Thanks to our friends at Text Publishing, we have two copies of Andrew Porter’s The Theory of Light and Matter to give away. Details will appear in our April newsletter, which you can join here.

The Theory of Light and Matter
Andrew Porter
Text Publishing
RRP: $27.95
Publication date: 01/03/2010
ISBN: 9781921656057

Richard Feynman’s The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, published in 1986, contains four lectures in which Feynman demonstrated ‘the truly strange behavior of light’: why light is partially reflected from some surfaces, including glass – even though it’s transparent. Andrew Porter’s debut collection of stories, The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, directly references Feynman. And while Porter’s stories deal with people, not physics; memory, not light, they too investigate invisible barriers.

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It’s often said that writing and editing are two sides of one coin, and it’s not unusual to find a person who incorporates both into a literary life. So it is with Nicola Redhouse – by day, an editor at Scribe Publications, and by night, a fiction writer. Killings speaks to Nicola, whose story ‘The Girl and the Cat’ appears in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings, about being on both sides of the fence.

What are your processes and passions as a writer?

I’ve always felt a creative compulsion to record things in words – and of course tied to this, to read – but my interest in the different forms has changed over time. As a child, I experienced utter pleasure reading, and then discovered a similar pleasure writing my own stories. Then, as a teenager, I began to read poetry and verse novels (Robert Lowell and Emily Dickinson were favourites, and of course Dorothy Porter), and I became interested in psychoanalysis, and I suppose I discovered the rich associative possibilities of poetic language.

I’ve now moved back into really enjoying the more extended involvement with character that you get reading short stories and novels – Alice Munro and Joan London are among my favourites – and wanting to achieve that in my own writing. Short stories are an incredible form – I think they’re capable of both that more associative meaning and symbolism that I love in poetry and the expansive characterisation of longer narratives that so deeply engaged me with books as a child.

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For the inaugural Killings podcast, I spoke with Torpedo’s editor, Chris Flynn.

Torpedo 7 was released just this week – and it’s only available in non-paper form. Chris caused a stir in local publishing channels by making Torpedo the first literary journal in Australia – and the world – to make the leap to the Amazon Kindle reading device, though you can read the journal on an iPhone or a PC as well. We spoke about how e-publishing is suited to small press publishers, the online model’s capacity for catering to overseas audiences, and how publishing roles are changing with the advent of new technology. Did you know that you can get any book on Kindle for a free two-week trial? That’s a boon for book lovers.

Download the podcast here. Podcasts will be posted fortnightly.

Visit Falcon vs Monkey, the home of Torpedo.

Music on the podcast is Pompey.

The Miles Franklin longlist for 2010 has been announced – and with only three of the 12 writers women, the signs are ominous that there may be another sausage fest (aka all-male shortlist) this year.

In strictly objective alphabetical order, the longlist is:

Patrick Allington, Figurehead
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Brian Castro, The Bath Fugues
Jon Doust, Boy on a Wire
Deborah Forster, The Book of Emmett
David Foster, Sons of the Rumour
Glenda Guest, Siddon Rock
Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly
Thomas Keneally, The People’s Train
Alex Miller, Lovesong
Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones
Peter Temple, Truth

While there’s not the very obvious omission of female literary heavyweights that there was last year (when Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Amanda Lohrey and Joan London all missed out), the gender imbalance is still curious, to say the least. Read more

photo by Tim McLean

Newcastle writer Patrick Cullen’s stories have been anthologised in those bastions of short fiction, Best Australian Stories and Sleepers Almanac, and his novel-in-stories, What Came Between, has been praised many times over. His short story about the friendship between Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, ‘Carver’s Unkempt Lawn’, appears in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings. Killings asked him to share his thoughts on reading and writing, and the germination of his tale.

Looking back at what I’ve written over the years I’ve probably followed a typical writer’s trajectory: teen poetry that ran on into my early twenties, evolving into prose and a largely autobiographical (and wholly unpublishable) novel, then finding a form to call home, which for me was short stories. Thinking about those earliest days I’d say that every time I sat to write I was as serious then as I am now, though experience tells me that taking writing seriously and having something good come of it are not always correlated. But you keep going regardless, writing whatever you’re fired up to write. Inspiration comes from anywhere and at any time, and much of the creative impulse comes from the challenge of trying to make something out of random fragments that lodge in my consciousness. The randomness of inspiration is probably echoed in the way influences work on you. Read more