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On February 12, fortyfivedownstairs is holding a poetry reading in honour of former MP Barry Jones' 80th birthday:

Barry Jones is one of the more remarkable politicians to have sat in the House of Representatives in Canberra, a much loved and respected figure on both sides of politics.

As a tribute for his 80^th birthday late last year, the Chair of fortyfivedownstairs, Julian Burnside, has curated a night of some of Barry’s favourite poetry and music.

Readers include Race Matthews, Gareth Evans, Peter Craven, Marieke Hardy, Dr. Joan Grant, Max Gillies and John Stanton.

The Flinders Quartet will also perform on this memorable evening.

Get your tickets here.

I basically took the summer off from blogging, so feel a little wobbly about it, my palms sweating on the handlebars, not sure I remember how to do this. I don’t know what happened, exactly, just somehow tired of the “James Preller” corporate thing. Ha. Mostly, I wanted to concentrate on other writings, as I’ve been deep in a new series that I’m writing for Feiwel & Friends. It won’t launch until The Fabled Summer of ‘13, but I’ve nearly finished the third book in the series.

NOTE: I just reread this and had a chuckle about that “nearly finished” line. It only signifies that I’m an old pro when it comes to deadlines and editors: a manuscript that has not yet been handed in is always “nearly finished.” Any writer who says otherwise is a fool and a boob.

As for my new series, it feels like I’m that kid behind the snow fort, busily stacking up a supply of snowballs. Can’t wait to fire ‘em out there. More on that topic another time.

I’m usually a one-book-at-a-time guy, but I’m now reading three very different but equally remarkable books concurrently: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem, and Good Poems, selected by Garrison Keillor.

Normally I don’t do that to myself, the three-books-at-once bafflement, but the mixture of long novel, short nonfiction, and poetry seem to complement each other nicely.

I have a long and sordid relationship with poetry, and I’m especially happy to find this sweet collection by Keillor, based on poems featured on “The Writer’s Almanac.”

Writes Keillor in the introduction:

Oblivion is the writer’s greatest fear, and as with the fear of death, one finds evidence to support it. You fear that your work, that work of your lifetime, on which you labored so unspeakably hard and for which you stood on so many rocky shores and thought, My life has been wasted utterly — your work will have its brief shining moment, the band plays, some confetti is tossed, you are photographed with your family, drinks are served, people squeeze your hand and say that you seem to have lost weight, and then the work languishes in the bookstore and dies and is remaindered and finally entombed on a shelf — nobody ever looks at it again! Nobody! This happens often, actually. Life is intense and the printed page is so faint.

Keillor, as curator, has a point of view. He likes poems that tell a story, poems that are direct and clear, that don’t sound too “written.” Poems that communicate. He quotes Charles Bukowski, “There is nothing wrong with poetry that is entertaining and easy to understand. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”

And I put a big star in the margin when Keillor described his former English major self — a tender self I identified with, all those lessons that have taken me so long to unlearn, the bad habits of academic thought, “back when I was busy writing poems that were lacerating, opaque, complexly layered, unreadable.”

I have a file drawer jammed full with opaque and unreadable poems.

Now I see that as my writer’s quest, this effort to write clearly (and yet, even so, to write interestingly, to achieve moments of “lift off”), to overcome my own big stupid fumbling ego, those temptations to craft “look at me!” sentences that dazzle and bore readers. Perhaps that’s the great gift of writing for children of all ages. They don’t go for the bullshit. You can deliver any kind of content — really,  there’s nothing you can’t say in a children’s book — but please don’t overcook it.

One last phrase from Keillor, in praise of Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton and, for that matter, all Good Poems:

“They surprise us with clear pictures of the familiar.”

So that’s how I’ve vowed to begin my days, by reading a few poems each morning. To sit in the chair, coffee at hand, and try on the silence. My favorite from today was Charles Simic’s “Summer Morning.”

You might enjoy it, too.

