Lit-Mag #26

National Young Writers Festival 2002


Publishers‘ panel, National Young Writers Festival

This is a special issue featuring Steaming Hot Pepperinas prose writers from Newcastle’s 2002 National Young Writers Festival with introductions by Hop, Shane and Gerald. – Guest Editors Hop Dac and Shane Jesse Christmass, Melbourne


Geoff Parkes (n) See also Toowoomba; Fuct & Fiction; www.loggedoff.net (bio taken from This Is Not Art): “It took me some time to learn bong talk. My friends, including Doc, who I’ll talk about later, put up with me for a while.”

Briohny Doyle is a wannabe 80’s trash nightmare, or so she would like to think. She writes short stories for fun, book reviews for ‘voiceworks’, and novels that don’t get published: “Janet was waiting, alone at the Oil Spill. Piecing together the events of her afternoon. She had been going about her usual militant business and was just about to start internal solidarity time when she had fielded a very interesting phone call. It was an anonymous call.”

Hayden Payne is currently a post-grad student. He lives on the Darling Escarpment in Western Australia and studies creative fiction at UWA. He has worked for student and commercial newspapers in Western Australia and is currently writing his novel on the back of a growing collection of beer coasters. Creatively he is interested in disjunctive narratives. But of course all this is rubbish, we don’t evolve. We accumulate experience like compost. Gathering one moment after another until the pile of shit is so big that we can never get out from underneath it. We are left forever to fossick through these remains. Undigested meals. Lessons learnt and forgotten. Things loved excruciatingly for one burning moment and then discarded. His piece is titled: The urban bestiary.

Kami (Campbell McInnes) is a drunk poet, zinester since 1986 (noisenoisenoise, Sprak!, Splatter Videos, Funhouse), not-so-dumb white boy, jazz fan, old perv. (bio taken from This Is Not Art): The Dog-God and Me.

At the moment Sally Hardy, 26, is studying Professional Screenwriting at RMIT in Melbourne. In the past she has written for the children’s zine ‘Sticky Bun’, worked as a freelance copywriter and illustrator, and has written and produced her own plays in Adelaide, where she grew up. She’s currently writing an animation based on her short story, The Cull.

Lachlan Williams, a student from Wollongong, sat quietly in the Pepperinas audience every night and then presented this piece in the final open mic section: Autumn In New York.

Nicole Gill hunts plants for a crust. Likes wasabi green peas. Keeps aliens in jars. Dislikes green beans. Writes when no one else is looking (bio taken from This Is Not Art). She lives in Tasmania and her text is called: Stalking Bob.

Shane Jesse Christmass is a bloated short story writer. He’s another 6’8″ lanky twit with too many records and literary pretensions. He’s also a greasy music journalist of ill repute. He titles his short story: Two Days Out.

Hop Dac was born in Vietnam and came to Australia as a refugee child in 1980. His family settled in the town of Geraldton on the West Coast of Australia. He has completed a collection of poems called A Young Man’s Dream, nearly completed a collection titled The Drift, of Poems, Prose and Prints. He is also writing a novel set in Perth, called The Reconstructionists. All his creative output explores the space of the In-Between, the place where things touch and begin to merge, the linked chain of impetus. He holds an Honours degree in Fine Arts and currently he is working as an IT Consultant. He writes about Little Things.

Gerald Ganglbauer: Last but not least, and not relating to this issue’s Steaming Hot Pepperinas prose writers, my paper, presented at the National Young Writers Festival on the publisher’s panel.


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