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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #183
In this week’s ABR podcast we feature one of the winners of the 2011 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’ was joint winner of the prize that year with Carrie Tiffany’s ‘Before He Left the Family’. Gregory Day commented at the time that ‘the short story form encourages an intense display of the writer’s craft whilst being a potent vehicle for the compression of emotion’. Gregory Day is a novelist, poet, and composer from the Eastern Otways region of southwest Victoria. Listen to Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’, published in the October 2011 issue of ABR.
Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own, published by La Trobe University Press and reviewed in our June issue, is the first authorised biography of the Australian poet Gwen Harwood (1920–1995). Unsurprisingly, this was not the first attempt to record the life of one of Australia’s most loved and admired poets. In an exclusive feature for ABR, John Harwood reflects on the conflicting motives behind his literary executorship of his mother’s estate – an estate holding the secrets to an at-times fractious marriage between two opposing temperaments.
... (read more)For much of her career, Gwen Harwood (1920–95) was best known for her hoaxes, pseudonyms, and literary tricks. Most notorious was the so-called Bulletin hoax in 1961, but over the years she orchestrated a number of other raids on literary targets, mainly aimed at challenging the power of poetry editors and gatekeepers. For L’Affaire Bulletin (as she sometimes called it), she submitted to that august magazine, under the pseudonym Walter Lehmann, a pair of seemingly unexceptionable sonnets on the theme of Abelard and Eloisa. Only after the poems were published did the Bulletin discover that they were acrostics; read vertically, one spelled out ‘So long Bulletin’, and the other, ‘Fuck all editors’.
... (read more)