Tag Archives: Michelle Elvy

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Michelle Elvy launches new book

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Note from Michelle:

the other side of better is published by Ad Hoc in the UK, the same publisher who produced the everrumle in 2019.  As with the everrumle, I’ve been lucky to work with an artist for the cover design. Wellington-based Jennifer Halli will be at the Dunedin launch on Friday, June 18, for a joint reading and art show. I’m attaching the poster for this event, so you can see her beautiful artwork (and you can find more about the artist here). 


I’m also excited to be doing readings in Auckland (July 02, introduced by Paula Morris) and Christchurch (July 08, introduced by James Norcliffe), as well as online readings in July, for friends and colleagues who are not in Aotearoa New Zealand. More about those coming soon… 


To pre-order the book or find out more, please see the publisher’s page. They ship worldwide! And in New Zealand, you can find the book at Nationwide or in book shops near you as of mid-June.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Paula Green reviews Landfall 240 at Kete Books

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A good literary journal will offer the reader an inviting range of tones, subject matter, emotional effects and cerebral demands. Familiar writers will sit alongside new voices. Landfall 240 achieves an eclectic mix of voices, especially as it favours multiple genres: poetry, fiction, memoir, essays, artworks, reviews. Such a writing smorgasbord suits my habit of devouring issues over repeated visits and the degree to which certain pieces affect me is why I am a long-term Landfall fan.

An annual highlight is always the results of the essay competition. Editor Emma Neal received 85 entries this year and A. M. McKinnon’s winning essay, Canterbury Gothic, is a little beauty. The essay begins with a great aunt, exquisitely detailed, and moves through a city’s architectural detail to the dark and moving twists in a family history.

full review here

Poetry Shelf connections: Michelle Elvy’s ‘Kia ora’

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Kia ora

for my mother

 

I remember the brooch you always wore

I remember it most of all

tiny fragments, blue dust

glinting on your breast

my hand reaching to touch

 

I recall the call of the song sparrow

I recall it most vividly of all

the squeech-squeech-trill

moving through sunlight

stopping on our sill

 

I can see the maple in our yard

I can see it best of all

its smooth  grey skin

planted in thin slanting soil

a young towering thing

 

Or was it a pendant?

A warbler? A white oak?

My memories, round

and flawed, you

across oceans and continents

 

It’s autumn in Dunedin

sunrise, cool and misty

glowing

the brooch            the pendant

the sparrow          the warbler

the maple              the oak

 

Michelle Elvy

 

 

Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor and manuscript assessor. She grew up in the Chesapeake Bay region of the US and now makes her home in Dunedin. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions, and she chairs National Flash Fiction Day. Recent anthology projects include Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (CUP 2018) and Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (OUP 2020). Michelle’s poetry, fiction, travel writing, creative nonfiction and reviews have been widely published. Her book, the everrumble (Ad Hoc Fiction 2019), is a small novel in small forms. michelleelvy.com

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Michelle Elvy’s ‘the everrumble’ launching at the Flash Fiction Festival UK

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Ad Hoc Fiction is honoured to be publishing the everrumble, “a small novel in small forms” by Michelle Elvy. It’s a wonderful and important work of fiction highly praised by the writers quoted below. The striking cover art is by acclaimed Ethiopian artist, Eyayu Genet.

“the everrumble is a poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas. Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, inevitably to the place where human history began.”

We excited that the everrumble will be launched at the Flash Fiction Festival, UK on 28th-30th June where Michelle is running workshops, chairing a panel on Flash Around the World, introducing the latest Best Small Fiction anthology, and talking about flash fiction in New Zealand. And it will also be for sale from June from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop in paperback in several different currencies and in ebook formats from Kindle and Nook.

 

 

 

 

 

Still time to submit prose poems/small fiction/flash fiction to Bonsai

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IMMEDIATE CALL — ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS THROUGH NOVEMBER 30!

Editors Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe are seeking submissions for a comprehensive book of compressed fiction to be published in 2017. This is an ambitious project, the first of its kind in New Zealand, and we aim to include the very best small fictions from around Aotearoa.

The book will be a wide-ranging collection in three parts: one section will feature the best of previously published work; one section will feature considerations and essays by noted practitioners on the short narrative form and its development/ growth in New Zealand; one section will feature entirely new work, to showcase the fast-changing landscape of New Zealand small fictions.

 

Contribute to this uniquely New Zealand collection by sending your best work, up to 300 words not including title, with ‘BONSAI’ in the subject line.

 

  • Send new work as well as previously published pieces to: bonsaifiction@gmail.com
  • Up to three new pieces; up to three previously published pieces.
  • Please include your name and contact details.
  • Please send a .doc or .docx file with all submissions in the same document; no pdfs, unless absolutely necessary to demonstrate the layout of specific formatting.
  • Deadline for story submissions: November 30, 2016.

 

There is no theme for this anthology. We will include a variety of stories exploring a range of topics and themes – from humorous to wicked to sublime. We encourage experimental writing, as well as haibun, prose poetry and stories in te reo (accompanied by an English translation). We encourage new and experienced writers. We encourage very short flashes of inspiration or stories that take up the full 300 words. We want to see stories that light up the page and take readers to unexpected endings. We are looking for stories that leave us breathless, wanting more. We aim to put New Zealand flash fiction on the map even further, so give us your shiniest stuff!

 

Whatever approach you take, make every word count.

The editors’ decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into. Payment will be in copies of the anthology.

Deadline for story submissions: November 30, 2016.

