This is super exciting news and I'm feeling very proud to be a Fairfaxian right now. Inspired by and based on Dave Eggers' hugely successful 826 Valencia project in the US, Herald journalists Catherine Keenan and Tim Dick (with the support of the paper) are opening a tutoring centre for young writers in Sydney! The Sydney Story Factory is a special place for children to develop their love of words. (Volunteer tutors offer free, one-on-one help with English homework and any writing project a child can imagine.) 

Excuse the churnalism. But here is a presser with some background details...

 In 2002, Eggers opened a tutoring centre attached to the offices of his publishing company, McSweeney’s, in San Francisco. To comply with zoning laws, the centre also had to sell something, so out the front he opened a Pirate Supply Shop, stocking everything the independent buccaneer needs: peg legs, wooden planks, eye patches. The shop became an integral part of the operation, providing a child-friendly street-front, and soon generating revenue too.

The model was so successful that 826 went national, and seven more centres have opened across the US, each with their own shop. Brooklyn, New York, has the Superhero Supply Co. and Chicago has The Boring Store, servicing the city’s undercover secret agents.

In 2010, the centres helped 24,000 students and utilised the skills of 4,750 volunteers. Then, late last year, novelist Nick Hornby opened Hoxton Street Monster Supplies in London, based on the same model. Now it's Sydney's turn. The Sydney Story Factory is on it's way!

The centre will be located in Redfern. Children arrive at the centre via a fantastical shop, and as they pass the tins of Mortal Terror and Dragon Harnesses in sizes small to extra-extra-large, everyday rules fall away. They enter a place where the imagination is without bounds, and the written word is more exhilarating than a narrow escape from the Boogie Man.

For more information, see the inspiring talk that Dave Eggers gave

at TED. If you want to volunteer you can email

sydneystoryfactory@gmail.com and I'll see you there!

A very disturbing experience: Palo Alto by James Franco

In homage to today's Oscars broadcast I spent the weekend trialing James Franco's book of short stories, Palo Alto. I got it out of my bag at the pub last Friday night so we could admire his cute head shot on the back but my friends who had already received copies were uninterested in cooing over James and savage in their assessment of his writing. Rob started to read aloud from a passage that contained a graphic rape scene and while I was somewhat alarmed I thought 1. the NY Times said it was OK and they're rarely wrong and 2. how could such a cute face have created something so bad? Plus 3. maybe this seems worse than it is because I've had several white wines.

Anywayz it turns out Rob was really right. I got through four short stories and they contained, in order, a brutal hit and run killing, a  horrific drunken murder, a savage beating and a disturbing sequence of racist school yard bullying. It is a barrage of offensive, senseless and often sexual violence that is deeply disturbing. It's all described in great detail in a very simple, minimalist style of writing. It's a stream of consciousness that is desperately trying to be Holden Caulfieldesque but desperately misses the mark. At story four I read a couple of reviews to see if what was ahead might be worth pushing on for. This was a fairly standard response...


"This is moth-eaten Bret Easton Ellis. It's 3rd rate high-school stuff that wouldn't have been published if the author wasn't a movie star. The stories are full of adolescent violence and have no beauty, muscle, or point. Publishing them is an act of unethical self-indulgence on someone's part; everyone who bought this should get a refund!"

At that point I decided to grab a free copy of Shop Til You Drop I had received and can I tell you it read like Shakespeare after what I had just been through. I can only guess that when your first few roles have been General Hospital,  Spiderman and Pineapple Express you might feel the need to write some short, mercilessly offensive stories to gain some street cred. I wanted this to be good but it's just not. He seems less pretty to me now.

Drawn together

Rorschach Test inspired illustrations from a self published childrens book called Wild Animals by Rop van Mierlo. How delightful.

Super cool comics by Lisa Hanawalt who is regularly published in little known titles The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Vice, and Chronicle Books. 

And a dreamy animation about beautiful fonts

The Alphabet from n9ve on Vimeo.

Side project

Apologies for the lack of posts this week. I was momentarily distracted by an unusually large number of social engagements and this side project that Natalie and I are enjoying working on. Strictly in our lunch hour. Of course.

Michelle Obama Hugs - The Blog. Click to enjoy more.

Dizzy with excitement

Holden Caulfield kicks

Catcher in the Rye themed shoes!

Order them here 

Hearing voices

This week I read Your Voice in my Head by Emma Forrest. Let's be clear about something from the beginning, I'm convinced that the cover of this book is going to ensure that 90% less people pick it up than actually should. Oh Bloomsbury, it looks like your garden variety young adult fiction at best. After it arrived on my desk I quickly judged it as not appropriate for the magazine nor interesting to me. I had placed it deep in a stack headed for the office free table when an email from the publicist intervened with some glowing  reviews. 

See, in the UK people know who Emma Forrest is and, unlike the cover might suggest, she's really cool and enormously accomplished. She was first published in The London Evening Standard when she was 13 - an interview with Madonna no less. Shortly after that she got her own column called 'Generation X' in the Sunday Times where she interviewed various indie bands. This is her third book and she's been published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle, Harper's Bazaar and NME. These days she's also a well respected  screen writer and famously had a very tumultous and public relationship with Colin Farrell. (Oh, how you'll hate him by the end of reading this. In fact I'm typing with one hand right now so I can shake my fist at him with the other). 

