Tag: literary festival

Festival of Flash, Sunday 19 June

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I’m taking part in the Festival of Flash to celebrate 10 years of Flash Frontier magazine this Sunday, 19 June. There’s a lot going on – check it all out below.

Festival of Flash flyer

National Flash Fiction Day 2022 – an all-day Festival of Flash, closing with the awards night

A special day and evening celebrating ten years 2012-2022

Info and details here.  

Please join us at the Flash Frontier YouTube channel for our celebration of flash fiction in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Sunday 19 June 2022

Featuring: Special guests, musical interludes, new books, a celebration of languages of Aotearoa and features from NFFD’s centres
Youth stories & awards with Jack Remiel Cottrell
Adult stories & awards with Anne Kennedy and Kiri Piahana-Wong
NZ Society of Authors Regional awards
With special guests, raffle prizes and more!  
Please check out our panels and readings and then tune in for our national awards night.

Tune in here: Flash Frontier YouTube channel

Find this year’s Short List at the NFFD site, here,
with the youth Short List at
fingers comma toes.

Congratulations, all! 
A list of the festival events…

SUNDAY, 19 June 2022
Celebrating ten years 2012-2022!
 
 
lively discussions * guest readers * judges’ comments * NFFD awards * NZSA regional awards * raffle prizes * special features from our regions * musical performances * book giveaways
an all-day series of free events livestreamed to the Flash Frontier YouTube channel

more info here

09:00-10:00 AM Panel discussion: Shaping your narrative –novella-in-flash & story collections

10:15-11:15 AM Reading: Packing a punch in small spaces – nuance and humour

11:30-12:30 PM Panel discussion: Youth voices

12:45-01:45 PM Panel discussion: Fairy tales and myths

02:00-03:00 PM Reading: Selections from the youth long list

03:15-04:15 PM Panel discussion: Languages of Aotearoa

04:30-05:30 PM Panel discussion: Writing our world

06:00-08:00 PM ONLINE AWARDS NIGHT

Please go to the website for information
about festival topics, participants, links, etc.

nationalflash.org
Ngā mihi, Michelle Elvy   James Norcliffe   Gail Ingram 
 Rachel Smith   Vaughan Rapatahana
www.flash-frontier.com

The Blackball Readers and Writers Festival 2021

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I last visited the West Coast in 1989, when I returned to Haast Beach, where I’d lived as a young child. (Here’s my poem about that return journey: Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach – and below is Lake Brunner, near Blackball.)

Lake Brunner, West Coast, South Island

For that and many other reasons, I was very glad to be invited as a guest to the Blackball Readers and Writers Festival – originally scheduled for 2020, but postponed till 2021.

I enjoyed getting to know the village of Blackball, where as the map below shows there is a lot going on. I enjoyed listening to the sessions, which gave so much more opportunity to get to know writers than the usual two-questions-and-on-to-the-next-panelist format of larger writers’ festivals. AndI enjoyed the panel I was on, where Caroline Selwood interviewed Kathleen Gallagher and I about wiring and activism, and what motivates us as writers.

Map of Blackball

Blackball is a remarkable community, which both acknowledges and celebrates its mining past and is actively seeking to move beyond it. Here’s more about Blackball, the Festival, and Blackball’s role in promoting a Justice Transition away from fossil fuels for the West Coast:

– Festival Report: Readers & Writers Festival successful
– Radio NZ: Blackball – the town that refused to die
– Coast future highlighted at May Day forum

A Mainland Double: Tales For Canterbury and the Readers And Writers Alive! Festival

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Tales For Canterbury

In just over a month since the Christchurch earthquake of 22 February, editors Cassie Hart and Anna Caro have done an amazing job of pulling together Tales for Canterbury, a fundraising anthology to benefit the victims of the earthquake, with all proceeds going to the New Zealand Red Cross Earthquake Appeal.

Tales for Canterbury is now available for pre-order as an ebook (in pdf, mobi, and epub format) and as a paperback – I’ve just ordered my paperback copy. It should be published in April, so you won’t have long to wait for it.

There’s a blog detailing the progress of the anthology, and if you’re not sure whether you’d like one, you might want to check out the list of contributors. There are a few names there you might know – Neil Gaiman, for example; not to mention Janis Freegard, Gwyneth Jones, Jay Lake, Helen Lowe, Tina Makereti, Juliet Marillier, Jeff Vandermeer, Sean Williams, and many, many more fine writers. I am honoured to have a story in such company.

Readers And Writers Alive! Festival (Invercargill)

I lived in Southland between the ages of four and sixteen, and though that’s, well, several years ago now, I have written a lot of poetry about and set in Southland, and have even set a science fiction story in Gore.

So it has always been a private ambition of mine to take part in a Southland literary event, and I’m delighted to say that this ambition is about to be realised. I’m going to be a participant in the Readers and Writers Alive! programme of the Southland Arts Festival 2011, organised by the Dan Davin Literary Foundation, for whom Helen Lowe is currently running writing workshops.

I’m taking part in two events: a poetry reading featuring Joanna Preston, Kay McKenzie Cooke and Lynley Dear on Friday 29 April; and a writing workshop the following day. For that, I’ll remove my poet’s beret and put on my SF writer’s battered propellor beanie to run a workshop on “Writing Different Worlds”. I have to return to Wellington that night, so I’m unfortunately going to miss Joanna’s poetry workshop the following day, which should be excellent.

Reading with friends, and with poets I admire; getting an extended time to run a spec fic writing workshop; and returning to the scene of my youthful (mis)deeds. It’s all good.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!