t followed up on just yet, feel free to hassle me at enquire@pageseventeen.com.

I’m feeling energised and ready to leap back into the fray. I’ve been reading some awesome books over the past months – Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’m hungry. Ravenous. I want more material. I want more stories and more worlds.

Over the next couple of months the sleeping giant that is pageseventeen will shake off the January doldrums and stand tall. This will be Issue #10. A fantastic point to reach. My hands are literally hovering over the keyboard while I’m trying to express the raw exuberance I’ve got right now. I want to celebrate and re-affirm everything that has come before and defined pageseventeen while embracing the new. Keep checking this blog. There will be news. As soon as I settle on which ideas to run with.

The submission window For Issue #10 will open mid-April 2012 and run until the end of June. Our competitions will run for the same time frame. If you have submitted before, please do so again. If you’ve stumbled across the site and have stories to tell, or poetry to share, then take note and saturate us with all you have when the time comes.

And tell your friends about us! The more the merrier.

Thank you to everyone who showed up to the launch on the 19th. Fantastic. Brilliant. Stupendous. Hyperbolic.

If you want to see some pics of the day check them out on our Facebook page or here.

So lets roll out the further thank-yous. To my committee and judges, who have been great in helping me refine the issue.To Watsonia Library,, for allowing us the us of their community room for the event (which ended up being a perfect size for the attendees). To Busybird Publishing, for stepping in and giving page seventeen some tender loving care and being a part of this cool little collection’s continuation.

The best (and easiest) way to grab page seventeen is here, online. We have Paypal, so nice and quick.

***

Issue 09 is great, and you should grab a copy or ten, but it should be mentioned that Issue 10 waves at us from the horizon. Polish those poems. Size up those stories. Come April, we’ll do it all over again.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of other opportunities:

[untitled] is a sister publication to page seventeen, a pocketbook purely of short stories. Check out their back issues, as they have some strong names and strong entries. Their competition starts on December 1st and runs until February, with 1st prize being $300. See the details here.

21D is a friend of the Busybird flock; it’s a magazine that balances creative writing with imagery and photography, and really comes out looking stunning. They accept general submissions all year round (guidelines are here) and they run regular competitions, so keep an eye out for their next comp announcement.

Verity La is an online journal, edited by Nigel Featherstone and Alec Patric. It’s a great place for submitting flash fiction and short-n-sweet pieces. Check it out here. They have an open window, so drop the guys a line anytime.

The Writing Lab’s Facebook Short Story Competition has all its details here. You’ve got till the end of the year for a story no longer than 420 characters, and first prize is a iPad.

***

So, unless you’ve burned yourself out on National Novel Writing Month, you have no excuse not to be busy. Me, I”m one of the idiots who thought I could do NaNoWriMo and failed miserably, so I’m going to calm my coffee-saturated nerves for the time being.

Final note: check out Issue 09 if you haven’t already! It’s pretty, it’s polished and it’s packed with great material. And that’s not being hyperbolic.

February 7, 2009. My first rodeo. My gaze flitted from the clowns in the ring to the audience where I spotted a cowboy in a wheelchair and an attentive woman in a fold-out chair beside him. Again and again, I looked over at him. I wanted to know his story. He sparked questions in me like ‘what if’ and ‘how did he come to be in a wheel-chair?’ I have other images from that night – of leather gloved hands on the bulls, of ropes, of tasselled chaps and of a young boy, an Akubra pushed back off his shiny open face, his eyes never leaving the ring. And that’s where memory and fiction have blurred. I no longer know if I really saw such a boy that day because the boy Sam in ‘Luck of the Draw’ is now so real for me.

February 7, 2009. I know the date of that Tenterfield Rodeo because as we drove home we heard that 40 had died in bushfires in Victoria. ‘Forty!’ we said to each other. ‘That can’t be right.’ The next news bulletin confirmed we’d heard right. Tenterfield Show’s Rodeo became coloured with horror and sadness.

The impetus for the story ‘Luck of the Draw’ was probably that wheel-chair bound cowboy but I wonder if that tragic news of loss and sadness became entwined in my consciousness with that cowboy and helped me gain some insight into him, his wife and son.

***

The first short story competition Hayley Katzen won was page seventeen’s 2007 competition. Since then, Hayley’s short stories have won competitions including the ABC Radio Short Story Project and appeared in Southerly, Award Winning Australian Writing, Banquet and the Journal of Transnational Literature.

The launch is today! If you’ve got some spare time, come down to 6 Ibbottson St, Watsonia at 2pm. In Watsonia library’s community room we’ll launch and live it up. Come join us!

Immutable Vista.

