Blog posts

Listen up!

🎧 Tune in to Cover to Cover on Vision Australia Radio this Friday evening – it’s another Elwood Writers special! 🎧

Elwood Writers presents: The Writers’ Choice, includes:

📖 Memoirs by Margaret McCaffrey
📚 A new short story by Barry Lee Thompson
🖋️ Selections of poems and haiku by Helen McDonald

Don’t miss this literary showcase!

Vision Australia Radio

Check varadio.org for program times near you. If you can’t join us on Friday, catch the repeat broadcast on Sunday. And if you can’t make that either, we’ll be sharing a recording or podcast of the program on this site next week. So if you haven’t already, subscribe to Elwood Writers below to stay in the loop – it’s completely free and will remain free forever. How fab is that!

Happy listening!

EW

P.S. Do subscribe if you haven’t already – it’s a really good way to support our work, and we promise you won’t be disappointed. That subscribe button is coming up again at the end of the post. Here it comes …

What happened to September?

Why are we writing?
from barryleethompson.com

Here at Elwood Writers we usually like to publish one blog post per month, at least. But we’ve been so busy putting together our new program for Cover to Cover on Vision Australia Radio, among other things, that we missed September. Oh well, consider this September’s post, an interesting piece from Barry about the joys of writing. Or the pain of writing. Or both. Maybe sometimes it’s just easier to read. So, happy reading.

EW

Coming soon: Elwood Writers on Cover to Cover

Stories on your radio
from barryleethompson.com

I was enjoying a Marie biscuit and strong lungo yesterday morning when a new blog post from Barry’s website popped into the Elwood Writers mailbox. In the post – linked over there👉– Barry writes about an upcoming episode of Vision Australia Radio’s weekly literary program Cover to Cover, featuring the work of Elwood Writers. We don’t yet have a broadcast date for the program, but it’ll be sometime after the material goes to Cover to Cover‘s producer/presenter Tim McQueen in early October.

Elwood Writers has been contributing stories to Cover to Cover since 2015, featuring in roughly one special episode each year. Our first program, appropriately titled ‘Starting Over’, was broadcast in episode 38 of Cover to Cover on 11 January 2015. If you fancy a bit of a blast from the past, you can listen to that or any of the episodes featuring our work by clicking here. We’re always grateful for the invaluable support of Tim and the Cover to Cover team, and everyone at Vision Australia Radio.

Until my coffee break was pleasantly interrupted by the happy ping of that email notification yesterday, October had felt a long, long way away. And now? Well it’s closing in, but is still six weeks away – and I remember the six-week school holidays used to go on and on and on. We’ll be sure to provide more info about the radio program between now and October. To stay in the loop, make sure you’re subscribed – it’s free, and means you’ll never miss any content.

EW

On writing retreats, and more

Barry Lee Thompson is no stranger to the writing retreat. He wrote an essay for US-based journal Working Writer about his experiences of retreats in the Blue Mountains of NSW and on the Indonesian island of Bali. Barry’s blog post below includes a link to the July/August edition of the journal, as well as details of how to subscribe to Working Writer. If you’ve ever wondered what happens on a writing retreat, or what doesn’t happen, then please dive right in and find out.

Strange June

After reading all about it, Elwood Writers is more than ever in the mood for our very own group retreat. We’ve discussed it once or twice during our fortnightly meetings, with great enthusiasm, but so far haven’t been able to finalise a plan. We will definitely make it happen, one of these days. Maybe next year, even. It’s high on our agenda. In the meantime, there’s always Barry’s article to transport us without having to leave the considerable comfort of our very warm and cosy armchairs …

Happy reading,

EW

Every Second Tuesday: an update

The second half of 2024 got off to a flying start for the Elwood Writers blog yesterday with a fascinating new post from Helen, all about the power of the spoken word.

And the momentum continues today with this update on the Elwood Writers anthology Every Second Tuesday. We recently decided, for administrative reasons, to close our account with IngramSpark, the printers and distributors of the anthology. It takes 45 days for the closure to fully take effect, so the title is slowly being withdrawn, bit by bit, and by the end of July Every Second Tuesday will no longer be available from the usual channels. For now, it can still be purchased print-on-demand or as an e-book from some platforms (click here to view an example), but this is unlikely to be the case for much longer. The situation might even have changed by the time you finish reading this post!

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might be familiar with the voyage of Every Second Tuesday. Having discussed it for many months, Elwood Writers started to put an anthology together in early 2019, working on structural edits of the pieces in the second half of that year. In early 2020, Barry copy-edited the manuscript – when finished, he declared that no one would ever find a single typographical error in the entire anthology! So far, no one has challenged his bold claim. We’re forever grateful to David Grigg at Rightword Enterprises for his tireless and patient collaboration on designing and publishing the book, and creating a beautiful finished product. Lee Kofman launched the anthology in a glittering online Q&A event hosted by Melbourne bookseller Readings in December 2020. In the same month, the ever-supportive Tim McQueen of Vision Australia Radio generously dedicated an entire episode of Cover to Cover to the anthology. Other radio appearances included an interview on 3CR’s Published…Or Not, and readings on 94.9 MAINfm’s The Quiet Carriage. There have been many other events along the way, too many to list in this brief post, as well as wonderful reviews, a panoply of supportive readers and booksellers, and plenty of warm glows. And one of the best things is that we distributed or sold our entire print run, which means we’ve never had to remainder or pulp a single copy.

