Podcasts, Poems and P76

Bruce Pennington, ‘Children of Tomorrow’

Busy writing, which is cutting down on the posts, but in the meantime I thought I might point you in the direction of a couple of things that might be of interest.

The first is the latest episode of Jonathan Strahan and Gary Wolfe’s excellent Coode Street Podcast, which I was lucky enough to be a part of last weekend. If you’re interested in SF and Fantasy and you don’t already listen to Coode Street I heartily recommend you check it out; recent episodes have featured discussions with Paul Kincaid about his stinging critique of the state of contemporary SF in the Los Angeles Review of Books a few weeks ago (there’s a nice roundup of other responses to the piece on Kincaid’s website) and the brilliant Kij Johnson (if you haven’t read her new collection, At the mouth of the river of the bees, you should do so immediately, although not before you’ve read the opening story, ’26 monkeys, also, the abyss’). The episode featuring me is available for free from the Coode Street website or direct from iTunes.

The second is this week’s launch of issue 6 of P76. This is a project with a rather wonderful story behind it. As some of you may remember, P76 was a small but adventurous literary journal that produced five issues in the late 1980s and early 1990s before folding just before the publication of its sixth issue in the summer of 1992/3.

Earlier this year P76’s editors, Mark Roberts and Linda Adair, found the setting for this lost issue, which features work by M T C Cronin, joanne burns, Gary Dunne and others and decided to publish it as a time capsule showcasing the state of Australian literature 20 years ago. This was a decision that was of particular interest to me because the issue also contained one of the first poems I ever sold, and which, as a result of the magazine’s collapse, never saw the light of day. If you’d like to read the issue it’s available from Rochford Street Press. Issue 1 of P76 is also available for free online. My poem’s called ‘Wintering’, and it’s actually not bad.

Now, back to the novel …