How to use this Page

How to Create a Website in 3 Steps (with 10 thumbs). This is good sense advice succinctly put from Jo Ann Carson. NOTE – you do not have to buy. Word Press, Yola, Weebly and Wix all provide excellent ‘free’ – yes, that’s what I said, ‘FREE’ site templates, easy to assemble [if I can, anyone can] with lots of whizz-bang features!

The Lockyer is a fascinating and fruitful area and I don’t mean just crops. They grow talent there. This was very evident at the Lockyer Arts Festival where I was honoured to be a presenter recently.  All the arts were represented.

The Nolan family alone included an artist, a potter and a jeweler. KCMinis beautiful miniature 3D creations using recycled materials and Sheryl Lothian’s bread jewelry revived old arts that are ‘new’ again. Couture, millinery, original art for t-shirts, art for the garden, art on stone, art with icing, quilting, aboriginal art, lapidary work, woodwork and culinary arts were just some of the wide and wonderful variety of artistic skills displayed.

Music was high on the agenda with the  Battle of the Bands resulting in a win for country singer, Reanna Leschke, and her band [Open] and runners up, Third Eye Alchemy. In the under 18 division, the very talented classical guitar trio, Un Dia Antes wowed with their  original work. Winners joined  the inimitable Marcia Hines as supporting acts in a first rate live concert.

The  writers and poets of the Lockyer had their work displayed by local poet and editor, Andrea Kwast.  Andrea’s bookshop is the Lockyer’s writing hub!

Presenters for the Festival, whose theme was focussed on ‘resilience’, came from Western Australia, Victoria, Northern Territory and Brisbane, led workshops on writing a novel, memoir writing, non fiction writing with an emphasis on culinary arts.  Workshops on writing children’s books, illustrating picture books, cartooning and animation and landscape painting drew presenters from Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane. This will be discussed in more detail in another blog.

My own photo images from the Festival, focussing on the talents of the Lockyerites themselves, are reproduced below. Click to view slideshow.

This series of links were included as part of an article I wrote for WQ Magazine,”Markets – from woe to go and getting a foot in overseas! ” [March issue 2011] . Sadly, the actual links had to be removed due to space restrictions so I have placed most of them here.

This list of resources, sources and publishing opportunities on the internet and elsewhere is far from exhaustive. Please do contact me if you have or know of a resource that can be included!

Review Blogs and sites

Book Review blogs

Debra Sloan – The Picnic Basket http://www.thepicnic-basket.com/

Carol Denbow – A Book Inside http://abookinside.blogspot.com/ Magdalena Ball – Compulsive Reader http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/

Susan Whitfield http://susanwhitfield.blogspot.com/

Jo Linsdell – Writers and Authors http://writersandauthors.blogspot.com

Betty Dravis & co-bloggers  - Dames of Dialogue http://damesofdialogue.wordpress.com/

New Zealand Writer – http://new-zealand-writer.blogspot.com

Sarah Chavez-Detka        http://minorreads.blogspot.com/

Kerry Neary  http://kerryneary.blogspot.com/

Free Press Relese DIY site - http://www.prlog.org/submit-free-press-release.html

Sites

All genres:

Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/

Children’s Literature:

Terry Doherty Reading Tub http://www.thereadingtub.com/

Reading Tub Blog http://readingtub.wordpress.com/

Magazines that publish short stories and poetry

[I have submitted a list of online journals most on Facebook, some with links - http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150093435850908 and growing.] New additions

Leaf Garden Press http://leafgardenpress.blogspot.com/

http://leafgardenpress.blogspot.com/2009/01/submissions-open.html

Dash Literary Journal

Rose and Thorn http://www.roseandthornjournal.com/Home_Page.html

Cross genre:

Good Reading – http://www.goodr

In "Show and Tell," the Louis Menand/New Yorker essay on creative writing programs (June 8/15, 2009), these words arise:

Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn't matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.

John Gardner, Menand says, "was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples." Donald Barthelme, for his part, "assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashberry's 'Three Poems'." And then there was Gordon Lish, who "had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence."

I'll be teaching the advanced nonfiction workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and so Menand's essay gave me pause. I hadn't, for example, planned on having my students empty out the nearest liquor store. I also thought that I might give my students more leash than the first few words. But more than that, I plan to teach, along with the writing, so much essential reading, for it is only by reading that writers—aspiring or not—gain footholds against language and idea. I'll be encouraging students to read not me, but the books that I believe will matter most in their long-long evolution.

My course description for the few who bravely enter in:

“Maybe the best we can do is leave ourselves unprotected…” the poet-novelist Forrest Gander has written. “To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain.” In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will seek, and leverage, exposure. We’ll be reading writers contemplating writing—Natalia Ginzburg, Larry Woiwode, Vivian Gornick, Terrence des Pres, Annie Dillard. We’ll be reading writers writing their own lives—Gretel Ehrlich, Anthony Doerr, Stanley Kunitz, Brooks Hansen, Jean-Dominique Bauby—as well as writers writing the lives of others—Frederick Busch on Terrence des Pres, for example, Patricia Hampl on her parents, Michael Ondaatje on the utterly cinematic characters of his childhood. The point will be to get close to the bone of things. Students should each be prepared to craft and to workshop six new short pieces of analysis, memoir, and literary reportage.