As much success as she's had this isn't a memoir about the good times as, perhaps, the Getty-images-esque cover might suggest. It's about Emma's struggles with mental illness, her sadness at losing the one man she felt could "save her" and the relationships that moved her forwards and backwards. It's funny and fascinating and especially good if you can identify or are particularly familiar with the dysfunctional goings-on inside the minds of very creative people. On the downside, at times, it feels so self indulgent you may well consider partaking in the self harm and anti-depressants yourself. Look, it's an easy read and worth enduring the darkness if only to make you feel a little better about the state of your own mental health. Also, here's an alternative cover that you can get in the UK or buy online (not available in Australia). Yeh, that's more like it.

Apparently it will soon be made in to a movie. I wonder if Colin Farrell would be interested in  the role of Colin Farrell? He could do with the lesson in self awareness. 

Here's the lovely Emma chatting about meeting Patti Smith and the purpose of the book.

Play The Great Gatsby game

According to the Web site, a San Francisco developer found an old dusty Nintendo game cartridge at a garage sale, bought it for 50 cents and discovered a game never released in the U.S. Awesome.

Literary drunks

Ideally I like to keep the two activities "reading" and "drinking" quite separate because when I don't  I wake up in the morning and need to reread whatever ground I have covered (also, dependent on the amount of white wine consumed, it makes me dizzy and confused about the lines between reality and fiction. A separate issue.) Of course some people think they go together like miniature dogs and novelty costumes. Which is why, apparently, "literary bars" are now "totally hip" in LA. 

Hemmingways in Hollywood

The Wellesbourne in West Los Angeles

Hyperion Tavern in Silverlake

Library Bar in Downtown LA

 via Styleture

Where the magic happens

Writing Rooms! 

Susan Sontag

Roald Dahl (did everything from his arm chair)

Will Self (I'm looking at those Post It notes and I'm seeing OCD)

Woody Allen (looks like  a childs room)

via Flavorwire

Book club: The Complete Maus

It sucks when you choose a book people don't like for Book Club. And naturally it's the opposite when you do. Lauren, who chose Maus, has had an impeccable record so far so the stakes were high but she delivered. Maus was loved. Everyone should read this book. Probably today. If not then tomorrow is great too. 

Maus (the only graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize) is by New Yorker Art Spiegelman and it retells the story of his mother and father's struggle for survival during the second world war including the incredibly harrowing time they spent as prisoners of war in Auschwitz.

If you've heard of it before or just taken a glance at the cover above then what you probably know already is that the Jewish characters are portrayed as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Polish as pigs, the Americans as dogs and so on. Strangely enough it doesn't create the emotional distance you might suspect, the characters are very human and obviously the narrative is suspenseful and heart breaking. 

Maus is more than just a survival tale though, it explores the complicated relationship between Art and his father. Art was born post-war and recorded his fathers life story intermittently in the years before he died. The story of the second world war is punctuated by erratic, frustrating and often humorous interactions between father and son. It also explores issues around survivor guilt. Sidebar here: Check out this 

Book Club who wore masks for their meeting. Topical. And creepy.

Back at our Book Club inbetween tea and oat biscuits (I'd given up chocolate for the week in a failed social experiment to break a bad food habit) Amy mentioned that reading graphic novels takes some adjustment as you tend to power ahead with the story without taking enough time to enjoy the illustrations. 

I recommend some light training in the form of manga - not only will you need to remember to read these from back to front but you also need to retrain your eyes to move from left to right. It's Olympic-style preparation not unsimilar to what I'm sure Ian Thorpe is doing right now. My reccommended starting point is Nana comics which my friend Amy introduced me to while she was living in Japan. It's a series (addictive, just like a bad food habit) about a super straight and preppy girl called Nana who meets a super cool and radical girl, also named Nana, on the bullet train on the night they are both moving to Tokyo. They're complete opposites so of course they end up moving in together and being BFFs. One plays in a band, one works in a store and they both wear a lot of Vivienne Westwood. (I've read 12 so far and have two of the movies.)

Anyway this wasn't our first graphic novel, last year we did Persepolis. An amazing story

 by Marjane Satrapi about her childhood and early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. Little, uh, on the heavier side than the Nana comics but also, outstanding.

This is what my dreams look like.

John Hamm and Paul Rudd reading from Jon Glaser's new book 

My Dead Dad Was in ZZ Top: 100% Real,* Never-Before-Seen Documents from the World of Rock and Roll (*100% Fake) at it's launch in Brooklyn on Tuesday night.

Glaser is a former writer and performer for Late Night With Conan O'Brien.

Valentines Day cards for bookish types

Including John Keats and Lord Byron via  Presse Dufour

Book trend: Thank you notes

Out this month...

Out May 23...

Jimmy Fallon's  book of thank you notes based his regular segment. 

The topic of monetising gratefulness reminds me of these lovely thank you notes to authors from the Leah Dieterich's blog  thxthxthx (via Lee Tran via Flavourwire)

Book badges

Via Etsy