As a final treat, here’s Tom Waits reading “The Laughing Heart,” a poem by Charles Bukowski. Full text below.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

@Charles Bukowski

I had the good fortune to make it out to the October Wednesday Night Sessions two nights ago in Farmington, MI where a crop of SE Michigan based publishers and  literary journals sponsor a monthly reading series.

Each month they bring a trio of writers to read and this month the readers were: Jeremy Schall, Norene Cashen, and Anca Vlasopolos.

Jeremy read from one of his books and then some poems from a new collection he's working on. I'd seen Jeremy read recently at one of the last readings at Leopold's which happened to be a little more crowded than Wednesday night's reading (there was little thing competing with the reading called Game One of the World Series) but I noticed that the difference in crowd size didn't dissuade how Jeremy reads at all. His style is an interesting one as he makes sure to make some sort of eye contact with everybody listening between and during each poem.

Norene Cashen read poems that had been published in literary journals (from the journals), as well as new work herself. Norene's style has developed over the years to include interesting introductions to her reading in general, to the specific poem she's about to read, and beyond and it works great for her. I've seen her read probably half a dozen times over the past decade and each time seems better than the time before.

Anca Vlasopolos read poems from a couple of different previously published collections and then two new poems from a collection she's working on. She also gave good introductions to her works.

There was also an excellent story about Ingmar Bergman and his father that Dwayne Hayes, MC of the event, told after Norene read that worked nicely with her own introduction to her reading.

This series is a consistently solid one and I'm really looking forward to next month when Christina Kallery comes back to town to read, along with Steven Gillis and I have to apologize as I do not remember who the third person is going to be.

Before I rubbed the sand from my eyes, before I drank a cup of coffee, before I got dressed, I read this poem by William Stafford. Then I read it again, out loud, to my wife, before she rose from bed. Then I went downstairs, saw that the day was sunny and crisp, and that a dusting of snow covered the lawn.

I promised myself to be awake to the day.

Isn’t that something?

“the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe –

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

Later I found this reading of the poem by a guy named Dale Biron. Not exactly how I hear it, but a pleasure nonetheless, because it’s always best when the words are heard, familiar units of speech floating on meaningful sound. Have a great day, people. Recognize the fact!

I suppose I should get to work, stop wasting time, eh? But here’s Stafford himself, 46 seconds long, reading “Scars.” Ah, poetry.

A little over a month ago, I saw Norene Cashen read and really loved one of her new poems. She's been kind enough to allow me to post the poem here at the EWN:

WAR
By Norene Cashen

I’ve never seen peace.
I’ve seen a foxhole, combat boots, a drill sergeant
and a gun. I’ve heard the gun rattle
and talk and talk and talk
in its fast language, the clink of brass casings
spit out after each syllable.
I’ve seen girls in dog tags and dust
crawling under the barbed wire of the world
as if their mothers waited for them
on the other side, but there is no other side.
That’s what you learn.
There’s only more war.
There’s war outside and inside
war speeding on the highway
to get to work on time.
There’s war in our mouths, our hair,
our eyes. The best wars are in the movies
where we eat popcorn and tell ourselves
nobody dies. Then somewhere in the middle
of Afghanistan a boy from Wisconsin
is smeared inside a turret
just like the old poem says. It’s possible
we’re all walking cages
and it’s our job to keep ourselves closed
to keep the violence
from shaking out of our bones.

Conversational and accessible, Frank O’Hara’s poems read as if he jotted them down on a scrap of paper during lunch break, or told you them as you walked down the hall. Don’t let the surface casualness fool you, the man could write and he did it with care. This is one of my favorites, and one of the best poems ever written about the creative process and its attendant mysteries.

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Here’s Michael Goldberg’s expressionist painting, “Sardines.”

Lastly, below, Frank O’Hara reading “My Heart,” because it is always a thrill to hear the poet’s actual voice, his pauses and cadences, the sound his own work makes.

