6.12.17
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) Emerging Writers’ Mentorship Program received over 150 entries in poetry, adult fiction, non fiction, children’s fiction and Young Adult. It gives winners the opportunity to develop their early draft manuscript to a publishable standard through free mentorships with professional mentors. Applications are assessed on literary and artistic merit and developmental potential. All the assessors were impressed by the high standard of applications and selecting winners was not an easy task.
The 2018 program will support 11 mentorships from any eligible genre, funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, plus one additional mentorship – the Edel Wignell Mentorship – for children’s writers. This mentorship is funded by the income from the acclaimed children’s author, Edel Wignell.
Winners will work closely with a mentor selected from the ASA Mentors’ list for 25 hours over one year. A further five highly commended applicants will receive a two-hour phone consultation with a mentor they have selected from the ASA Mentors’ list.
Danielle Binks is an editor, book blogger, youth literature advocate, and literary agent specialising in middle-grade & young adult acquisitions with Jacinta di Mase Management. In 2017 she edited and contributed to ‘Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anhology’ (Harper Collins).
Nick Earls is the author of 26 books for adults, teenagers and children. Two of his novels have been adapted into feature films and five into stage plays. His books have won awards in Australia, the UK and US, and appeared on bestseller lists in Australia, the UK and the Amazon Kindle Store. His most recent work, the Wisdom Tree novella series, has won or been shortlisted for ten awards, including winning the People’s Choice Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and a gold medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (US).
Dr Robyn Sheahan-Bright has operated justified text writing and publishing consultancy services since 1997, and is widely published in children’s literature, Australian fiction and publishing history. She has judged literary awards, mentored writers, lectured in writing and publishing courses, and regularly assesses post-graduate creative writing theses for several universities. She writes both teachers’ notes and reading group notes for major publishers. She was inaugural director of and is a Life Member of the Queensland Writers’ Centre, and was co-founder of Jam Roll Press. Her publications include Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia (1946–2005) (2006) co-edited with Craig Munro. She has been Program Manager of the APA’s biennial Residential Editorial Program since 1999. She is Vice- President of the IBBY Australia Committee, and Secretary/ Deputy-Chair of the Australian Children’s Literature Alliance. She was recipient of the CBCA (Qld) Dame Annabelle Rankin Award in 2011, the CBCA Nan Chauncy Award in 2012, and the QWC’s Johnno Award in 2014.
Julia Stiles has been an editor for over twenty-five years, first with Pan Macmillan, followed by a publishing role at Random House and then, when she left Sydney for the high seas, years of freelancing with a variety of publishing houses. Her particular strength is in developmental work, which is why she finds mentoring for the ASA so enlivening. Working with Julia has been described as a ‘gentle and joyful experience’. Her areas of skill and experience are literary and genre fiction, YA fiction and narrative nonfiction. She has degrees in both English and Australian Literature and, more recently, Psychology.
Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. Her recent work includes scholarly volumes Researching Creative Writing (Frontinus, 2015) and Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; Manchester UP, 2016), and poetry volumes Watching the World (with Paul Hetherington; Blemish Books, 2015), Stolen Stories, Borrowed Lines (Mark Time, 2015), and Sentences from the Archive (Recent Work Press, 2016).
Overall comments:
The submissions were generally well put together, focused and displayed a keen awareness of genre. Many of the applicants are graduates of tertiary creative writing programs or have participated in a significant number of writing courses, workshops and fellowships, and this is evident in the standard of presentation of applications. What sets the best applications apart is what they offer beyond a well-prepared application - an exciting idea, writing skill and an emerging distinct voice. Unsurprisingly, there were more applications with prospects than the program is able to fund.
Amanda Niehaus, The Breeding Season: Intriguing in its details, The Breeding Season faces the complexity of love, and delivers it with writing that finds the power in small moments.
HT Thomas, The Passionflower: Psychologically complex and emotionally compelling, The Passionflower is a vibrant and powerful exploration of women’s courage in the face of family dysfunction and violence.
Melissa Manning, South West: Beautifully shaped and versatile in voice, the short stories in South West pivot delicately on a single unexpected moment that changes everything.
Katie Lavers, The Watersinger: Set in a tumbledown future Sydney, The Watersinger is a vividly imagined dark fantasy, lush, highly visual and reminiscent of Mervyn Peake.
Anne So, Second Chance Luck: Grounded in fascinating, well-chosen details, Second Chance Luck is a welcome new exploration of identity and of the Chinese-Australian migrant experience.
