farewell

Our December issue of Halfway Down the Stairs is now out!

As usual, I get all giggly and proud of it and keep sneaking online to look at it.

If you like writing or reading or both, you should also sneak online and look at it. And if you like writing in particular, you should submit your work to us - we love to receive submissions. Check out our submissions page for information.

Some of my personal favourites this time around:

Salt Stain, by Zoe F. Gilbert

Hades Landing, by Rebecca Burns

Dominion, by Cristina Vega

Her Story, by Marjorie S. Thomsen

and 1941, by Kyle Hemmings

But really we wouldn't publish anything if it didn't come with a "Recommended" stamped across it. I hope you enjoy "Farewell" too!

halfway down the stairs: we all fall down

The September issue of Halfway Down the Stairs is now published! The theme is "We All Fall Down" - which, I believe, has been one of the most interesting themes for us in terms of the submissions we have received.

Of course you should devour the entire issue! ...

... but, if you only read one piece, it should be The Red Dress, by M. B. Wallace. I really loved this story. One of my all-time favourites from the 'zine. (This is speaking from the point of view of a fiction editor, of course!) Go read it now. It's short, it's beautiful.

But there is plenty more: we were also very pleased to receive submissions like Leah Browning's Punch, and Jeff Wood's Ketchup. And there is quite a small but glittering section of poetry, and one really nice nonfiction selection.

This time, my contribution was a book review of a novel by one of our previous authors.

we all fall down

Today is the last day for submissions for "We All Fall Down" - the theme for our September issue of Halfway Down the Stairs!

Submission instructions can be found here. I'd encourage you to submit, especially if you've got a poem or a nonfiction piece sitting unpublished. (We've accepted rather a lot of fantastic fiction so far, but would still love to be sent more, too!)

several things

1. I have joined Twitter! And so has Halfway Down the Stairs. You can follow me here. Please bear in mind that I don't really understand the system yet. And you can follow HDtS here!

2. I know for a fact that Natasha Solomons' new novel, The Novel in the Viola, is winging its way across the world to me - and I am very, very excited.

3. I am having a very very busy week. Firstly I have to, oh, finish my thesis or something like that. Secondly I have just started doing part-time administration work which is great and it distracts me away from other things. Thirdly I am helping to organise the entertainment for the church camp I am going on over the weekend.

4. In this entertainment, we are running a team game on Saturday night - a long line of activities for which each team can win points. The winning team will win an AMAZING prize (or maybe just a token one). I won't run through them all. But I am running one round of the game which is pretty flippin awesome. It is the interpretation of children's pictures. I have got hold of a bunch of pictures which do not have simple explanations. Some of them are crazy creative! Such as my nephew's - a dog army attacking dinosaurs. Each team must come up with an explanation of what is going on in the picture. Points will be awarded for most accurate, most creative, etc.

things that are good

I've been feeling a bit bad lately that I've been loading all this dark earthquake stuff on you guys. And now that I'm back in Christchurch I'm feeling a lot more ... normal. So here is my list of things that are good in the midst of all the crappiness.

1. Having a home. As the facebook page says, you know you're in Christchurch when you are lucky to have a roof over your head, even when you're a millionaire. Also, being home.

2. Recent newsflash - the 22 bodies they expected to find under the rubble of the Cathedral were simply not there! A nice change to the rising-bodycount-stories.

3. This is not Haiti. This is not Libya.

4. There are plenty of ways to help out. The Student Volunteer Army is one of the more famous ways. There's also the 'Farmy Army' which rolled into town with its farm equipment and, with the SVA, got rid of a few hundred thousand tons of silt. There is also the Christchurch Baking Army and Comfort for Christchurch, to whom I dropped off sixty muffins (see below) and a bunch of other things today. You can volunteer for the Red Cross, or at a shelter for displaced people, or you can just drive over to the affected areas and start door-knocking and handing out supplies on your own initiative.


5. In the middle of all of this, people have a sense of humour. See the photo below. Also see Rocky, an uninvited guest to a Redcliffs home.


6. All these things are coming to the surface so visibly in a really moving way: Love, community spirit, humility, friendship, unity, inclusiveness.

