I was pleased to be at Avid Reader bookshop in Brisbane’s West End on 1st March for the launch of a public art installation by local artist Vernon Ah Kee.
Fiona Prager, joint owner of Avid Reader*, is one of the drivers of the project, which has been a team effort managed by Chrysalis Projects.
The image above shows me with Vernon and Fiona in front of three of the 42 panels that will be wrapped around West End buildings in May. It’s a great community effort in which I’m a tiny cog.
The mural work will celebrate Brisbane authors, forming a mosaic of wordplay that has been overlaid featuring First Nations authors in Vernon’s own handwriting.
At the event, Vernon announced the title of the installation: Charcoal Story. He suggested the name reflected the earliest form of writing implement and may well be the last one we use when the world finally comes to an end. He also referred to the mention of charcoal in Sally Morgan’s book, My Place.
Sally wrote about her childhood in Western Australia: ‘When I couldn’t find any paper or pencils, I would fish small pieces of charcoal from the fire, and tear strips off the paperbark tree in our yard and draw on that.’
This is another view of some of the panels, with Fiona Prager and Carmel Haugh, one of the Chrysalis team. (Photo: Jonathon Oldham)
The project started at the beginning of the Covid troubles, and the original concept has blossomed, with a few hiccoughs along the way, but also essential input from architects, engineers and other professionals.
To be honest, I can’t quite envisage what the final display will look like. I’m looking forward to the final ‘unveiling’ when the panels are installed across the upper storey of Avid Reader in May this year.
Until next time
Darryl Dymock
*Avid Reader bookshop was the venue for the launch of two of my books: The Chalkies (2016) and A Great and Restless Spirit(2022).
A Great and Restless Spirit: the incredible true story of Harry Hawker by D R Dymock, author of Hustling Hinkler.
His one need was speed
If Harry Hawker MBE AFC (1889-1921) was alive today, he’d be churning desert dust in the Dakar Rally, strapped in a rocket on a SpaceX flight, or taking pole position in Formula 1.
Victorian-born Hawker moved to England at age 22 and became an overnight aviation legend. In his day, he flew faster, higher and for longer than anyone else in Britain. His one need was speed.
When he wasn’t racing planes, cars and speedboats, Hawker was helping design and test WWI fighting aircraft. His boss, aviation trailblazer Tommy Sopwith, thought he was a genius.
Behind him stood a remarkable Englishwoman who kept his feet on the ground. But the mother of two grew increasingly anxious as her go-getting husband continually pushed the boundaries.
Especially when he disappeared attempting the first transatlantic flight …
And bubbling away was an underlying weakness that would literally help bring Harry Hawker down. Forever.
‘One of my top reads for 2022’
‘I had a job to put it down.’
Order A Great and Restless Spirit from all good bookshops, including Avid Reader and Riverbend Books, Brisbane.
EVERYONE HAS STORIES ABOUT THEIR LIFE. THIS WORKSHOP WILL GIVE YOU THE IMPETUS YOU’VE ALWAYS NEEDED TO START TELLING YOURS.
Getting started is often the hardest part of writing about your life, especially if you’re not sure how or where to begin.
In this workshop, you’ll not only write the first sentence of what will become your ongoing life history, you’ll be able to use a proven framework for deciding what to write about, where to start and how to go on. Even if you’ve never strung sentences together since your schooldays!
This workshop is aimed primarily at beginners, but you’re also welcome if you’ve already taken early steps with your memoirs but need some direction to keep going. Do this for yourself, and your family.
For more information and to register, click the link here.
Drawing on selected images from across the world, in this personal presentation Brisbane-based author D R (Darryl) Dymock compares the spectacular but very different life journeys and tragic endings of two remarkable Australian aviation pioneers: Harry Hawker and Bert Hinkler.
Saturday 18 June2pm -3pm, St Matthews Church Hall,
cnr Sherwood & Oxley Rds Sherwood, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Books for sale on the day
Can’t make it to the talk? You can still order both books through any bookshop, including Avid Reader, Brisbane and Riverbend Books, Brisbane, Queensland. Or download the e-book online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booktopia, or check out ABE Books in the US.
A few weeks back I posted an interview with Fiona Stager, co-owner of Avid Reader bookshop in West End, Brisbane, Australia. You might remember how strongly engaged Avid Reader is with its community, both locally and online. So I thought you might like this recent post from Fiona, from the bookshop website:
“This Saturday 3 October we celebrate Love Your Bookshop Day which was created by the Australian Booksellers Association to celebrate bookshops across the country and highlight what makes local bookshops great. There will be facebook events, online events and giveaways galore.