Don’t you think?

I have to share this brilliant piece from The New York Times Sunday Review, March 18, 2012, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri. I powerfully identified with every word, thought, sentence.

In it, she expresses her core-deep love of sentences. Everything about this piece confirms, echoes, and expands upon my own feelings as a writer. Because this is where I come from, too — perhaps with less grace and craft, Lahiri writes so beautifully — for I have the exact same relationship to reading and writing. It’s about the sentences.

Though we’re told that Lahiri’s piece is part of a series about “the art and craft of writing,” it is just as much about reading. Perhaps more so. Teachers, librarians, editors, readers, please check out it.

Art by Jeffrey Fisher.

Here’s the opening . . .

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be.

As I’ve said many times on this blog, that’s exactly how I still read — with pen in hand, underlining sentences, making marks, asterisks and exclamation points, my beloved marginalia. But the thought that really had me nodding my head in agreement was how the best sentences make me stop reading. I look up from the page, thinking, feeling, dreaming. It’s counter-intuitive. We want readers to keep turning the pages, right? To devour the book, consume it. Well, maybe not. Sometimes we want them to slow down, to stop altogether.

From my copy of Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann.

That’s why, I think, that I’m so often uncomfortable when I encounter the counters and the tickers, the well-meaning folks who inform us how they read exactly 214 books this year and so on. I don’t mean to insult anyone, but I’m so tired of the idea of quantity.

Pause and reflection, that’s reading too.

Of course, there are different kinds

CALL FOR POETRY:
Submissions for Woman Made Gallery Literary Series
Event Date: Sunday, June 3 from 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Location: 685 N Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago IL

Theme: Consumer Culture

In tandem with the concurrent art exhibit, poems might consider consumer culture “as it relates to natural or environmental resource issues, the financial and cultural impact of consumption, body/social image.” Additional topics could include (but need not be limited to) the following:

Mass production, marketing and selling of consumer goods
Desire, status, competition, impulse, addiction
Credit & debt
Fashion & trend-setting
Big-box vs. mom-and-pop and other economies of scale
Economies dependent on waste and planned obsolescence

Selected poets must be available to read in person. Please send five poems on the theme ALONG WITH a 50 to 75 word bio* IN THE BODY OF AN E-MAIL to:

gallery(at)womanmade.org (replace (at) with @ in sending email) by April 21, 2012. We will make every effort to inform those chosen of our decision by May 4, 2012.

Although we can't afford to pay readers, this is a great opportunity to sell books, read with other talented people and, since we've developed a partnership for the gallery with WBEZ's Chicago Amplified, to have your reading archived for future listening (a really great publicity feature).

Read more about poetry events at Woman Made Gallery here.
* if you have a performance background, please include this or any other information that might assist us in putting together for a varied program.

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I was in the library today, reading poetry . . .

—————-. . . when I was supposed to be writing prose.

I found a poem called “Berryman,” by W.S. Merwin.

Here’s the last seven lines . . .

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can’t

-

you can’t you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don’t write

Great tips from agent Jennifer Laughran about what to do at a bookstore event.

Some random thoughts (not entirely my own, as they've been bounced off a few others over the years) about giving readings. These come from one that attends many readings and has, over the years, determined what I think works well and what maybe doesn't so well. Take them how you will.

1. Read for at least 10% less time than you think would be appropriate. Yes, at LEAST 10%. Those attending might be there as friends, might be there as potential buyers of a book they heard good things about, might be there as patrons of a great store or readings series--they most likely are not there because they really wanted to be read to for 20 minutes.

2. Be loud and clear. While I've rarely been overly happy at the end of a longish reading, I've never been happy at the end of one that I had to strain to hear the reader.

3. Find a place in your work, be it a story, a novel, or non-fiction, that demands your listener NEED to find out what happens next. Do NOT tell them what follows--make sure they are left on the edge of their seat so they rush to the table to grab a copy of your book. To me, this probably could easily be number one on the list--there is rarely something as disappointing at a reading than to have a reader his a note that has me think to myself--Perfect ending--only to have their voice continue on with the next sentence.

