Time Out did a feature covering the rise of storytelling, and called us “Sydney’s number one night for the unpublished and aspiring.” Read the whole piece, which also mentions our friends Late Night Library, Story Club and All The Best amongst others, below. Or the web version here.

The Sydney Morning Herald had a similar article on storytelling events in Spectrum on Saturday May 5th. None of us were quick enough to get a physical copy, so have a read here, if only for the entertaining censorship of Pip’s quotes, which makes her seem like some sailor down at the pub, telling it like it is.

In her more polite moments, Pip has also been guest writing for the Southerly Journal, covering Melbourne’s story nights and reading out loud in general.

So far we’ve got a selection of stories from January and March this year. Come May, we’ll have some moon-related fiction to add to the mix too.

What we CAN promise is that Rebecca Giggs, Luke Carman, Vanessa Berry, David Finig, Patrick Lenton, and Oliver Mol will read to you.

We can also promise you that there will be the usual opportunities to read your own one-page moon-related fiction.

Fully wet-suited and flippered, we will present to you:

1) Norwegian novelist JOHAN HARSTAD.

Johan’s first novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? has been described as “A modern saga of rocketships, ice floes, and dreams of the Caribbean.” It’s won awards, and has even been made into a TV series starring The Wire’s Chad Coleman. We’re incredibly lucky to be able to host Johan at PPR this March.

2) Boxer, baker and BMX-rider MONIQUE SCHAFTER.

Monique is a Walkley Award winning producer/reporter who co-hosted the ABC’s current affairs program Hungry Beast. Monique writes a weekly column for Australia’s highest circulating queer newspaper, Star Observer, and currently works with “grown ups” on 7.30.

3) Associate Artistic Director of the Tamarama Rock Surfers, playwright, performer and Australian acquisition from the United Kingdom, PHIL SPENCER.

Phil Spencer was responsible for curating the recent and very excellent Horse’s Mouth festival at the Old Fitz last year, for which he also baked a cake on stage, and stuffed his audience full of sugar. We’re not saying he’s going to do the same at PPR, we’re just saying that’s the type of person Phil is.

4) New Scientist reporter and soon-to-be researcher for ABC’s Catalyst, WENDY ZUKERMAN.

Apparently, Wendy will be reading a story about using decomposing pig carcasses to predict the time of death of a drowning.

We promise there will be no props or audience participation for Wendy’s story.

Also, don’t forget to bring your own one page stories. Think ice floes, whales, pirates, offshore processing of refugees, Atlantis, islands, underwater caves, krill, lonely polar bears, & etc.

If you would like to get your chops up recording live audio and producing it into web and radio-friendly sound files people would download, re-listen to, or crash their cars into telegraph poles over, then Penguin Plays Rough would like to talk to you.

Perhaps you are studying Media, or perhaps you have experience recording bands, or producing stories for radio already. Perhaps you don’t have any experience, and are very keen to get some. We’re interested in whoever sounds like they have the time to commit, the ability to develop their skills, and the eagerness to add their own ideas to PPR.

The position would involve:

• Attending each Penguin Plays Rough (which usually falls on the third Saturday of each month), and recording each of the stories into our Zoom recorder. Or yours, if you have a fancier one.
• Saving each file in the PPR dropbox and producing the best stories into radio-friendly/ podcast-able packages. Possibly three – five each month. If the audio is recorded well, all the files will need is a top and tail.

and possibly

• Uploading the audio onto our blog, with a small spiel.
• Liasing with the EPs from programmes such as FBi’s All the Best, and 2SER’s Final Draft in regards to airing the audio on radio.

depending on your time, and what you would like to get out of the role.

The position is currently unpaid, however the successful applicant will receive an even split of the door takings at the live events (usually around $50). Also, this year Penguin Plays Rough is committed to hitting the funding bodies up for some hard cash, so that we can pay everyone properly, and then maybe go to the Hebrides for a holiday. Just joking Australia Council. Lucy, put that travel brochure down.

If this sounds something you can commit to over 2012, please email Pip at penguinplaysrough@gmail.com, outlining your experience, what you can bring to the position, and what you would like to get out of it.

