Community Publishing Newsletter - Issue 3
From outback Queensland to the UK… the CPRA team are telling the world about regional Australia.
Team members Alex and Kim had the great pleasure of visiting Winton in outback Queensland in April. It has been a wet year and the whole region was covered in long waving grass. We flew into Longreach, picked up our hire car and the sat nav told us to drive for 180km and turn left.
In Winton we found a thriving culture of local books, many of them produced by local grazier and entrepreneur Jeff Close via his small press publishing company Spur’n’8. Jeff is a dynamo, probably the most active publishing entrepreneur you’ve never heard of, and he is responsible for finding many local voices and getting their stories into print. We met many of the authors he has helped as well, including the amazing Fae le Friz (pen-name for the local postie, Grace Elliott), who wrote the highly entertaining young adult novel A Spot of Bother: a story about a dalmatian who is resistant to learning how to be a sheep dog. We also visited the Waltzing Matilda Centre and the Australian Age of Dinosaurs, and had an amazing evening of stargazing up at the Jump-Up, an international dark sky observatory. We talked to many writers, editors, and publishers, and found ourselves invited back for the Outback Writers Festival in June next year.
From a town with only around 1000 people, our next stop was Reading in the UK, population 174,000. Beth, Alex, and Kim were there to present their research at the SHARP conference. That stands for Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, and the annual conference attracts researchers from all over the world. This year’s theme was Global Book Cultures. We presented on our fieldwork, on a panel called ‘Finding Book Cultures Outside the Centre’. We had lots of interest and lots of smart questions, and it was highly satisfying to talk about tiny outback towns to a global audience.
Next up, our final fieldwork visit is happening in September in Far North Queensland. The town of Ayr has produced a number of writing clubs and published anthologies and has hosted its own writers festival. The whole team will be heading up to the warmth and sunshine together, to spend time speaking to writers and publishers, and work on some of our own publications. You can keep up to date with our travels by subscribing to this newsletter, and by following us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.