Helen Rickerby – Page 2

Snippets: Earthdawn Sale; Readings and Launches; Valley Micropress; Likeable Things

Posted on August 24, 2008

Earthdawn 15th Anniversary Sale

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the roleplaying game Earthdawn. To mark the occasion, publishers RedBrick have discounted the prices of Earthdawn products until 4 September, so you can get my novel Anarya’s Secret for a little bit less until then (in hardback, paperback, or e-book via RPGNow or DriveThru).

Readings and Launches

From the social pages: here in Wellington, it’s been the season of readings, launches, and both combined. I wasn’t able to make the launch of Sue Orr’s Etiquette for a Dinner Party: Short Stories, but did attend the Wellington launch of AUP New Poets 3 – Wellingtonian Janis Freegard is one of the three poets included in this volume, together with Katherine Liddy and Reihana Robinson, and Janis ran an enjoyable launch at Mighty Mighty.

I was also an apologetic no-show at the first instalment of the annual Winter Readings Series, which featured the launch of three books by Mark Pirie, including Slips which I reviewed a while back. There’s an excellent report on Helen Rickerby’s blog.

I’ll be there next week, though, when Helen’s new book of poetry My Iron Spine is launched with Harvey Molloy MC’ing, and the following week sees the launch of Michael O’Leary’s Paneta Street.

I’ve had a sneak peek at My Iron Spine, and it’s excellent.

And the launches don’t stop there: Harvey Molloy’s Moonshot is not far away from lift-off!

(Enough capital-centrism: there’s lots of readings and poetry events right round the country, such as Kay McKenzie Cooke reports on from Dunedin.)

Valley Micropress

I took part recently in a Montana Poetry Day event in Upper Hutt, and organiser Tony Chad kindly sent me a copy of the “Poetry Olympics” booklet arising from the event, and also a copy of the magazine he edits, Valley Micropress. This is a monthly – that’s right, monthly – poetry magazine which Tony produces. Subscriptions cost NZ $30 per annum, and contributions are mainly from subscribers, but also include other work at the editor’s discretion. If you’d like to know more, please email Tony, tony.chad (at) clear.net.nz

Likeable Things: Second Instalment

maps, a poem by Jill Jones

The Bibliophilia shop, which sells the handmade books of Meliors Simms

Blackmail Press 22

Strange Horizons

Eating Greengages, a beautiful piece of writing by Fionnaigh McKenzie.

A few things I’ve learned about writing poetry, a very useful and interesting blog post by Janis Freegard.

Of Montanas, Skodas and Likeable Things

Posted on July 23, 2008

Montana Book Awards

The biggest thing first: congratulations to all the winners, and all the nominees, in the Montana Book Awards, which were announced in Wellington on Monday night. In particular, I want to congratulate Mary McCallum, who won the Best First Book of Fiction and overall Reader’s Choice Awards for her novel The Blue, and Jessica Le Bas, who won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry for her collection Incognito. Charlotte Grimshaw’s Opportunity – a short fiction collection – won the overall Fiction award, and Janet Charman’s Cold Snack the Poetry award.

The Skoda Diaries

The Skoda Diaries, a new story by me – one of my short, weird ones – is now online at Southern Ocean Review, which also has a nice capsule review of Transported and a number of other books (including Swings and Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood).

If you seek a key to the Skoda, you might want to read up on the history of the Social Credit Political League. Of course, most of this particular short fiction is fiction, but the “controversial construction project” referred to in the Wikipedia article was the building of the Clyde Dam on the Clutha River – the moment when Social Credit jumped the shark.

Likeable Things

Groomed by a Bird, a poem by Emma Barnes

The cover of My Iron Spine, a poetry collection by Helen Rickerby

St Clair Apartments, a painting by James Dignan

Why I Write, an examination of motives (one motive per blog post), by Sean Molloy

Blogs in Their Summer Clothes – 1

Posted on March 31, 2008

I link to a number of writers’ and artists’ blogs. You can find those links nestled down in the left-hand column of this page, under the Blog Archive, but I thought it was time I gave some of them a bit more prominence. So here’s five presented, as they say in Hollywood, “For Your Consideration”.

In a subsequent post, I’ll look at some more blogs, and at a discontinued New Zealand literary site that still speaks, from time to time, from a little to the east and somewhere beyond the veil.

When I started work on “Books in the Trees”, there were two existing blogs I turned to as role models: Harvey Molloy’s Notebook and Helen Rickerby’s Winged Ink.

Harvey and I have a number of things in common: we’re both poets, we both hail from the north of England, and we both write science fiction poetry. Not surprisingly, we’re friends! Harvey’s blog, with its mixture of news, writing and reviews, continues to be an inspiration.

Helen Rickerby, also a friend, is a poet, publisher, and encyclopedist. One of the things she publishes is JAAM, the Wellington literary magazine of which I’m editing Issue 26. Helen also runs Seraph Press, which publishes a (so far) small range of exceptionally handsome books.

Helen also plays a valuable role in encouraging her associate, the mysterious Giant Sparrow, to grace the blogosphere more frequently. Giant Sparrow is a deep thinker and fine writer with an enduring faith in the existence of places where anything is possible, such as the theatre.

Finally in this instalment, two bloggers whose blogging forte is a synthesis of words and images. I have known Meliors Simms for a long time, even though we go for many years without seeing each other. She combines visual art and poetry in her arresting and beautiful handmade books, and her Bibliophilia blog showcases the combination.

On the other hand, I don’t believe I’ve ever met Kay McKenzie Cooke, but we both have strong connections with Southland, Dunedin, and their wildlife and landscapes. She’s a fine poet, photographer and excellent blogger with an an output — and range of blogs – that puts mine to shame. Her as it happens blog is a good place to start.

So there’s a few blogs I like. But there’s more! Check them out at the left of this page, or look out for my next post about the blogs I link to. They may be wearing autumn clothes by then.

Bernard Gadd

Posted on December 30, 2007

Bernard Gadd died earlier in December. I’m late posting this news, and there are excellent memorials to Bernard on Harvey Molloy’s blog and on Helen Rickerby’s blog.

I never met Bernard, but read and enjoyed a number of his poems, was impressed by his steadfast commitment to a multicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand, and owe him a debt of gratitude for selecting stories of mine for two anthologies he edited: “Statesman” in a Longman Paul anthology for schools, I Have Seen the Future, and subsequently “My Friend the Volcano”, in the first volume of the Other Voicesseries produced by his publishing house, Hallard Press. These were the first two stories I had published professionally.

He and Trevor Reeves were among the first New Zealand publishers and anthologists to see that speculative fiction – science fiction, fantasy and horror – was part of the New Zealand literary scene, rather than being separate from it, and to include it in literary journals and anthologies.

Thank you, Bernard.