new newsletter

It’s been over a year since my last LTP Newsletter, hello again to original subscribers, and welcome to the new ones. (If you’re new to my newsletter, note: it is infrequent and you can unsubscribe anytime.)

Local Time Publishing

Local Time Publishing is my publishing project created to make available my back list titles in well-designed paper editions. To these I added new titles: a memoir, Local Time, a new novel, Ghosts Like Us,  and a short prose collection, 7 Stories 2 Novellas.  All LTP titles can be seen here. Ebook versions are also available. Books can be ordered at Lulu, Amazon and other online sellers.

sine loco: without location

Publishing details usually give a place of publication. Sine loco, without location: thus ruled by a librarian writing catalogue entries for my LTP books. Local Time Publishing is sine loco, but it’s my own project, and I am always in one location as long as I’m alive.

my relocations

There have been more relocations than usual since I left Turkey in September 2017.
In good moments, there’s a way to look at every staying somewhere as being for the right amount of time for whatever it ended up I was doing there.
Those somewheres, since the last newsletter:
I left Turkey, where I’d lived for nearly 6 years, in September 2017, spent 10 days as a resident visiting scholar at Christ University, Bangalore, then a couple of weeks staying with dear old friends of various incompatible persuasions in Chennai, where I had been many times before, and gave a talk at Queen Mary’s College, where I had once run a 3-week workshop. Then to Cambodia, my first time in Phnom Penh, for a 2 week stay full of highlights.
In late October I landed in Australia after all that time which felt very strange for quite a while, watching the reality of Turkey slowly fading out. I still look at news from Turkey every day.  It keeps getting worse.
 Meanwhile, I stayed in:
Newtown, Sydney’s inner city trendy heart, rainbows posted everywhere; Mornington Peninsula, at the southernmost point of the eastern coast of Australia, an abundance of gorgeousness and foodie-ism; Lane Cove, a North Shore “leafy”  suburb meaning a long time upper-class-ish suburb of Sydney (rainbow flags not seen); Wollongong, discovering that wonderful  stretch of coast, the “Illawarra”; then several Blue Mountains locations, mountain house after mountain house, invigorated by the pure tonic air, enchanted by the bushland and cliff views from escarpments and each house’s book collections.
And then at last I moved into a flat of my own in a solid tower block in inner-city Redfern. And set out rediscovering Sydney, the first city I really knew, my home town for most of my first 40 years.

Here's an interview I did recently for the blog The Godless Traveler

publication news

Turn Left At Venus, my new novel, will be published by Transit Lounge  in 2019.
Transit Lounge put out  a beautiful edition in 2012 of my 1992 novel The Edge of Bali with additional writings on Bali. I’m glad to publish with Barry Scott again.

sample of new work

Here is an early version of an early part of the novel Turn Left At Venus, as presented at the Sozopol Fiction Seminar in 2016 (Elizabeth Kostovo Foundation, Bulgaria; see LTP Newsletter 4 ) published here in Vagabond magazine:
Here's the link. 

new projects

(1) some kind of a biography

Sasha Soldatow (1947-2006) was a writer, editor, activist, performer, and an influential, flamboyant, disruptive personality.
I have embarked on research for a biography (life and times) of Sasha. There are 38+ boxes of his papers in the Mitchell library, plus other relevant books and papers, and other holdings elsewhere. Perhaps his most successful art was the cultivation of friendship, love, and acquaintance; as well as delving in those boxes I have started interviewing a range of people.
If you knew Sasha at all and I haven’t contacted you, please be in touch.

Here’s a paragraph to sum up Sasha:
    Inspired by Sydney’s anarchist tradition, he joined radical action groups for rights for tenants and prisoners; 1970s gay writers’ group The Gutter Club; produced publications The Only Sensible News, Scrounge and the Patterns series. Performance art included the dynamic Adventures of Rock n Roll Sally. He worked in  SBS-TV’s subtitling unit; collaborated with other poets and writers; wrote uncompromisingly modernist  prose collections; did skilful, transformative work as an editor; controversially sued the Australia Council for refusing to give him a grant; edited a book of Harry Hooton’s poems; returned to Moscow to explore his Russian roots; collaborated with Christos Tsiolkas on ‘autobiography’ as dialogue Jump Cuts. Soldatow nicknamed himself ‘Party Fun’ but perceived failure to gain adequate recognition, and multiple surgeries following a fall on Moscow’s winter ice, exacerbated anxiety and alcoholism. His work is significant in the context of Australian literary history and social movements, the phenomenon of 'migrant' writing, and the emergence of queer culture and writing.

  (2) other prose writing

Oh, it does go on but I still don’t know quite what to call it.

looking forward to

The conference for Asia Pacific Writers & Translators [APWT] at Gold Coast in early December 2018. Thinking about my panel subject "authenticity".

workshops

I did some workshops for Westwords, an organisation for writers in the Western suburbs and Blue Mountains. Having grown up in western Sydney, I was pleased to be working in the territory. The West might be distant from the Harbour and beaches that are Sydney’s iconic natural wonders, or the inner city that once meant more cosmopolitanism, but it’s the vital urban area for those things we cherish: "Diversity", "creativity", "authentic" migrant food.

Books featured in this newsletter

Now I tell you about a couple of my books. This time I choose my previous 2 novels; I see them as forming a kind of trilogy with the forthcoming Turn Left At Venus