4. If you write humorous material, TRUST IT. Leave some room for the listeners to laugh before you move on after your punch lines.

5. Q&A's are great. If you have 30 minutes slotted for your event, read for between 10 and 15 minutes and use the rest for allowing the audience to ask questions--it brings a more personal experience for those in attendance--to me this is similar to being on a panel--those in attendance usually have something they want to know, and it rarely seems to be what you've prepared. If those watching you read get more involved via a Q&A, they are probably more likely to pick up your book.

6. Always remember to thank everybody for coming out and the store/series for having you.

Again, these are just some thoughts, not from one that does readings, but from one that has attended many and  founds trends in those that I remember fondly.

A reading and book-signing of Rudy Ch. Garcia's

The Closet of Discarded Dreams

Saturday, Sept. 29, 2012, 2:00 p.m.

at the

National Hispanic Cultural Center

1701 4th Street SW
Albuquerque, Nuevo Mexico

For info: 505-246-2261

By coincidence, I'm in the same publishing stage as Melinda Palacio who posted yesterday on La Bloga about turning in her final manuscript for her upcoming book of poetry, entitled How Fire Is a Story Waiting. I too just turned in the final for my upcoming novel, The Closet of Discarded Dreams. Dos frijoles in a pod?

Last night I came across a chilling story behind a famous photograph of Albert Einstein.

The portrait was taken by Philippe Halsman, a photographer who had escaped Nazi Germany with Einstein’s help. Meeting together in 1947, Halsman held a camera while he chatted with Einstein. He asked Einstein if he believed there could ever be a lasting peace.

Einstein answered with weary resignation,

“No, as long as there will be man, there will be war.”

According to Walter Isaacson, from page 494 of the fine book, Einstein, that I described on Monday:

“At that moment Halsman clicked his shutter and captured Einstein’s sadly knowing eyes for what became a famous portrait.”

Here’s the Halsman photograph. You can almost see the thought lingering behind his eyes.

While I surfed that up, I also caught another wave — a copy of the first page of the letter that Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, alerting him about the potential of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” This was the letter that set the Manhattan Project into motion. As a side note, though this was a matter of utmost urgency, it required two months for the letter to be finally delivered into the President’s hands.

This Friday, September 23, 2011, there are two great reading events:

The One Pause Poetry Series presents Franz Wright.

7 p.m. 7101 W. Liberty Road, Ann Arbor, MI  At Copper Colored Mountain Arts

Free of charge

An evening with Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright.

Reception and book-signing to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Franz Wright’s most recent works include Wheeling Motel and Earlier Poems. Walking to Martha’s Vineyard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, and he has also been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, among other honors. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, the translator and writer Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Kindertotenwald, a genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet.

There is also a conversation with the author Saturday from 10:30 to noon

Detroit Artists Market Reading

7 p.m. 4719 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI Free of Charge

Readings by Anna Clark, Peter Markus, John Rybicki, and Norene Smith.

I've had the pleasure of seeing three of these writers read and have read extensively of the fourth writer's work and while none may have a Pulitzer yet, they are all well well worth your time. This will also be the first local event that Peter Markus' new collection, We Make Mud, will be available at.

Those of you in Ann Arbor and Detroit are damn lucky--you probably have pretty easy decisions. Those of us right in the middle in Westland have a decision to make. With an author to support in Detroit, I will most likely be there, but trust me, those of you residing further west than I will be in for a treat at the Wright reading and reception.

As part of a late summer assignment, I received a terrific letter from Zander in Brooklyn, including his answer to the question, “What will happen to the characters in Bystander after the story?”

Here’s an excerpt from that letter . . .

