Saturday 7 February 2009

Links for www.blusterhead.com

Blusterhead (http://www.blusterhead.com) is an information site with a lot of useful links and bits of information which I originally put up for my writing students and then it got out of hand. I'll be checking all the links, updating and adding more shortly. So, if your magazine has a site, your book has a site, or you have a personal site which is writing-related email me at info@blusterhead.com or writerslink@gmail.com and I'll look at it with a view to putting it in. Not everything will get in probably but I'll try. (It's free btw.) The What's on will be disabled because I update irregularly. If you have ideas that would be good for a different info section to replace What's on which doesn't change every ten minutes, let me know. All writing-related of course. I must be insane to keep this going.

[This site no longer exists. It was a good site but difficult to maintain, and frankly I had better things to do.]

Friday 6 February 2009

PressPress Chapbook Award

It's hot where I am - though I've been getting news of those struggling with the snow elsewhere - and it looks as though the chapbook award is hotting up too. The entries are flowing in. This is good, rather than having a lot of administration at the last minute as people, naturally, fling things over the deadline (end of May 09).

It's exciting but all the entries have to wait so that they can go through the judging process together to allow fair comparison (they're all judged 'blind' ie without identifying the poet on the manuscript itself).





Response to Carolyn Fisher's winning chapbook has been very positive. She's organised a number of launches in Tasmania which I get reports about. After Carolyn's was published the long-awaited chapbook from Alison Thompson Slow Skipping came out.

Alison is from my own locality (ie boondocks) so I was very pleased about that. It's rare. Half of the titles originate from the Northern Territory or Tasmania.

In fact, one of the runners up for the Chapbook Award was also published - and was from the Northern Territory. This was Jennifer Mills with Treading Earth. I love this book. It has the qualities of the landscape it was written in. Have a look.

The next title will be different and is posing some production problems which might delay it. We shall overcome. There will also be another exciting opportunity in the second half of the year - but first, let us survive the 2009 Chapbook Award!