'I feel ashamed, facing a roomful of artists on the first day of rehearsals for my new play Contest. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I tried my hardest but we didn’t get the Creative Victoria funding.’ Everyone in the room has already signed on for the project, based on modest fees, thanks to other funding we have secured. The Creative Victoria money would have ensured paying all actors at Equity (performance industry union) minimum rates.' (Introduction)
'Australian poetry tends to enjoy a scrap, whether or not there’s an actual point at stake – cf. what Ali Alizadeh called the ‘abundantly unnecessary poetry wars’ – but even so Robert Wood seems to have raised eyebrows for more substantial reasons in a bizarre piece published in the Los Angeles Review of Books last week.
'Briefly, Wood manages to turn a review of Kent MacCarter’s recently released collection California Sweet, published by Five Islands Press, into a jeremiad bemoaning an apparent crisis of opportunity instigated by his own experience of rejection from ‘a nationally prominent, poetry-specific publishing house.’ Inauspicious, but it gets worse. From the sweeping and fatuous claim that ‘individual poems and reviews of poetry books are no longer in Australian newspapers’ – instantly corrected on twitter by The Australian’s poetry editor Jaya Savige – we move on to an old-fashioned cultural cringe:
But I do not know of any Australian poetry press that is a hot ticket in global, literary markets.'
(Introduction)
'It is with great pleasure that I write about the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN). Conceived out of the ‘Guwanyi’ Indigenous Writers Festival in March 2011, FNAWN is the peak representative body for First Nations Australia novelists, poets, storytellers and screenwriters. We are focused on representing and advocating for our membership in the creative industry, both nationally and internationally. We aim to ensure networking opportunities and assist our members in their skills and career development. In order to maintain a public face as FNAWN we do this through our newsletters and through an active presence online by social media and by email.' (Introduction)
