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Author Q&A with Carmel Bird – Thurs 14 Dec, 8pm AEDT

We'll be chatting with award-winning Australian author Carmel Bird on from 8pm AEDT on Thursday 14 December to celebrate a new award for digital short stories and the launch of Bird's new digital collection, The dead aviatrix: eight short stories.

Is there anything you'd like to know about writing short stories or publishing online? Don't miss this chance to put your questions to an experienced and talented writer. No need to wait until 14 December either – post them as they come to you.

If you'd like a bit of inspiration, have a read of some of Carmel's work:

The Dead Aviatrix, a story from her new collection: https://tablo.io/carmel-bird/the-dead-aviatrix-and-the-stratemeyer-syndicate
An essay on her new collection: https://tablo.io/carmel-bird/the-dead-aviatrix-the-story-of-the-stories

Carmel Bird has written novels, short stories, essays and books on the art of writing, in addition to editing anthologies of essays and stories. She was awarded the Patrick White Award in 2016.

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While I'm on a roll with questions ;) - One of your narrators has a bit of a dig at ‘literary fiction’. Do you write ‘literary fiction’? What does the phrase mean to you? Does it annoy or intrigue you? If so, how?

Glad you asked, Marjorie. It’s more than ‘a bit of a dig’ at categories of writing. The whole story, titled ‘The Whirligiggie of Time Brings in His Revenges’ is a little satire on the whims and vagaries of the publishing industry. The common term ‘literary fiction’ is isolated in the text by the use of quote marks.
I look at the broad categories of fiction as a kind of continuum from ‘literary’ to ‘mass market’ – note that the word ‘market’ has made it’s appearance. For these categories are needed in the marketplace – booksellers need to know where to shelve their Finnegans Wake and where to put their Dan Brown, just as supermarkets need to know where the Doritos are in relation to the French Camembert. There, I’ve just offended Joyce, Brown, Camembert and Doritos. Perhaps the food analogy isn’t so great, but just to run with it for a minute – the high end literary stuff tends to be complex but nourishing, while the low end mass market, not so much. Both can be pleasurable. The difficulty comes when you try to work along the continuum from Joyce to Brown, deciding where the middle is, deciding which books hover on the line between literary and mass market. Generally speaking, you don’t go to K-Mart to buy Finnegan’s Wake. K-Marts know what they are doing. They sell the Da Vinci Code.
All this interests me – but I don’t think it intrigues me. Doesn’t annoy me at all. It’s just a thing about the business of writing.

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