 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – BONSAI: The Big Book of Small Stories

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Editors Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe are seeking submissions for a comprehensive book of compressed fiction to be published in 2017. This is an ambitious project, the first of its kind in New Zealand, and we aim to include the very best small fictions from around Aotearoa.

The book will be a wide-ranging collection in three parts: one section will feature the best of previously published work; one section will feature considerations and essays by noted practitioners on the short narrative form and its development/ growth in New Zealand; one section will feature entirely new work, to showcase the fast-changing landscape of New Zealand small fictions.

Contribute to this uniquely New Zealand collection by sending via email:

  •   your best work, up to 300 words not including title, with ‘BONSAI’ in the subject line. Deadline for story submissions: November 30, 2016.
  •   a proposal for an essay or reflection concerning the compressed form – we are open to ideas and are presently considering essays on composition and technique, history of the form, prose poetry and story-telling, teaching flash in the classroom, representation of Pasifika writing in the short form, music and the rhythm of flash, compressed story-writing as a tool for all writing, experimentation and play in very short stories, literary criticism of the compressed form. Note: there are many themes to explore! Please send an email about your essay proposal by October 28 to discuss with the editors.

    Send new work and essay proposals to: bonsaifiction@gmail.com

  • Please include your name and contact details.

    There is no theme for this anthology. We will include a variety of stories exploring a range of topics and themes – from humorous to wicked to sublime. We encourage experimental writing, as well as haibun, prose poetry and stories in te reo (accompanied by an English translation). We encourage new and experienced writers. We encourage very short flashes of inspiration or stories that take up the full 300 words. We want to see stories that light up the page and take readers to unexpected endings. We are looking for stories that leave us breathless, wanting more. We aim to put New Zealand flash fiction on the map even further, so give us your shiniest stuff!

    Whatever approach you take, make every word count.

    Writers may submit up to three unpublished works for consideration. Please send a .doc or .docx file with all submissions in the same document; no pdfs, unless absolutely necessary to demonstrate the layout of specific formatting.

    The editors’ decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into. Payment will be in copies of the anthology.

    Deadline for story submissions: November 30, 2016. Deadline for essay proposals: October 28, 2016.

NZ Flash Fiction Day takes me back to a missing book: the deadline looms

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Years and years ago I bought an anthology called Sudden Fiction and I loved the way the writing fell on the page in bright drops. Were the miniature pieces agonised over and crafted to a sweet and shiny essence or were they a quick and vital shedding of narrative (stream-of-conscious-like)? Tiny. Surprising. Saporous. I don’t remember such details and I can’t find my weather-beaten copy but I do remember the way the anthology sparked my attention.*

Nowadays, look each way and you find Flash Fiction.

Poet Michelle Elvy is a key supporter and writer of Flash Fiction in NZ. Many other NZ poets move between poetry and the lure of flash-fiction territory: Frankie McMillan, Owen Marshall, Mary McCallum, Rachel Fenton, Caoillin Hughes, Elizabeth Welsh, Gail Ingram, James Norcliffe.

 

National Flash Fiction Day is New Zealand’s celebration of the shortest form of fiction writing, on the shortest day of the year.

The 2015 NFFD competition opens Feb 1 – April 30. See the competition page for information and guidelines.

The 2012, 2013 and 2014 competitions were great successes with 300 entries each year. You can find the winners from previous years by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page.

In past years, National Flash Fiction Day has been celebrated with prize-giving ceremonies and presentations by the judges as well as readings in various hotbeds of flash all across Aotearoa.

Events will be posted on the website as they are put together this year.

 

website here

contact: nationalflash@gmail.com

 

 

*Ha! I went online and discovered this:  ‘Here Are 70 of the very best short-short stories of recent years including contributions from such contemporary writers as Raymond Carver, Leonard Michaels and John Updike; a few Modern Masters as Hemingway and Cheever; and an assortment of talented new young writers. Sudden Fiction brilliantly captures the tremendous popularity of this new and distinctly American form.’ The book was published in 1983 so I was living in London. Maybe I left it there. I am sure there were women in it! But I can’t recall.

 

Three Poets on Love

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I was invited to contribute a piece on Love to Awkword Paper Cut blog run by Michelle Elvy (it draws in writers from NZ and USA to write on writing). Even though I edited an anthology of love poems (Dear Heart) and I feel I write primarily out of love, I don’t write many love poems.  It was a fascinating thing to do– to write the piece.

You can read the three pieces here.

 

Earlier this year, I read ‘Iambic pentameter’ by Patricia Sykes, a poem about voice and rebellion and learning to stand on one’s own two feet. In Sykes’ bio, I read of her collaboration with composer Liza Lim, and I was so intrigued by this project that I followed the links to Lim’s webpage and found myself lingering late one night over her piece called ‘Love Letter, 2011’ – inspired and linked in various ways to James Tenney’s ‘Postal Pieces’. Tenney’s experiment is described as a “meditation on acoustics, form, or hyper-attention to a single performance gesture”. Lim’s ‘Love Letter’ is similarly experimental, something she describes as a mere “prompt, an invitation to the performer to participate in a process of honouring someone (‘their beloved’) [while] all the true work lies with the performer” – something which prompted me to reflect even more on ideas linking passion, voice, heartbeat and distances we traverse both physically and spiritually in the name of love.

– See more at: http://www.awkwordpapercut.com/13/post/2014/04/writers-writing-about-writing-about-love.html#sthash.Nnocbapg.dpuf