Blog | Brascoe Publishing

Supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, and managed by Artworkers Alliance, Eat Your Words is a collaborative writing project that is designed to help foster the development of critical arts writing in Australia.

The prize

Through the project, eight emerging writers will have the opportunity to attend an intensive writing workshop in Brisbane, and collaborate with academics, visual artists and leading Australian arts writers.

Selected writings from the collaboration will be published in the July 2009 issue of Artworker, the Artworkers’ magazine.

Eligibility

Emerging writers under the age of 30 are invited to submit a 600 word arts related article or visual arts review with their entry form.

Closing date & entry forms

Entries close 5pm Friday 30 January 2009 - so get cracking!

For entry forms, terms and conditions and more information on Eat Your Words visit the ArtWorkers website.

The Weekly Book Newsletter group conducts annual surveys of Australian booksellers around Christmas. Their most recent one found that despite hard times, books still sell - great news!

There has been a lot of verbiage on the “economic crisis” and “hard times” and so on in the mass media. We here at the Brascoe don’t tend to follow what goes on in the media, preferring to source our news and information from independent sources, so we are a bit distant from all the negative hype. Even so, we know that people were pretty hard hit by the stock falls and interest rates - and it therefore warms our cockles to know that books haven’t been hit terribly hard.

While the WBN found in their most recent survey that booksellers are expecting an ‘okay’ Christmas, some of them are totally unable to contain things. Unsurprisingly, these shops are indie bookstores.

Many of these booksellers reported modest rises of less than 10%, but success stories here and there stood out. A chain store in a newly refurbished shopping centre reported sales increases of 80% on this time in 2007 and Clive Tilsley reported that Fullers Bookshops in Hobart and Launceston, Tasmania, were doing ‘record figures’. ‘I don’t understand it … people are spending,’ he told WBN. Ron Serdiuk, owner of Pulp Fiction in Brisbane, is similarly happy: ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had as busy a November … it’s insane!’ he told WBN, reporting a sales increase of between 20 and 25%.

‘The media is hyping problems more than they exist,’ said Meredith Wright of Daltons Bookshop, Canberra, referring to coverage of the economic crisis. ‘We’re going to have a really, really good Christmas,’ agreed Graeme Bowden of A&R, Caloundra.

How lovely!

So it’s not all bad news. It’s great to see that some bookstores are going great guns, even when people have little cash to spare. All of those doom-and-gloom prophets might need to rethink the way that books are perceived by consumers. Unlike regular purchases, books are often kept, cherished, read and re-read. Buying a good book is like buying an incredibly durable pair of slippers, that are always comfortable. No matter how many times you’ve read it, you’ll always go back, and it will always greet you like an old friend.

There’s this little meme going around Facebook at the moment that has the following instructions:

* Grab the book closest to you
* Go to page 56
* Find the 5th sentence
* Write that sentence as your status message
* Copy these instructions as a comment to your status message
* Don’t go looking for your favourite book, or the coolest one you have - just grab the closest one

I did this over at Facebook, and the results were quite interesting; but I picked up the meme for blogging from my friend Alan, so I thought I’d give it a go. The nearest book to me was Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, within reaching distance of my desk.

Anyway, the fifth sentence on page 56 of The Writing Life turned out to be:

The vision, I stress, is no marvellous thing: it is the work’s intellectual structure and aesthetic surface.

It’s interesting, given today my work has all been on theses, books and other such stuff, and most of that has been with the ‘intellectual structure’ and ‘aesthetic surface’; but doing this just made me want to write out the whole page! As a writers’ bible Dillard’s Writing Life is extraordinary.

If you want to get involved, consider yourself tagged by the meme - put it up on your blog and leave a comment here with the line you found, and track back from your own site if you can so we can see where the meme ended up.

Also, make sure you put what book it’s from too, or that will just be too frustrating. If you don’t have a site to carry the meme on, that’s fine - you can just leave a comment here if you like. Come on, get involved! Writers need communities too!