One Crowded Hour(s) … Fullers fills to capacity for last night’s launch
Bob Buchanan’s pic of Erin Hortle reading at the launch …
Tony Thorne
Jenny Forward
Jenny Forward’s pic of the Dead Maggies rockin’ it out …
What a marvellous idea …
What a marvellous collection …
And what an honour to be asked to contribute to launching it … it is simply … marvellous!
I am, quite frankly, a bit in awe of both this idea, its compilation, and its birthing … that wondrous moment when the wraps come off, and the sweet, sweet smell of newly-imprinted ink on paper wafts into your consciousness …
When I got my copy … fresh from the printers … it took me back to another life as a news editor. I was back in the little bar at the Hope and Anchor pub late on a Saturday night perusing the first edition of the Sunday Tasmanian; copy-boy earlier asked to present first editions to the little Hope bar where proper well-aled journos made changes for the second; sometimes third editions …
I digress … but smell is so very important to homo sapien; and nowhere is that more beautifully described than one short-story in Transportation Islands and Cities.
It’s 55, by Kate Ellis.:
Listen to this:
The 55 arrives and its doors wheeze open. It smells of wet plastic, teenage deodorant and deep fried chicken … ‘This. Is the. 55. To. Oxford Circus. The. Next Stop. Is. St. Thomas’s. Square.’ The seat breathes up and down as a man sits next to me. I feel the heat of his damp thigh close to mine and shuffle towards the window. A faint aroma of dust and paint sweeps up my nostrils. A glob of gum is pressed into the window frame, moisture clings to its hardened form.
As His Eminence Peter Conrad – Hobart-born Oxford Don and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature – says in his Foreword:
Kate Ellis in 55 has a connoisseur’s nose for the aromas bottled in an average London bus, along with the human oddities who exude them; she like others here, uses London as the setting for a story about loss and mourning, and as I read I began to notice a pattern in this.
The Tasmanian contributions are grounded in childhood, because the place itself compels you to see it with wide, wondering eyes. London is where you come of age and stumble into the confusions , distresses and grief of adult existence. Everything there is elegiac or even funereal, including the teeth of one of (another contributor) Woolf’s characters, which resemble tombstones.
Yet are the two extremes of island and city so very far apart? Tadhg Muller equates them when, gruffly terminating a story set in London, he says ‘And damn this city. Damn all islands.’ Despite that curse, the idea of insularity may be Tasmania’s gift to the world (which for the most part remains unaware of the benefaction). To be on an island or to feel like one is a natural condition writers, who inevitably feel detached. disconnected, but by way of compensation enjoy the unique occupancy of a personal universe.
Conrad details being gripped by childhood memory of Hobart after reading Transportation in early print-out form. As he says: “Transportation, I found, can happen thanks to words alone: just one is enough to whirl you away through space and time. That was the case with ‘Pigface’ … I was startled to find in Susie Greenhill’s ‘Unravelling’.”
Of course none of this would have been possible – no book, no wonderful foreword – without the organisational skills of Editors Sean Preston and Rachel Edwards.
I asked Rache to detail some of the highs and lows … and this is what she said:
• Meeting an excellent crew in London who were into collaborating about this idea.
• Never doubting that we would get there … except for every morning between 3.30-4am.
• Feeling blessed when Tony Thorne offered his ink drawings of people on the London Tube,
• $10,000 and a whole lot of love generated through the Crowdfunding.
• The website – www.transportationbook.com – which keeps on publishing good new shit
• Every single deadline blowout has been agony; there have been many! (most of us work full time too)
• Peter Conrad saying Yes to writing the foreword
• And now, I remind myself of the excellent, excellent stories inside and am tortured by the font size.
• The absolute pleasure of working with a wonderful, engaged, collaborative crew across the two places … and now, an Iranian editor on board for the next issue.
Wow … so this is just the First Edition. I think we should toast in Pagan Cider what is by any measure … a wondrous idea brought to beautiful fruition.
To Transportation Islands and Cities …
