from the editor's desk
News from the Westerly Office
Hello all,
We’ve been blown away by the success of our subscription drive! We now have nearly 100 new subscribers, with almost $5000 raised, which is going straight back into the production of the next issue. A huge thanks to all of you who have supported us in our campaign, especially UWA Publishing, UWA’s Cultural Precinct, Margaret River Press, The Centre for Stories and OOTA, who have been a great support. Also, congratulations to the winners of our two book prize packs, Robyn Black (Vic) and Gail Willems (WA)!
You might have noticed a few changes on our website. We are pleased to announce that a great array of new Westerly material has started coming out and will continue to appear online. Our updated website now includes selected works from previous Westerly editions, launch speeches from local events and reviews of newly published works from some of our own emerging writers are now also available online. The latest example is this great review on Kate Grenville’s One Life: My Mother’s Story, from Marie O’Rourke. Click here for review.
It’s been a busy 2015 so far, with the launch of 60.1 having already come and gone, and we are very excited to let you know that we will have a whole range of upcoming events in October and November. More details on those will follow… But something we can tell you about is our public poetry campaign, ‘Word Matters’. Sure to be unique and unforgetable, ‘Word Matters’ will see a group of young WA poets have two lines taken from their works to be printed on blank business cards and spread around Perth. This campaign is in part our response to the cuts the Arts have suffered over the last year. The cards aim to make a connection between business and poetry as different currencies, playing with writing as an ‘economy’, as well as having fun with poetry in the public sphere. You should be able to find them all over the place – we will be leaving them in cafes, bookstores and libraries, as well as sending them out with a November edition of Westerly. You also will be able to read the full length poems in the issue, and with hashtags and Twitter handles (#wordsmatters, #poetrycards,@westerlymag), the cards will direct readers towards the project online. This campaign promises to get people talking about poetry, and we hope you will all get involved. It will be exciting to see how far the cards will travel!
Thanks,
The Westerly team.