4 Lackey St, St Peters.

January’s PPR is all about going places, and getting lost. Or going places to get lost. It’s about road trips, back-route highways, ghost towns, or paths that connect people the long way round.

Featuring stories by:

HADLEY (from Mr Fibby) of Our Nation’s Capital. He performs stories in a band and runs a radio show and is currently busy piecing together the You Are Here festival due to explode all over Canberra in March. He will have to travel up a highway to get here. You can’t get much more Method than that.

ZOE NORTON LODGE of the Many Talents including NYWF Co-ordination, theatre making, editing, producing, and writing of hilarious and delightfully odd stories. Zoe can be found at Story Club, and published in Our Book, Going Down Swinging and Seizure Magazine.

FELICITY CASTAGNA, who can be found in Our Book, and whose collection of short fiction, Small Indiscretions, was published by Transit Lounge last year.

ROB WILSON of the Sonorous Voice. Rob usually writes poetry, and some of it can be found in the second Ampersand Magazine and on the Red Room Company’s website. But this time round we’ve bullied him into writing us a story.

SAM TWYFORD-MOORE who has also been published in Our Book, as well as in Meanjin, the LA Review of Books, the UTS Writers’ Anthology, and all over the twittersphere. He also runs a podcast called the Re-Readers with Rebecca Giggs and Fiona Wright.

In the meantime, YOU should get writing a one page story about highways, and WE will try to dream up some kind of highway-related novelty drink.

You may or may not hear a brief history of teleportation, what happens when geometry has its own country, find out about the superpowers of cockroaches, experience a projection of what might happen just before the Apocalypse, and learn why Pythagoras concealed irrational numbers from his minions.

Featuring:
New Scientist Magazine’s Wendy Zukerman
Seizure Editor in Chief Alice Grundy
Theatre Director Jimmy Dalton & sound design genius James Brown
the rather intelligent and quite amusing Adam Yardley

and the first ever public appearance of sci fi author Terence Bumbly.

As we have limited ourselves to a mere five programmed readers, we require YOU to write a one page short story about all the other parts of science we haven’t covered above, of which, we have been assured, there is much to say.

You will also be able to purchase blue drinks, the latest and most futuristic SEIZURE MAGAZINE and see a theremin up close in the metallic flesh.

When? Saturday November 19, at 8pm.

Where? At the PPR laboratory, otherwise known as 4 Lackey St St Peters.

Why? Because you have a thirst for knowledge. Because you are Carl Sagan, in short pants. Because the Universe is a big place, and there’s a lot to say about it.

We’re also doing another right thing by telling you that Grolsch are very generously stocking us with beer. This is because they know you are all todieforgorgeous and will look good in pictures holding their beer. Which is a compliment you should take. Also by telling you that the ladies who run the Schoolhouse Studios are hosting our party for no money, promissory notes or promises of firstborns. All these things are proof that Blanche was right when she said you can always depend on the kindness of strangers.

Here is a picture of Grolsch, so that you can see what the word looks like in a different colour and font:

Another stranger who is kind is Amy Espeseth. She’s stepped in at the last minute to cover for Emmett Stinson, whose wife’s about to have her first sprog. Amy’s written not one, but TWO stories for us, because Pip stuffed up and gave her the wrong story to read in the first place.

See you tomorrow, Melbourne. We might even feed you penguin biscuits. Penguin biscuits with little white jackets and EVERYTHING.

As it turns out, four months is also how long it takes for the How Fun Was the Sydney Book Launch stories to start boring the socks off flatmates/ lovers/ family members. And as Nick Sun warns us in “The End,” it is this kind of nostalgia that will bring this fucking country to its knees*. So then, what choice do we have but do the whole thing again, but in another city, so it’ll be like the First Time, every time, forever. Or at least until we run out of Australian cities. Or until pull our fingers out and make another book. Whichever comes first.

So: ding ding ding: ROUND TWO of the launch festivities is going to take place on a BASKETBALL COURT in a SCHOOL in ABBOTSFORD, MELBOURNE. Or, more specifically at 97 Nicholson St. There will be a band, which might sound like this, but which probably won’t be locked in until the last minute.