Overall comments:
Though there was just a handful of poetry submissions, most showed writers who are already accomplished in their form, aware of how the world of poetry operates, and poised to take a more substantial place in that world. The selections were intrinsically interesting. While they tended to explore the conventional topics of poetry – loss, desire, the unfamiliar – the best of them achieved something fresh and engaging. Those that moved beyond personal experience and into observation and reflection tended to be stronger; and those that dealt with something that the poet clearly knew in a personal and visceral as well as a conceptual way were convincing and, often, moving. Those that were located in, and utterly at home within, the Australian context were for the most part persuasive. There is wit and wistfulness in many of the poems submitted, along with a feeling for rhythm, an understanding of imagery, a willingness to take chances with word choice, and a feeling for narrative in verse. Stronger submissions came from poets who have already achieved some publication success in literary journals and competitions; the best submissions take everyday life and render it fresh, through unexpected imagery, through the shimmer of the numinous within the ordinary, and through a sense of compassion for others.
James Gering is likely to be a very fine Australian poet, and clearly understands how to find empathy in the everyday, how to avoid sentimentality even when rendering heartbreak, how to explore memory without leaning on nostalgia: these are not easy to achieve, particularly for those still finding their way through the complexities of poetry and its traditions, and his focus on the moment, and forensic attention to perhaps quotidian detail, bring his poems to life.
Overall comments: The YA entries submitted were of an impressive quality and evinced a high level of professionalism and dedication to craft amongst the applicants.
They included a heartening number targeting the lower-aged members of the YA readership; publishing has had a tendency to favour the upper age-group and the ‘crossover’ sector of this market, and it is pleasing to find so many potential works for the 13–15 year readership too.
The entries submitted also evinced a diversity in regional settings, inclusiveness in point of view, and several works of well-researched historical fiction. The writers presented modern Australia and contemporary teenagers’ lives on the page in an honest and thoughtful way.
In most of the realistic writing for teenagers submitted, assessors were pleased to observe some sense of the redemptive hope in the sub-text which is advisable for this audience; a promising horizon to be glimpsed, however fleetingly, and that the characters are on the cusp of experience, rather than being doomed by their situations, no matter how harrowing.
We commend the writers who submitted works and felt that Australian readers were privileged to potentially have such an exciting breadth and diversity of story to choose from.
Geraldine Borella Bertie and the Black Hand
Synopsis: Bertie Bingham, a melodramatic musical tragic, is about to become eligible to perform in the school musical when stepfather (Evil Elliot) is given the green light for his ecology/pharmacology research project. He’s moving them from Brisbane to Nargo Creek, a rainforest hellhole in North Queensland. Bertie plans to sabotage Elliot’s project but faces opposition from local boy, Aurelio De Luca (Rel). Responsible, family-orientated, hard-working, Rel, is everything Bertie’s not.
Comment: This writer creates a convincing teenage voice using humour and pace. This sample has great promise as a junior YA novel. There are many plot diversions to add interest, inventive word play, references to musicals provide an entertaining sub-text, and the blended family situation also offers a relevant context. Bertie and the Black Hand is a little like the YA eco-fiction of Carl Hiaasen with the crime fiction sensibility of a YA author such as Lili Wilkinson. This sample feels very fresh and exciting – Bertie is an engaging protagonist who is wholly original.
Amelia Mellor The Celestial Kris
Synopsis: ‘The Celestial Kris’, a YA novel, is a disruptive reinvention of the high-fantasy quest inspired by the traditional art and mythology of Borneo.
Comment: This tale of a captive giantess in a Lilliputian world, is intriguingly told with a clarity which engages the reader’s interest immediately. Sasuri’s emotional connection to the beautiful giantess, Maalo, is heartfelt. The action is fast-paced and emotionally intense. The narrative promises in its synopsis to take the reader on a heart-stopping quest adventure to find the legendary Celestial Kris, in a richly imagined mythical world. A mentorship might enhance the dialogue and develop the many thematic layers of this promising and enticing work of fiction.
Catherine Gillard Two Juliettes (Girls Can Kick Too)
Synopsis: When Jules and Roz meet at their first Youth Eels AFL training session they don’t at first hit it off, but their friendship evolves over the season. They must deal with the fallout from their families as they embark on a relationship that transgresses traditional boundaries. The girls learn to tackle big opponents, even one taking the form of a team mate’s bullying father. When the girls rally around the victim, they learn that going in hard and fighting back can lead to serious injuries, of the physical and emotional kind.
Comment: This is a ‘women in sport’ YA offering which is presented realistically without being clichéd. It is written in an inventive style in two alternate voices, deals with very contemporary subject matter, is told via convincing dialogue, and is well-paced.