Where was I when I wrote this poem? Was I on a rooftop in Santa Maria de la Ribera, drinking coffee ladled from a clay pot, looking out onto plateaus of rooftops simmering in the stick heat?  No. I was at home looking onto a patch of domestic wilderness that creeps around my window, daydreaming about a certain morning spent on a rooftop en Mexico.

As I looked at the garden images of flowers and birds were coming through my daydream in threads. Soon enough, the vision had smothered the dream with its concrete certainty. ‘Every Morning of a Year’ was written in response to that moment. It was a prose poem in its beginnings but, as I pared it back, I cut the lines into fragments to reflect the way my dream was clipped and pruned, tamed, by an immutable vista.

***

Hayley Singer is currently undertaking a MA by Research (Creative Writing) at the University of Melbourne.

Hayley’s poem ‘Every Morning of a Year’ is just one plate on the smorgasbord that is the latest issue of page seventeen. Come along this Saturday to Watsonia Library’s community room at 2pm and see for yourself!

This poem was directly inspired by a piece of Sean M Whelan’s titled Slow and Pink and Gone, where a lion with the face of Harvey Keitel comes to eat his heart.  It was commissioned by Going Down Swinging as part of a show that included myself and Alicia Sometimes.

Sean’s poem is about accepting death, and it led me to think about what it means to diminish, to walk away from the limelight of a performance career—a decision and journey that takes just as much courage as ‘emerging’.

Babble played a huge part in my development as a performance poet.  It was something of a spoken word circus where some flew and some fell.  I learnt so many lessons there.  Every time I took to the stage I was hungry and ferocious, eager to impress both he and his ‘pride’ (his crew).

So my poem is a melancholy piece, not without disillusionment.  Using Sean’s image of the lion I reflect on what it means to emerge, the importance of role models and places like Babble, plus the demands of a performance career.  Each new generation must take on the one before, with both fire and respect, and although it speaks of a changing of the guard, for me Sean is still the Alpha lion of the pack, one that I’m happy to be a runt of forever.  He’ll always be Michael Jackson while I’m a punk MC Hammer.  He can never be challenged in my mind.  Besides, his heart is too big to swallow.

***

Nathan Curnow is an award-winning writer and a recent editor at Going Down Swinging. His latest collection, The Ghost Story Project (Puncher & Wittmann) is based upon his stays at ten haunted sites around Australia.

The full title of this poem is ‘I am the lion on the edge of your bed who has come to eat your heart’, and has been shortlisted for the page seventeen poetry competition. Is it a winner? Come along to Watsonia Library Saturday afternoon and be among the first to find out!

As a child I always wanted to stay up with my older brothers and sisters and watch Deadly Earnest. I was never allowed because it might give me nightmares. Once, I crept behind the sofa and watched an episode about an escaped convict who entered an art gallery to flee the police. For a short time he was able to enter one of the paintings, a serene image of a man rowing a boat on a river, and avoid capture. A day or so later he was once more running for his life and he ran into the gallery and leapt into the painting again. Only this time, the painting had been changed and the man was left to hang forever on a crucifix. Yes, it did give me nightmares but it also inspired my love of using paintings as a point of departure for poetry. My recent verse novella, Knowing Vincent, explores 16 different women who knew Van Gogh and I used the paintings he was working on to inform these voices and their stories.

This poem was inspired by Steve Warburton’s The Penitent (www.stevewarburton.com). I went to his studio to look at his paintings and used these images as the basis of a cycle of ekphrastic poems. I was struck by the scale of Warburton’s canvases and the feeling of desolation as the human figure is dwarfed by crumbling machines in a drowned environment. I linked this feeling of seeing another’s emptiness to the emotion of a mother’s grief and her desire to escape into the painting to avoid her own loss.

***

Marian Spires (www.marianspires.com) is a poet, writer and teacher exploring the internal landscapes of personal and cultural myths with concrete language. She performs her poetry on radio, television, at festivals and at poetry events. Her verse novella, Knowing Vincent, exploring the life of Van Gogh, is available at www.picaropress.com.

Steve Warburton is a fine artist currently working and primarily exhibiting in Melbourne, Australia. Since completing a Fine Arts degree at Monash University, Steve Warburton has exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions. His paintings are held in collections Australia-wide and internationally.

Marian’s poem, ‘Half Empty’, is included in Issue 09 of page seventeen. Remember, 6 Ibbottson St, Watsonia at 2pm! And be sure to check out Steve’s site as well at www.stevewarburton.com.

I have reference books that I never read cover-to-cover but enjoy dipping into occasionally. One of them is an SAS training manual, in which the author, a soldier, describes hair-raising scenarios in a deliciously matter-of-fact way. My short story ‘Basket Trap’ grew from a desire to write something that involved tracker dogs. To me, these animals are the most frightening of the many challenges listed in the SAS manual.

