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From tea and tears to laughter and champagne
Spread the word. Our Pozible campaign for Tears, Laughter, Champagne is now live!
On 18 January 2003, four bushfires that had been burning in the Brindabella mountains for more than a week combined and roared into Canberra’s south-western suburbs, destroying 500 homes and claiming four lives.
Have you ever wondered what happened to the people behind the headlines?
Tears, Laughter, Champagne is the story of nine women who forged an unbreakable bond in the weeks and months following the fires, brought together by the one thing they had in common, loss. In this cookbook come memoir these ‘Singed Sisters’ recount their fifteen year journey from the day the fires changed their lives.
As devastating bushfires become part of life for so many communities around Australia this book will serve as a reminder of the enduring nature of friendship, good food, and great champagne in tough times. This book is also a chance for the Singed Sisters to pay forward the charity and kindness they received in the aftermath of the fires. All profits from the sale of this book will go to YWCA Canberra – chosen by the Singed Sisters because of their work in housing support, child care services and family counselling as well as their advocacy on gender equity and women in leadership.
To make this book a reality there are some upfront costs to cover such as photography, design, layout and printing. The Singed Sisters have been talking about this book for over a decade now – they are ready to make it happen. And with just a little bit of help from you through our Pozible campaign it will!
We would be very grateful if you could share this email with friends and family who might also like to support Tears, Laughter, Champagne. Thank you!
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Can you tell a story in 100 words?
We are intrigued by a flash fiction competition run by the Cesar Egido Serrano Foundation in Madrid for very short fiction pieces of a maximum of 100 words. There’s US$20,000 on offer for the winner, with three prizes of $1000 for runners-up. Entries can be in English, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew. The 2017 contest has the motto ‘The Word, bridging the gap between different cultures and religion’ but there are no subject or genre restrictions and there is no entry fee. All stories entered must be original and unpublished. You can enter online until Thursday 23 November 2017.
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What we’ve been reading
Prescient is a word readily bandied around in book reviews. With the recent destruction of the Cassini space probe however, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017) can aptly be described as prescient. Nature Poem is a searing epic poem about the legacy of colonialism from the perspective of a queer American Indian. In it, Pico makes confronting assertions about the colonising of space. Aidan first discovered Pico as a co-host of the brilliant Food 4 Thot podcast and Nature Poem is easily one of his top reads for 2017.
In contrast to Aidan’s up-to-the-minute reading of poetry, Jane has just about hauled herself out of the eighteenth century. She’s been reading the Romantics, both the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats and their writings on poetry. Alongside this she’s been reading an early A.S. Byatt novel, published fifty years ago, simply because she hadn’t read this one before and she is a great fan of both sisters, Byatt and Margaret Drabble. One of the fictional sisters in The Game (Chatto & Windus, 1967) is an Oxford don who quotes Coleridge on occasion. Jane was able to feel supremely smug that she understood the allusions. She has promised herself something from the twenty-first century next. Perhaps something off the Booker Prize shortlist.
Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens (Random House, 2012) is set in Versailles, France, and Lake Garda, Italy. Karen has just read it during a road trip from northern Italy to Paris and she was enchanted in its company. It is historical fiction with three complex female protagonists in intertwined story lines that include a masterful retelling of Rapunzel’s story and the life of the real woman who wrote the version of Rapunzel that we now know. Karen has also just finished Kim Scott’s Taboo (Picador Australia, 2017). It is powerfully troubling and she is still unsettled by the experience.
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