Talking Weather and Words with Margaret Throsby on Classic FM, Wednesday 1 February 2012

Published : Monday, January 30, 2012 | Label:

Margaret Throsby—whose interviews on Classic FM (ABC radio) I’ve listened to for ten years or more—invited me on to talk poetry, weather, grammar, music and ecology this Wednesday, 1 February.

Margaret’s format is famous: she leads her guest in a conversation that travels through his or her life and passions; the guest chooses five pieces of music they love; the conversation negotiates a passage, always elegant and often deep, between the music.

Choosing my music was exquisite and prolonged: for two days I replayed most of the music I love, in order to leave nearly all…

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Writing in Paradise August 2012

Published : Wednesday, January 18, 2012 | Label:

This August (18 to 25), I’m reprising the creative writing masterclass, “A Dream With A Pen in its Hand”, I ran at Daku Resort in Fiji last year.

I’m posting below (our host) Delia Rothnie-Jones’s description and outline of the course. For what we got up to last time:  http://dakuresort.com/blog/creative-writing-retreat-mark-tredinnick/

A Dream With a Pen in its Hand
A Masterclass in Creative Writing
18 – 25 August 2012

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The course

This…

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“Walking Underwater” wins the 2011 Montreal Poetry Prize

Published : Saturday, December 17, 2011 | Label:

My poem “Walking Underwater”, written in Portland, Oregon, on a reading tour, in March last year, has won the inaugural Montreal Poetry Prize.

The prize is worth $50,000, raised mostly from the donations of poets and modest entry fees. $50, 000 is more than has ever been offered for a single poem. The organisers wanted to send out a message to the world that poetry has inestimable worth, and is in wonderful health, even if most of the world doesn’t seem to know how much we need it.

The prize attracted over 3200 entries from poets…

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Wild Weather Launched in Canberra, 8 December 2011

Published : Friday, December 09, 2011 | Label:

Dr Bob Brown, leader of the Greens, launched Australia’s Wild Weather at the National Library in Canberra last night.

Bob spoke about the book with great warmth and insight. He spoke very personally, too, about his being a long-term weather tragic, and about how the book reminds us that we may need to live with more love toward the weather if we want the weather that has sustained us and all our great (and terrible) works in the anthropocene is to go on loving us. A hundred people listened to him (and me) speak, and watched the 128…

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Weather on the Radio

Published : Monday, November 28, 2011 | Label:

Every day this week (28 November to 2 December), Jill Emberton is talking with me about the weather.

Jill presents Mornings on ABC Radio Newcastle (1233 am), and each morning at ten, she’ll run a piece of a long conversation we recorded a few weeks back—about my poetry and prose, my alleged addiction to the weather, and my book Australia’s Wild Weather. Jill will also play some fragments of “The Wombat Vedas” (which caught Jill’s ear because it won the Newcastle Poetry Prize this year) and a few of the more wind-blown, flood-prone, fire ravaged poems from Fire…

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What’s Writing For

What makes writing worth writing—and reading—is what the story or the poem achieves beyond the tale it tells: its music, its wisdom, its form, the way it makes the ordinary world beautifully strange. A good tale is only good, in other words, if the telling is sound and memorable. It’s the voice and mood, the arc and flow, the poetry of the writing that endure when the storyline fades.

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