A professional writer for 25 years, my move to fiction has been relatively recent. To stretch myself, I approach each short story as an experiment in style or technique. For ‘Basket Trap’, I wanted to try my hand at writing a suspenseful action-adventure story. Since I typically set my fiction in suburbia, I dropped my protagonist into a Brazilian forest. Ten times out of ten, I would choose room service over camping, so research was enormous fun. Fascinating bits and pieces that couldn’t fit into this story will probably wend their way into future writing projects.

I chose intimate third person point-of-view, and felt as tense and watchful as my protagonist while I was writing the first draft. In fact, my husband got so sick of startling me during those few days that he took to whistling around the house. Suggestions from my writers’ group and the staff at page seventeen further helped to hone ‘Basket Trap’ into a tense little read.

***

‘Basket Trap’ by Deborah Sheldon will appear in the upcoming issue of page seventeen. Come along to Wastonia Library’s community room (6 Ibbottson Street, Watsonia) at 2pm. Meet some of the contributors and grab an issue for some night-time reading – and there’ll be finger food. Seriously, who can say no to finger food?

One of my friends describes my poetry as “emotive confessional”, so I tend to start writing from an emotional viewpoint. In all my writing I try to be emotionally honest, which I define as my own unfiltered reaction to a topic or situation.

Black is about my grandma, who died in 2009, and it references the same hospital where my father died in 1997. I knew it was going to be a colour-driven poem, because especially against white hospital walls, it often seems to me that other colours and emotions are splashed in reaction. This poem was part of my grief response and, overall, I found it cathartic to write. Despite the line “I don’t wish to write this”, I always work through grief’s stages by writing. That was essentially a comment on a diary entry at the time of her hospitalisation, that I just felt so angry at faith in “her God”, yet would find myself singing hymns from my childhood to her, as it was the communication strand she retained longest after the stroke.

***

Debbie Lee has been a regular performer at Ballarat and Melbourne poetry gigs since 2010. Winner in May 2011 of Brunswick’s Muddy Rivers Slam. Key concerns include mental health, feminism, love and lust. She especially enjoys writing from ABC to XYZ in acrostic splendour.

Debbie’s poem ‘Black’ will be included in Issue 09 of page seventeen, to be launched at Watsonia Library on November 19. You know you want it. Yes you do.

When I first arrived in Australia, I didn’t recognise Perth as a city. I adjusted my view after moving to Meekatharra, WA. Meekatharra means place of little water, but there was little of anything really. As I moved even further into Australia, to the Great Sandy Desert, the remoteness truly hit me. It’s sandy all right, and maybe even great after three years of working in this landscape.

As a geologist, my job is to create order out of chaos. I unravel a mountain range, taking steps back in time to when the rock was a simple beach or riverbed. In the most remote places of Australia, you would expect to find order in the landscape, but it is all chaos. There is a stillness that breaks people. This is what I wrote ‘Slickenside Creek’ about: how the stillness breaks people in different ways.

Some people need the radio on, some sing, others can’t stand noise and need to hear that they are in fact still alone. When you climb a sand dune and look behind you, instinctively, to make sure no one is following you, you realise that there is nothing there, just Australia.

***

Ilse Oxenburgh is a Dutch geologist living in Perth. She has experience in translating, but is a new writer. She moved to Australia five years ago to search for gold. Instead, she found copper, a new home, and a passion for writing.

Ilse’s short story ‘Slickenside Creek’ will be included in Issue 09 of page seventeen. Less than two weeks till the launch on November 19!

On my first meeting with my Hungarian cousins, I learned a little of life as it was when my father played on the banks of the Danube. Despite my lack of language, I also learned of a cousin, László, who was born during the war, and died during the war.

‘Remembering László’ is a reflection on the way chance can determine the course of our lives. While we each like to think that we exercise choice and determine our own future, as infants we are dependent on the care of our parents, and on circumstance. The references in the poem to soldiers, station masters and stone masons all allude to lives lived by various members of my family. Through no fault of his own, László never had the opportunity to choose any of these lives. In fact, he had little opportunity to experience life at all.

***

Greg Piko lives in Yass, New South Wales. Greg has written haiku for some time and now writes longer poems as well. He was a featured haiku poet in A New Resonance 7 (Red Moon Press, USA, 2011)

Greg’s poem, ‘Remembering Laszlo’, has been shortlisted in page seventeen’s 2011 Poetry Competition and will be published in Issue 09. The launch of Issue 09 will take place at 2pm on Saturday November 19, at Watsonia Library’s community room. See whether ‘Remembering Laszlo’ won the competiton and pick up a copy to enjoy!