Spineless Wonders is very proud to announce the following writers and their winning stories in The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award, judged by Sophie Cunningham for 2011. Winner $500 Susan McCreery ‘The Gardener’ Runners Up $100 Claire Aman ‘Those Gauls Must Be Crazy’ SJ Finn ‘Paper Anniversary’ These three stories along with twelve others which … Read More
Author: Bronwyn Mehan
Spineless Wonders Asks Patrick West
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)? Vladimir Nabokov comes to mind first. I remember reading a raggedy copy of Nabokov’s Dozen, ages ago, at the beach. The book was so ancient that the pages were almost petrified. Each time you turned one it came away from … Read More
small wonder prose poems & micro fiction
small wonder an anthology of prose poems and micro fiction Is it a prose poem? Or poetic prose? Perhaps it’s postcard fiction or sudden prose. A vignette or a monologue. SPINELESSWONDERS invites you to break some rules. Try a little genre-bending. Let the line break take a stroll through the streets and fields of prose … Read More
Spineless Wonders asks Mark Welker
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)? I tend find inspiration from different authors at different times, depending on what I’m writing. At the moment my book pile is stuffed with shorts by John Updike, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortazar. I’ve also read … Read More
Spineless Wonders Asks Irma Gold
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)? Some of my favourite contemporary Australian short fiction writers are Cate Kennedy, Nam Le, Helen Garner, Marion Halligan, Gillian Mears and John Clanchy. For the ‘otherwise’ who can possibly go past Alice Munro? And then there are the greats of … Read More
Spineless Wonders asks Sophie Constable
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)? *has a terrible urge to read thousands more stories to make an informed decision…comes back to earth reluctantly* I know I should be saying Saki, Emily Perkins, Turgenev, Oliver Sacks, Paul Jennings, (because it’s true, I do admire them all) … Read More
Little Bleeders 2 Talking short crime with A.S. Patric
This week, The Column asks Alec Patric, winner of the 2011 SD Harvey Short Story Award about writing short Australian crime. I spent years reading prose that was lit up with insights and revelations. Dense with psychological verisimilitude. That exposed all the nuances of our most precious relationships. Years with tortured prose that demanded a … Read More
Spineless Wonders Asks Lucy Sussex
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)? Chekhov, for ‘The Lady With a Little Dog’. Mary Fortune, who as Waif Wander wrote 500 pioneering crime stories for the Australian Journal between 1865-1909. James Tiptree Jr, alias Alice Sheldon, the great American science fiction writer. Ellen Davitt’s 1867 … Read More
Spineless Wonders asks Emmett Stinson
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)? Uh, I like the pretty standard kind of literary, ‘intellectual’ short story writers that, or so it seems to me, are liked by slightly pretentious, overeducated bourgeois dudes like myself. So people like Donald Barthelme, Julio Cortazar, James Joyce, William … Read More
Recycling Tales: unearthing treasures in the short stories of Angela Carter and Margo Lanagan
This week, guest blogger, Karina Brabham dives into the work of two short fiction greats, Britain’s late Angela Carter and Australia’s Margo Lanagan, to find out how they each take something old and turn it into something shiny and new. Writers are recyclers at heart. Not necessarily in an environmental sense, but rather that we … Read More