Monthly Archives: March 2010

日本に行くことになりました！

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Hey, my blog speaks Japanese!

If you can read the title of this post, come and meet me in Japan, because that’s where I’ll be very soon.

Over the last few months I’ve used various euphemisms to allude to this news: “something else exciting, yet to be announced”; “a forthcoming writing-related trip”; “a bunch of other bits and pieces”; “other news on the horizon which is the current source of both excitement and blind panic”.

It is still all of those things, the last one most acutely. But now there has been a formal announcement, so I can at least spill the edamame:

I am thrilled to be the recipient of an Asialink Literature Residency and will be spending three months in Nagoya from April-July.

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Tales From Inner Libraria

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Although I work at home a lot, I don’t always work at home. Sometimes I take my laptop down to Fremantle and park myself in a cafe. Sometimes I head up to my local library. It helps to have a change of scenery, to avoid the many demands of an insistent house, and there’s something satisfying about writing surrounded by books and readers.

Because my house is currently an inviting combination of bomb-site, dust bowl and storage facility, I’ve been doing this more often lately. And because I’ve been doing it more, I’ve broadened my reach. In the last couple of months, I’ve sampled over a dozen libraries. And I can’t help noticing that although some features are common to most – from the expected (books!) to the less-expected (flat-screen TV!) – each also has its own idiosyncrasies, its own particular culture.

So I bring you the first in an occasional series: “Tales from Inner Libraria*”. Reading these entries, perhaps you’ll nod, because you recognise your library here. Perhaps you’ll shake your head because you think I’m making it up. I won’t be.

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None of Your Business

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Well, I did warn you this would be the title of my next post. It’s prompted by an email I received recently from a writing friend, with the subject line “Business”. And by the last couple of months, which seem to have been incredibly busy somehow with a bunch of things which, while writing-related, are not actually writing itself.

A couple of weeks ago, frustrated with my slow progress through the various WIPs, I decided to take a good hard look at where my days are going. Of course there is a slew of other bits and pieces crammed into my day – house, family, exercise and so on – but here is the graph that represents how the time I had available for work was divided over a two-week period.
fc96b-piegraph2

A little alarming, no?

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Back From the Moon (and the stars)

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Yes, I’ve re-entered the atmosphere.

Last weekend, I read at the Moon Cafe. I scrambled to stitch together some poems that had been lying in pieces for far too long – one a day for the eight days leading up to the reading was my goal, but in the end I managed seven. Which is pretty good, I think. What’s that old saying – “Reach for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars?” Lately, I have been feeling rather more like the more recent re-working – “Reach for the stairs; they’re closer” – but either way, I got seven new poems out of it, so I am very happy.

It was a lovely afternoon – stinking hot on the Moon but I like the heat. I like the weather, actually, and do not like the way we seem to increasingly avoid it via the so-called necessities of air-con and so forth. I do like it when the air is moving, though. An oscillating fan will do me most of the time. It was almost tropical at the Moon, with the humidity and the closeness and the overhead fans and the languid couches, and I loved it. And I think there might be a poem in there somewhere – “Give Me Weather”? Perhaps I’ll scratch that down shortly.

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