Thanks so much for answering my questions. I really loved your book! I did a little writing about what I thought might happen to some of the characters in the future. I was wondering if you have ever thought about this? Do you think Griffin will continue to be a bully? What about the other characters? I also have to ask the obvious question — were you a bully or where you bullied in school? If not, why did you want to write this book? I’m really looking forward to your answers.

Zander

What I think will happen to the characters after the story:

I think Griffin will still be the bully, but he will be a lone bully with no clique by his side. About twenty pages before the book ended, Griffin’s gang separated from him; they were fed up with Griffin and his ways and felt bad for the people they hurt and picked on. Griffin may form a new clique, but I think the same thing will happen that happened to the original click, they will get fed up with Griffin’s ways. Eventually, Griffin will probably find out that this whole bully thing isn’t working out for him and turn over a new leaf, but I’m not so sure about that either; it’s not exactly Griffin’s way. The other problem is the relationship between Griffin and Griffin’s father. If the way Griffin’s father acts changes, Griffin will change with him. You see, Griffin mimics his father’s actions, and if those actions change, I have a good feeling that a new Griffin will be born. If they would go into therapy, this could be achieved. But since that didn’t happen in the story, it’s unlikely that it will happen now. Thus having Griffin stay the same.

I also think that Mary and Eric will still hang out a lot, they might be considered boyfriend and girlfriend, but I’m not sure. I also think that Griffin’s original clique will turn into Eric’s clique, or Griffin’s original clique will accept Eric as a member; either way, Mary will no longer be Eric’s only friend. Before I finished the story, I thought to myself that it would not be a “…and they all lived happily ever after” ending, and I was right. If the story continued on, I still think this would be true

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by Rudy Ch. Garcia

On a planet-wide, historical scale, ascending to the cima of Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Sun [something I did when it was still permitted and the vista wasn't marred by the effrontery of having to look down at a WalMart] makes you realize the awesomeness of one of the Siete Maravillas of the World. Others have told me how visits to Machu Picchu similarly impressed themselves into memory. Unforgettable.

What most of us regularly experience outside of vacations or treks rarely reaches such heights, being of a smaller scale, but maybe that imparts them with a more unique charm, since the scale acts to concentrate the experience, the way a magnifying glass focuses sunlight--short of grandiose or monumental--but making for a more personal experience. Like watching the birth of your child in a delivery room, or maybe the feelings Melinda Palacio underwent when she read from her first published novel to an Arizona audience last week. Exhilaration, internalized, even if surrounded by sixty people in the same room.

Last Friday, me and my eighteen first-grade bilingual students were privileged to experience one of those smaller wonders. René Colato Laínez, in Denver for the REFORMA Nat. Conf., kindly agreed to visit the elementary school where I work, along with Mara Price who shared her book El Chocolate de Abuelita. Mara gave us Maya history, the discovery of chocolate and made the kids hungry for more than treats.

In Rene's thirty-minute presentation, largely in Spanish, he burst the envelope of what I've seen of author readings. René pranced and danced, he sang, chimed, and theatrically stroked us with descriptions and quotings from his books, primarily The Tooth Fairy meets El Ratón Perez. Accompanied by a powerpoint of his making, René transported us his audience to a small moment where entertainment was left behind and wonderment took us elsewhere.

“. . . one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle In Time.

When I was a kid, growing up in the 60’s, I didn’t read many children’s books. P.D. Eastman, of course, whom I liked better than Suess, some of the Little Golden Books, and later, the Hardy Boys. Frank and Joe, I think their names were. I have no memory of either of my parents reading to me, ever. It may have happened, must have happened, but I can’t recall it. I was the youngest of seven, born in 1961, and bed time wasn’t the hour-long ritual it’s become for so many kids today, with reading and talking and snuggling and sharing, etc. When I was a kid, it was more like, “Good night. And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

The words that formed my reading habit came from the sports pages of The New York Daily News and The Long Island Press. I still maintain that my writing style, such as it is, was probably more influenced by Dick Young than anybody else: I faithfully read his column for many (formative) years. I also remember, as I reached my middle grade period, talking to my older brothers and sisters about books. They were readers, all of them, and loved Bradbury and Vonnegut and Brautigan and Robbins, so I picked up those books. I have a vivid recollection of writing a book report in 7th grade on any book I wanted. I chose Anthem by Ayn Rand, probably because it was a slendest paperback on the family bookshelf.

