On Monday my #8WordStory appeared on Brisbane’s digital billboards.

Thanks to Queensland Writers Centre for their support and to Tiny Owl Workshop for the photo.

You can read more about and join the #8WordStory project here and follow on Twitter.

Poetry submissions for Issue 20 (December 2017) will be open from 13 Sept – 13 Oct. Please send up to five poems in a single file. In the interests of diversity, please note that we are highly unlikely to publish your work in two consecutive issues unless it’s part of a continuing series that we’ve already agreed upon.

We have an Australian focus, but consider writers from all around the world. We would particularly like to see some more English writing from the Asia Pacific region and by Indigenous Australians and Indigenous people around the world. We are committed to publishing a diverse range of voices, including diversity of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and writing experience.

Booktopia’s offering free shipping (to Australian and New Zealand shipping addresses) with promo code SPRINGTIME until midnight 11 September on my Glasshouses and many other poetry titles such as Ali Alizadeh’s Eyes in Times of War, Shastra Deo’s The Agonist, Benjamin Dodds’ Regulator, Rebecca Jessen’s Gap and Felicity Plunkett’s Vanishing Point.

At Tincture Journal we’re seeking fiction, scripts and creative non-fiction for Issue 20 (December 2017).

Poetry submissions for Issue 20 will open September 13 and close October 13.

We have an Australian focus, but consider writers from all around the world. We would particularly like to see some more English writing from the Asia Pacific region and by Indigenous Australians and Indigenous people around the world. We are committed to publishing a diverse range of voices, including diversity of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and writing experience.

We look forward to reading your submissions!

Thanks to Queensland Writers Centre for asking me to contribute to WQ’s Writers in their landscapes series. Here’s an extract:

‘We are the children of our landscape,’ wrote Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet. ‘[It] dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.’

I think often about four kinds of landscape: the physical, the natural, the dream, the psychic. All dictate my behaviour and thought, but my responsiveness to each varies.

I’ve learnt that I can’t manipulate, and must accept, my dream and natural landscapes (reiterated by experiencing 2015’s Tropical Cyclone Marcia, which sparked a series of poems for my first collection Glasshouses, and Rockhampton’s 2017 post-Tropical Cyclone Debbie flood), but can largely control my physical and psychic landscapes.

[…]

‘All truly great thoughts,’ declared Nietzsche, ‘are conceived while walking’, and while I don’t agree entirely (some of mine originate in dreams, at my desk, while watching films), I do know that walking, especially at 4pm, when the light is ‘perfect: buttery and dense and fat’, to quote from Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, on desire paths or constructed tracks or both, is crucial to my writing.

You can read my piece in full here.

Tincture Issue 19 is out 1 September and includes poetry by Lisa Brockwell, Dave Drayton, Angela Gardner, Ella Jeffery, Amir Safi, James A.H. White, and Gavin Yates.

Full ToC here.

Thanks to Catherine Vidler for publishing three newish centos, featuring lines from favourite people/poets Adam Aitken, David Gilbey, Matt Hetherington, Jill Jones, Rosanna Licari, Cleopatra Mathis and Les Wicks et al, in Snorkel #24, which also includes poetry by Rico Craig, Dave Drayton and Elizabeth Welsh.

Thanks to Jennifer Mackenzie and Jessica Wilkinson for publishing my pantoum ‘Sweet Puff’ in Rabbit Poetry Journal Issue 20: Dance, which includes writing by Adam Aitken, Jordie Albiston, Cassandra Atherton, Jennifer Compton and Ravi Shankar, and Jonathan Dunk’s review of Tony Birch’s Broken Teeth.

Also available are Rabbit Issue 21: Indigenous (ed. Alison Whittaker), which includes writing by Evelyn Araluen, Phillip Hall, Natalie Harkin, Craig Santos Perez and Sam Wagan Watson, and, from the Rabbit Poet Series, Dave Drayton’s P(oe)Ms and Melody Paloma’s In Some Ways Dingo.

Recently, Transportation Press announced the winner—Daniel Young, for ‘Dalian Blood Futures’ (huzzah!)—and runners-up—Robbie Arnott and Patrick Lenton, for ‘Zoo’ and ‘What is a Hornet’, respectively—for its first international microfiction competition, Smoke, judged by Adam Ouston. Congratulations to Daniel, Robbie and Patrick!

I’m delighted my ‘Do You Mind If (after OW & SB)’ was highly commended alongside writing by Bella Li, Kali Myers and Ben Walter et al. Thanks to Adam, Transportation Press, and Fullers Bookshop, who sponsored the competition.

Smoke One is a collection of the microfiction by the winner, the runners-up and eighteen highly commended writers, and is available in print and electronically.