7. I have family and friends who are alive and well.

8. I think my eyes have perhaps been opened a little. I will not scoff light-heartedly at material possessions again. They are useful, and the people whose possessions have vanished in the blink of an eye are living hard lives right now. At the same time, I have to recognise how little we have that is permanent, and how unnecessary many things are that I wanted before.

9. I am learning to appreciate people I didn't really value before, or look at them in new ways. Businesses and commerce are important. Many of them have been very kind in the wake of the earthquake. Engineers, the natural enemy of the University of Canterbury arts student, are important and hard-working. Strong muscles are useful, as shown by the video below:



10. Because the cordon around the city is still in place, we are unable to return some DVDs we got out from a central video store. :) Much more time to watch period dramas (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Rebecca, and Sense and Sensibility) and classic movies (The Great Dictator, The Great Gatsby, and Love in the Afternoon)!

11. I know this is not particularly relevant to quaking, but there is a new issue of Halfway Down the Stairs out, and I really like it. That in itself makes me happier.

it isn't up and isn't down

Silence - the December issue of Halfway Down the Stairs - has arrived!

Check it out. There's some beautiful writing as always. Some really wonderful poetry, like Isi Unikowski's '5am' and Gail Wawrzyniak's 'Still Life Discussions' - and actually I'm going to stop there because I like so much of it this time around that it seems silly to basically list the whole poetry section. I also love the nonfiction piece 'Cold, Black, Leaves, Cloud, Lightning' by one of our editors, Carrie Bachler.

Something new that we did this time around is a kind of 'Staff Favourites' page, in which a few of us who have been around for a while picked out our absolute favourites from the five years in which Halfway Down the Stairs has been published. Check this out also. Money back guarantee if you don't like them!


'Halfway Down the Stairs', by A. A. Milne, was also one of my favourite childhood poems. You can read it here. I remember thinking it was one of the most profound things I'd ever read (although of course I did not know the word 'profound' at that stage in my life!).

beginnings and ends

This is a photo of a beginning of something:


It graces this quarter's issue of Halfway Down the Stairs - 'Beginnings and Ends' - which is a website that you should definitely visit, browse, read, etc. September's HDtS is full of fabulous poetry, fiction and nonfiction - I can say that with confidence because I've read it all!

Of the fiction, I love 'Ashes' by Jennifer Marie Brissett, which is as fine and restrained a portrait of an ending as I can imagine, and 'Knitter's Corner' by Suzanne Marie Hopcroft. I also think 'Roman, Explorer' by Peter Hajinian is hilariously funny.
Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick's nonfiction piece 'Sounds and Fury' is pretty amazing.
And of the poetry, I really enjoyed 'For Keeps' by Sarah Bartlett, 'Fall' by Janeen Rastall, and 'Pebble Round' by Kimberley Keith.

We also welcome two new poetry editors, Ashley Vemuri and Joseph Murphy, which is very very exciting. It's been a while since we had new blood.

Submissions are now open for our December issue, themed 'Silence'.

Edit: Oh, and I almost forgot! Follow us on facebook! If only to minister to our vanity at the number of 'likers' we have.

call for editors

Ta-dah!!!!

Come one, come all, to our latest issue of Halfway Down the Stairs, which is, as we all know, the best literary e-zine ever. This was our first attempt at doing an issue with only three months to prepare, and I think we chose to do this at a really good time, since we have another issue packed full of material, even though we were open for submissions over a much shorter period. Our next issue will be "Beginnings and Ends", in September 2010, and we welcome your submissions.

This issue was a sad one for us, because it was our senior poetry editor Francesca Leung's final issue. Francesca has been on the HDtS staff right from the start and we are all very good friends by now, so it's very, very sad to see her go.

Because of Francesca's departure we are now looking for two new poetry editors. If you like writing poetry or think you would be a good selector of poetry for the e-zine, check out the information included in my editor's note in this issue.

But back to this issue, "The Outsider": Of the fiction selections, I would recommend especially "Man of the World", by Barry Jay Kaplan, and "This Trio, Fatal and Valuable", by Teri Carter. I also really loved "Contract for a Slice of Uruguay", by Jack Frey, but it's the sort of story you will either love or hate.

I am not a poet, and distrust my own poetic inclinations, but I loved "Real Gods", by Jari Thymian, and "Origami", by Chloe N. Clark.