I’ve been a bit slow getting around to this post, and the number of things to be posting about has hit critical mass. But first, a brief pause to pay homage to Father Ted: Almost a month late, but congratulations to John Adams, who has won the 2012 NZSA Best First Book Award for Poetry …
Signing off for 2011
Hard to believe the year is nearly over. Feels much longer. And much shorter. So much has happened. So much lost. We did the Cathedral walkway last weekend – a friend who has already done it commented tat it was a bit like being told someone had died and then being shown the bed they’d …
Writing beyond
I'm reading the first book – an Advance Reader Copy, no less! – of Helen Lowe's keenly anticipated Wall of Night series, The Heir of Night. Enjoying it enormously so far. It's classic fantasy, complete with a more-than-usually-interesting proto-heroine in Malian. But there are twists that I recognise as uniquely Helen – the semi martial-arts …
Poetry in Performance – the year’s final
Wednesday night is the final session of Poetry in Performance from the Canterbury Poets' Collective. Yes, after this Wednesday night it's back to boring nights around the TV, shivering in the intellectual wasteland that our lives will then become. (Unless of course I manage to get a Wednesday night poetry course up and running, in …
Free Workshop – Helen Lowe: Writing Fantastic Fiction
News just in of a very interesting sounding workshop for all of us who yearn to write that fantasy or science fiction novel: Award-winning author, Helen Lowe, runs a workshop on “Writing Fantastic Fiction”, focusing on Fantasy and Sci-Fi. The session includes discussions and exercises on the essential elements of 'fantastic world building', structure and …
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A Dark Feathered Art 