None of this means that Every Second Tuesday is disappearing. Far from it. The anthology will continue to grace the shelves of many public libraries in Australia (and maybe even beyond), as well as the shelves of any bookstores that might still be holding stock – although most of the bookstores we supplied sold out very quickly.

The upshot of this quick (ish) update is that if you’re late to the party or you’ve been here forever and still don’t have a copy of Every Second Tuesday, then you’ll need to act quickly if you’d like to get your hands on it because opportunities to buy the book are dwindling. We hear it’s a very good book, so you won’t regret it. The clock is ticking …

Happy reading,

EW

P.S. If you miss the boat, or you end up kicking yourself at the end of July because you didn’t get hold of a copy, then there is a small chance that all may not be completely lost – but more on that later.

The Unique Power of the Spoken Word, by Helen McDonald

I don’t know where the last few weeks have gone since the phenomenal success of the 100th Chamber Poets was celebrated at Woodend’s RSL club. I think I’m still soaking up and processing the wonderful atmosphere of the spoken-word event. The 100th celebration drew a crowd of no less than 100 enthusiastic poets and poetry lovers to listen to some of Australia’s most lauded poets – including Andy Jackson, Kevin Brophy, Es Fung, Joe Dolce, Gaylene Garbis, Ross Donlon, and the legendary Pi O – spin and weave their beautiful, funny, heart-wrenching, poignant, politically charged and piercingly honest poems.

We are currently bunkered down in the Macedon Ranges, experiencing our coldest winter for many years, and we have yet another much-loved Chamber Poets afternoon of poetry reading to keep our hearts warm this coming Saturday, July 13th.

There is really nothing like the spoken word – it has the power to draw an audience into a kind of magic circle that unites and holds it spellbound, addressing as it does both the personal and universal experiences common to humanity.

For the poet, the experience of reading aloud to a gathering is very different from sending out work on the written page for the reader to interpret as they choose. I was recently delighted to have my poem ’Crossing the Fitzroy’ published in online journal Catchment – Poetry of Place (click here to read) after a marvellous exchange with its editor Rodney Williams. I had originally written what I thought was a haibun, a Japanese poetry form comprising a piece of prose followed by a haiku, which has its own unique structure on the page. This in itself informs how the poem is read aloud. Though satisfied that my words expressed the sentiments I needed to put down on paper, when I read the piece aloud I somehow couldn’t quite get the phrasing to sound as I wanted. 

Working with Rodney and his incredibly helpful suggestions, and using exactly the same words, I came to realise that my haibun form was masking a poem of free Western verse. Not only did the visual effect of the revised poem work more effectively but, importantly, the way I now read my piece aloud – the phrasing, pausing and emphasis – came far more naturally. This of course will influence the way my words resonate with the listener as I come to share my profound experience of travelling in the Kimberley region on Aboriginal Bunuba country.

There is a world of difference between the look of a poem and its telling, but in both instances, once seen or heard, the individual can take from the poem whatever meaning they will. It no longer belongs just to the poet.

Such is the power of the spoken word.

Helen McDonald

Chamber Poets celebrates its 100th event

Victoria’s Macedon Ranges longest-running spoken word event, Chamber Poets, is marking it’s 100th occasion with some of Australia’s finest poets reading their work this Saturday June 8th. Held from 1- 4 pm at the Woodend RSL this promises to be a wonderful afternoon of poetry performance. With entertainment from resident band Black Forest Smoke, plus an open mic section, food and an open bar, what better way to celebrate this much-loved monthly gathering of wordsmiths. Convenor and published poet Myron Lysenko created Chamber Poets in 2013. Poets of all stripes, from first timers to the acclaimed, have since embraced the warm and inclusive event. Helen is excited to be going along and will be reporting back to Elwood Writers on how the festivities play out. We can’t wait to hear!

Currents: What I’m working on, by Barry Lee Thompson

Here, better late than never, is my contribution to the Elwood Writers ‘Currents’ series, where members of the group talk about what they’re currently working on. Jenny started the ball rolling with her post from 17 July 2022, followed by Helen on 2 November of that year.

Initially I wanted my second book to be a linked collection of four novellas, each exploring an aspect of life after dark. There are some people for whom daytime spaces can be alienating, even suffocating – for them the night can be a source of ease, and it’s that ease that interests me. But as I began to write the stories, the lines between them blurred, they began to overlap, and I came to realise that it might be more useful to think of the work as a novel.

I’ve been constructing the novel piece by piece, building a narrative from smaller stories and vignettes – writing in the spaces, elaborating, moving parts around, solving problems of place, structure, tense and point of view as I go. I might think, here’s a pertinent episode: how do I fit it in? It’s an absorbing project.

In an Elwood Writers workshop in 2022 I set myself a goal of having an entire draft ready by the end of 2023. A lot happened for the group last year, and the months sped by faster than I had anticipated. So I adjusted the goal to the end of this year. Which is already in sight. Or maybe it’s ages away, depending on your attitude. But whether looming or distant, I enjoy having a deadline of some kind in mind – it keeps me on my toes. And there’s always room for adjustments.