The Rereaders

2011-08-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

I have spent the last month or so working on a secret project, which I finally got to reveal last week. It's a fortnightly literary and cultural podcast based on the Slate.com series of podcasts, specifically the culture gabfest, where three topics/subjects are discussed. I am being joined by Fiona Wright and Rebecca Giggs, two friends who I am very happy to get to work with on such an exciting project. You can listen to the podcast at the website or via itunes.

Newswrite

2011-06-05T23:39:00.000-07:00

I have just finished guest editing an issue of Newswrite, the magazine of the NSW Writers' Centre. The regular editor Kirsten Krauth has been on maternity leave. It's a simple 36-page magazine, beautifully designed by Marc Martin – check the cover to the right – and has a strong focus on the ins and ours of writing. It was a good chance for me to publish some of the writers I have enjoyed following over the last couple of years. That these writers were all under 30 might show a certain prejudice for the young, but as I wrote in the editorial, “it is important to provide space for newer voices in an industry that can become overly focused on the established and proven.” There is little doubt that the writers here are going to play a part in shaping the future of Australian literature, as novelist James Bradley wrote on his blog City of Tongues that…

younger writers like Rebecca Giggs, Sam Cooney and Jessica Au – make me really excited about the future of writing: they seem not just to be a group of genuinely new voices, but to be negotiating a moment of profound cultural transformation with energy and aplomb.”

In editing Newswrite I had a chance to get Rebecca, Sam and Jessica together for the same issue and introduce their writing to people who may not have come across it before. Rebecca and Sam I met through editing Cutwater and Jessica from being edited in Meanjin, where she served as deputy editor until recently. Jessica’s highly anticipated novel Cargo is due out in August through Picador – and as I wrote in the editorial, there is little doubt that individual collections will follow from Sam and Rebecca.

These are three writers that I feel as though I am constantly running behind to try and catch up. They’ve all got a pretty well developed web presence. Sam Cooney has a well-mantained wordpress and Jessica Au was behind the Meanjin blog Spike. Rebecca's beautiful new website, designed by the very clever mind at Tonne Gramme studios, is one of the reasons I have revamped this blog. It's not quite on the level of Rebecca's - she has interactive Google maps as backgrounds! – but it seems serviceable enough, even on this simple Blogger platform. Rebecca’s use of her webpage to keep a list of publications in magazines is something that I have adapted here. The path of the emerging writer is one where we see small pieces published in little magazines as we work towards a bigger publication. It's important to collect these in the one place - I think it is important for the contributors of magazines such as these to get out there and promote them as much as the editors. In that spirit, please click through to the Fiction and Non Fiction pages if you are looking for interesting magazines to support or submit to.

Unfortunately, you have to be a member of the NSW Writers' Centre to pick up a copy of Newswrite - although I would suggest membership for aspiring writers who aren't sure where to start with their careers - but there are a few spare copies and if you can think of innovative ways to distribute them among emerging Sydney writers, I would be very interested to hear from you.

Sam Twyford-Moore

The Rereaders

Newswrite