And now for the details which are locked in, and which we should have told you in the first paragraph of this post:

If y0u come to our launch at 8pm on Friday September 23 you will not only hear Luke Carman, Zoe Norton Lodge, Felicity Castagna, Sam Twyford-Moore, and Vanessa Berry read their stories from our book, but you will hear BRAND SPANKING NEW responses to those stories by Going Down Swinging’s Geoff Lemon, the Lifted Brow’s Ronnie Scott, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award winner Amy Espeseth, HEAT’s Fiona Wright, and Beat’s Amelia Schmidt.

There will be stupidly cheap beer generously provided by Grolsch.

There will be dancing.

There will be music.

But most importantly, it will give us something to talk about for another four months.

Oh, and it’s free.

* From “The End” by Nick Sun I mean Rick Doom:

Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any more different, famine struck. Not in the sense of an absence of food, but an absence of imagination. Humanity consumed more and created less, and, as a result of their under-developed creative lives, people developed a debilitating addiction to nostalgia and cliché. Everyone became mentally trapped in the romanticised past, whence they projected unrealistic visions of the future while decaying in the present.

“Remember that time when we were remembering that time?” was an oft-heard refrain. When the dying watched their lives flash before their eyes, all they’d see was themselves at various ages in various locations reminiscing about reminiscing about reminiscing about stuff that they’d once planned on having had happen to them.

This endless cycle of nostalgia increased in speed as nothing new was created and even more was over-recycled. Everyone’s temporal perception compressed and people began to over-emotionally reminisce about things that had just happened to them. “Remember breakfast three minutes ago? Such a wonderful bowl of porridge! Ah youth,” one five-year-old was heard to say, eyes wistfully wet with sentiment, wiping his rose-coloured glasses. What everyone didn’t know was that each time a nostalgic fantasy or cliché was repeated it gained momentum and its anti-anti-anti­matter mass increased. The tipping point was reached when The Karate Kid III was remade for the three-hundred-and-thirty-third time, this time with an aging Jessica Alba playing Mr Miyagi and the reanimated corpse of Heath Ledger, inexplicably in blackface (well, it was directed by the ghost of the ghost of the ghost of James Cameron), playing Ralph Macchio playing Genghis Khan playing Shirley Temple playing the Karate Kid. Upon its debut screening, a mesomorphic quantum squish hole was torn in the space-time warpflux capacitator and triple black anti-anti-anti matter spewed out of the cinema screen and invaded the world in the form of a vague existential malaise and constant dissatisfaction with everything in an environment of plenty.

People started to reminisce about things that were about to happen. It was more pattern recognition than psychic prophecy: the same things kept happening, so they weren’t difficult to predict. Temporal perspective broke down. No one could tell if they were living in the present, future or past, and time became one long, unbroken, disorienting moment that seemed to last forever but was over very quickly. And when it was over everyone would try and reminisce about it but the experience would be unsatisfying; similar to re-watching your favourite childhood movie as an adult and realising it was a tawdry, clichéd piece of shit.

Gleebooks on Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
Better Read Than Dead on King St, Newtown
Ariel Books on Oxford St, Paddington
Title Music and Film on Crown St, Surry Hills; Whilloughby Rd, Crows Nest; Gertrude St, Fitzroy; Sydney Rd, Brunswick, and High St, Northcote.
Modern Times on King St, Newtown
Cream on King St, Newtown
The Brunswick St Bookstore on (yep) Brunswick St, Fitzroy
Metropolis Bookshop on Swanston St, Melbourne
Polyester Records on Flinders Lane, Melbourne

And if you live no where near these places, you can buy your copy at our online store, here, and we will post it to you.

Our other exciting news is that our app is now available for download. If you search for PPR in the app store, you can not only carry the book around inside your iPhone or iPad, but you can hear the writer (or, in two cases, someone else) read the stories to you.

With the book, the app is free. Without it, it costs a mere $5. A bargain so low it’s a highway to receivership.