Big-time Ballarat Bonanza: Literature and Poetry Lovers Welcome [22.09.2010]
Ballarat Writers Inc and Going Down Swinging are presenting an afternoon featuring some of Ballarat’s finest writers and poets including Paddy O’Reilly, Ross Gillett, Emilie Zoey Baker, Sean M Whelan, James Laidler, and Jillian Pattinson .
The details:
Old Colonists Club
16-24 Lydiard St North, Ballarat
October 23rd 2-5 pm
$10 entry/$15 entry with a copy of book
The gang at SPUNC were already rapt with such exciting news, but GDS upped the ante by letting us publish Jillian Pattinson’s poem Retrospective (originally published in GDS #30) here as a teaser for what to expect on the afternoon. Here it is:
Retrospective
by Jillian Pattinson
She reckons the red pencil is for colouring outside the lines and who am I to correct her?
Unlike a rainbow, any three colours will do for an umbrella
Her pictures turn out clearer when drawn upside down then turned around.
The yellow pencil, she tells me, is sunshine and bananas. Green is for frogs and grass and flower stems but she prefers her trees purple because they bear plums in summer.
Around each object she leaves a space uncoloured—this is air. You can’t see it but it’s there, because you feel it when you wave your hand or dry your hair.
Brown is for horses and dogs, except aJeRpY [sic] who is a grey lead silky terrier.
Otherwise, grey lead is for her own system of numbers and letters combined in unexpected order, upper and lower-case alternating, gees and jays and whys hanging off each others’ tails, tipsy dees and els propping each other up, ems and double-yews sporting rather more troughs and humps than they may elsewhere.
Orange is her momentary favourite—juicy sweet, good for dresses, ribbons and shoes. “OK too” for a car resembling a beetle, which extrudes her own musical notation in its wake.
Music is never drawn in grey lead, the colour depending on the song.
When I ask why each family member stands encased in an air bubble, I learn that they are thinking, not talking, and that this is quiet.
Not far from the house she draws a graveyard full of flowers with a blue shaft reaching down from the sky. This part is nice, she says, not sad, being the elevator that takes people up to heaven.
This makes as much sense as any other theory I’ve yet heard so I nod, think on it some more, then nod again. Not that she’s looking for my affirmation—her world is clear and colourful and wanders happily outside the lines.
Going Down Swinging (GDS) is a Melbourne-based, international literary journal celebrating not only 30 issues, but also 30 years of publishing new work by writers and artists including Dorothy Porter, Peter Bakowski and Judy Horacek, right up to the freshest new voices in Australia and from around the world.
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