General Comments:
Assessors were impressed by the quality and diversity of the writing submitted to the Children’s category. Several writers here also favoured a regional setting, introducing readers to situations and characters remote from the city/centric work often published for this age-group.
As a general observation – there seemed some confusion regarding the difference between junior fiction and middle grade fiction. Such misunderstanding about readership convention means that things like word-count, aspirational reading habits, and complexity of story are impacted. As a general rule, writers are encouraged to study submission guidelines (with regards to age-bracket and word-count). In order to develop an understanding of their target readership, writers need to delve into where kids are ‘at’ in their lives – in junior fiction, characters are just beginning to realise that the world exists beyond their own front-yard and family, while in middle grade they’re finding their place in a much wider community and starting to understand themselves within it. Some stories that presented as middle-grade, but with junior-fiction word-counts, also required more complexity – layered storytelling, subversive themes, secondary storylines, and complex relationships.
Overall, the assessors were excited by the prospect of so many promising fictions being published for younger readers, but felt that the picture book manuscripts presented were not as promising, in this round of assessments. A number of submissions actually hit on similar storylines and plot conventions, which further highlighted the need for more variety and ambition when writing for this market. Picture-books – like books in any other publishing landscape – experience change and growth over time, and as such, authors writing for this market need to ensure that they are in step with changing times. For example, authors like Davina Bell, Giovanna Zoboli, Oliver Jeffers, Phil Cummings, and many others are presenting complex and important ideas in such gentle and touching ways.
Julianne Negri Hattie Maxwell and the Library of Lost Words
Synopsis: Hattie Maxwell is stressed. Since the Big Split she lives a week with her mum and a week with her dad. They call it week-about. Now her special place, the abandoned mansion Sumner House with the best mulberry tree in the city, is going to be demolished to make way for apartments. While trying to save the house, Hattie discovers a magic library that appears when the moon is full, where a strange orphan girl, Hypatia collects forgotten words. Can Hattie overcome her anxiety to save the house – and perhaps fix some other things in her life along the way? This work combines issues facing contemporary children, a subplot based in the history of Lebanese immigration to Australia and classic magical adventure elements. The book is in first person voice and plays with language and imagination.
Comment: This sample work is fabulously engaging in style. Hattie’s gripes about the world are revealed in a stream of consciousness first person voice which is immensely readable. eg ‘Instead I look at her crazy wild frizzy hair and her cheekbones that poke out like two knife blades because she is so thin. Her pale skin is almost see through (or, if I was going to use another of last week’s vocabulary words I could say transparent) and you can make out each bone in her body.’ The assessors were most impressed with this manuscript. There’s a Barry Jonsberg appeal to the sample writing, in that it has both commercial readership potential and a layered style and approach which is highly literary, promising its attraction to a wide range of readers. The theme of immigration promises a manuscript celebrating diversity and inclusiveness. Assessors believe that a mentorship would guide the author in finessing the sophisticated, complex aspects of the story, the secondary plotting and thematic development. This is a work with enormous potential.
Catherine Mojsiewicz Forest of Bones, Steppe of Ashes
Synopsis: This sophisticated proposal asks: ‘Can an ancient secret destroy a dictatorship? This story twists ancient werewolf myth, following two Neuri girls, reluctant successors and shapeshifters, two thousand years apart.
Comment: The writer employs grippingly brutal scene creation in the opening chapter which establishes a strong central character in Aga and evokes the threat of the Gulag in 1947. (This will sit in juxtaposition to an alternative story which will later unfold, set in the past.) This is a work of middle-grade fiction about the matriarchy which is totally original in time and setting; it has a Neil Gaiman air to it, in targeting a middle grade niche audience with such a sophisticated text incorporating a strong sense of Russian history, as well.
Christopher Edwardes The Grimoire
Synopsis: Eleven year old Amy Crowther overhears a plot by strange creatures to take over their world by evil means. She becomes involved in an adventure with Rupert Oilskin and Otto Molewhisker, both gnomish enchanted tunnel engineers, and Otto’s sister Meglet, an enchantment chef to thwart the creatures – an evil public servant from the world of Jord and his cannibalistic acc omplices. Aided by the gnomes’ magical talking tools, the four accomplices expose and foil the crafty conspirators.
Comment: This writer has a style distinguished by adept turns of phrase, original use of literary devices, and excellent pacing. The sample indicates that there is a suspenseful plot in mind, and that the writer has created real characters in an original fantasy. This story is reminiscent of Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH – which was indeed intended for children, but had a moral complexity that has endeared it to audiences of all ages over time – so Edwardes’ story may likewise have broad appeal; a mentorship would assist in clarifying which readership is being targeted, a greater awareness regarding language usage, and assist in the development of theme.
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