I also read sports biographies, being an ex-boy, and still hold a special fondness for Go Up for Glory Bill Russell. It hit me like a thunderbolt, and for a time I was determined to grow into a very tall black man who’d willingly pass up a shot in order to set a fierce pick and roll into the paint, looking for the put-back.

Anyway, I basically missed the entire canon of children’s literature. I didn’t read Where the Wild Things Are until I worked at Scholastic as a junior copywriter in 1985, hauling in $12,500 a year, thank you very much. These days I still try to fill in the holes, though I’ll admit it: I love adult literature. After all, I’m an adult. Those are the books that lit my fuse. I am not giving up my grown-up books.

Now, about A Wrinkle In Time. I liked it. Some parts — the first few chapters, especially — I really, really admired. Other parts — after the tessering, and into the full-blown fantasy — I didn’t care for as much. It reminded me of the original Star Trek series (my brothers loved Star Trek and we watched it religiously). In sum: Dated, kind of corny, a little obvious, but entertaining and fast-paced and intelligent and provocative, too. There’s a quality to the book, a be

In this age of desperate self-promotion, of tweets and status updates and high-cost book trailers, of authors being told, over and over again, about the importance of having a web presence, and — God help me, I’ve heard this — “the value of leveraging the media for maximum impact” — I am comforted by this quote, from one of the masters.

“Writers will be judged by what they write.” — Raymond Carver.

Taken from a terrific interview from the Paris Review, conducted by my most respected pal, Lewis Buzbee, with Mona Simpson.

1.  Looking for something to read?  Go no further than this lovely little Literature Map highlighted by Flavorwire.  Just type in your favourite author and watch a series of names juggle to and fro in order to arrange a recommended reading list of authors.  Even better, young adult adults are in the mix including Sarah Lessen, Jennifer Echols, JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett and more.

Literature Map
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2.  Need proof that time allows you to be more creative?  Check out this two minute video out on youtube.
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3.  Do you know all the punctuation marks?  Buzzwire presents 13 that you might not know existed.  I am particular fond of the The Asterism  which they claim “…has an awesome name, a cool look, and a really lame usage.”  Agreed.

13 Punctuation Marks You Never Know Existed
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4.  The Amperstand Project is a brand new initiative at Hardie Grant Egmont to flush out those new, undiscovered Australian writing talents.  Targeted at writers of contemporary Australian young adult fiction they are hoping to discover the next Melina Marchetta.

HGE have a whole list of suggestions of what they are on the look for, which you can find here.  Submissions close on the 27th of February, 2012.
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5.  Readings has released their top young adult titles picks for 2011.  We were extremely excited to see Vikki Wakefield, Kelly Gardiner and Jane Higgins (among many other fabulous books) on the list as we’ve bee graced by their presence in our programming in 2011.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the increasing number of bookstores that are requesting that authors not read, or read only a little. The article points out that hearing the author read from the book is hardly value added, as presumably most bookstore patrons are more than capable of reading the book themselves.

Some alternatives they explore:

- Having the bookstore owner interview the author
- Teaming the author up with a writer friend or a writer who blurbed the book (potentially twice the audience)
- Powerpoint presentation on some topic related to the book
- Teaming the author up with their editor or agent (I'm presuming this only happens in NYC)
- Having the author tell background stories about the book
- Just having a Q&A

"When some authors read, I'll mutter to myself 'is that snoring I hear?'" said Charles Stillwagon, the event manager of the Tattered Cover, a bookstore in Denver.

Read more here.

(Read more ...)