Here at Avid Reader we have decided this year to rename it Love Our Customers Day! This is a chance for us to thank you for your continued support of our bookshops during this very uncertain time.
We have been overwhelmed with the many acts of kindness shown to us since March. An example is customers John and Jo who acted as our free couriers to 4005 and 4006 postcodes. Many people said it was the highlight of their day to receive a parcel and have a friendly chat with them.
We had orders from across Australia from family and old friends and concerned customers. Authors and publishers have also given us so much support. Along with an understanding and supportive landlord we have survived!
We thank you for everything you have done to support us.
Happy Love Our Customers Day,
Fiona.”
I hope that message makes you feel good as we continue to stutter through extraordinary times.
When you’re writing, do you sometimes go off at a tangent? Head off in some absolutely fascinating direction, only to discover later that’s not where you wanted to go? Or perhaps you decide the tangent is the new direction, and that what you wrote before is mostly irrelevant. (Maybe life is like that too?)
In this final blog of this series, which first appeared as guest blogs for Margaret River Press, I’d like to re-introduce the three people I interviewed for the earlier blogs and let them talk about tangents in a different way.
Each of them introduces a fascinating spin-off from their main area of work, a spin-off that in its own way tells us something special about writing and publishing in Australia.
Where the Wild Things Are – Fiona Stager
How big a market is there for children’s books in Australia? Big enough to generate a spin-off specialist bookshop alongside an existing one, according to prominent independent bookseller Fiona Stager.
And what better name for a children’s bookshop than one adopted from the title of Maurice Sendak’s highly acclaimed and much-loved (and occasionally controversial) 1963 picture book, Where the wild things are?
If you’re a regular, you’ll recall that my second blog in this series was based on an audio interview with Fiona, co-owner of Avid Reader Bookshop in West End, Brisbane. In the audio extract below, she explains how a flourishing children’s ‘corner’ in that bookshop developed into a stand-alone bookshop when the property next door came up for rent.
It augurs well for the future of books and bookshops in Australia that 30% of sales are of children’s books.
Of the two passions Fiona mentions – cook books and travel books, I reckon sales of the former might have risen during the Covid-19 slowdown as locked-in citizens looked for creative in-home activities.
I’ve heard that banana bread was a hot favourite (perhaps literally), but no doubt there were some who pushed the culinary boundaries.
The sales of travel books, especially for overseas destinations, must have surely slumped this year, however, and Fiona was no doubt fortunate she expanded into children’s books instead 🙂
Ambassadors for editing – Karen Lee
If you’ve seen earlier blogs in this series, you may remember that Karen Lee, CEO of the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), told me that if you really want to upset an editor, then suggest to them that what they do is ‘just proofreading’.
To try to address what they see as a major misconception of their contribution to the writing process, IPEd developed an initiative to send out some of its members as ‘ambassadors’ to explain what they do.
Karen tells us the origin and purpose of this IPEd ‘spin-off’ in this video clip.
Funded by the Copyright Agency, access to IPEd ambassadors is free, and Karen encourages writing groups and classes of all kinds to contact the Institute if they are interested in hearing about how editors can help them.
Postcards from future Queensland – Kim Wilkins
In addition to being a well-published author of fantasy and historical adventure stories for women, Kim Wilkins is Associate Professor in Writing, Publishing, and 21st-Century Book Culture at the University of Queensland (UQ). You might have met her through video clips in the first blog in this series.
In April this year, Kim and a colleague, Dr Helen Marshall, launched an initiative from UQ’s School of Communication and Arts which invited senior high school students to imagine a better world, post Covid-19.
In this video clip, Kim talks about the project’s aims:
You can catch up with the progress of the postcards project and see some of the many postcards Queensland high school students have submitted on the project website.
I suggested to Kim Wilkins that asking students to use their imagination in the postcards project fitted closely with her own use of imagination in writing her fantasy and historical fiction novels.
You can see her thoughtful response to that suggestion in the video clip here:
I hope that your own imagination has been sparked by Kim’s comments and also by the insightful inputs from Karen Lee and Fiona Stager into this blog. I’m very thankful to all three of them for their willingness to take part in this series and for their stimulating responses to the questions I posed.
What impressed me overall was not only their openness but also the enthusiasm each one showed for their particular contribution to the writing and publishing world.
Through these four blogs I’ve learned a lot about writing, editing, publishing and bookselling and a little bit more about technology. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
Follow-up
If you haven’t yet seen the three earlier blogs in this series, you can find them on my Writesite blog: drdymock.wordpress.com
Darryl Dymock's Writesite 