In October we sailed out of the Mersey River in Devonport, accompanied by bagpipes on the final Bass Strait crossing of the Spirit of Tasmania II. Hundreds of people lined the river to farewell her. It felt like we were living a hundred years ago in a time when ocean travel took months, as the tug accompanied us to the river’s mouth and Devonport and then the coastline receded. This series of images will stay with me always but it was an image of Hinsby Beach in Taroona that has become the set image for this piece. The tree shaded beach, the intense blue of sky on a hot spring day and the calm of the River Derwent after wandering down the steep track made the effort worthwhile. The image also alludes to the cover of Places Minds Shine Bright Anthology, 2026. A different place, a different beach, brought to life by talented artist Mike Barr, who has once again generously provided Minds Shine Bright with cover art work. We look forward to revealing the new cover soon and to launching Places Anthology.
This November and December Minds Shine Bright is releasing three new anthology collections. On Saturday 28th October we are launching our first ever Places Young Writers and Illustrators (aged 15 and under) anthology at The Little Book Room in Brunswick East. If you are a young reader, writer or illustrator you can register to come along to the Places Young Writers and Illustrators Launch here. There will be readings from young writers, artworks on display from young illustrators, special guests Erini Loucaides (online) and editor Emily Harap (in person) and competition judge Amanda Scotney will provide some advice about entering writing and illustrating competitions.
In December we are holding the international online launch of Places Minds Shine Bright anthology and on Saturday 20 February we are holding the live Places Launch at St Kilda Sports Club. Get your tickets to attend the online International Places Launch here and the in person Places Melbourne Book Launch here.
In December we are releasing Too Pink, a collection of quirky and experimental, contemporary short stories written and translated into English by Romanian writer, Catalina Steriu. We first discovered Catalina’s writing in Confidence 2 (the second anthology in the Confidence series of anthologies that explores the theme of confidence in contemporary fiction and poetry) and we met her on her trip to Australia in 2024. There will a launch for Too Pink in early 2027.
2027 will be our year of connecting with more readers, booksellers and reviewers as we continue to work to improve our budget and finances. Our flagship Confidence writing competition Confidence 2028 will open in August 2027 and close on 31 March 2028. We will open the competition up to include illustrators of all ages following the success of our first young illustrators competition with Places. We will be seeking line drawings, and cover art as well as our writing categories of short stories, short scripts, poetry and short form fiction. We will provide more information about the Confidence writing competition soon.
Look forward to more interviews with writers and poets from our Places anthology over the next few months. You can watch our first Stories and poems interview from our last post with overall competition winner Erini Loucaides here. This month our poet in focus is Angela Costi.
Interview with Angela Costi, 28 May, 2026, Proud Mary, Collingwood
Angela Costi is a remarkable and talented Melbourne based poet who consistently participates in, supports and gives back to Melbourne’s vibrant poetry community. Her poetry collections include Honey&Salt, An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, and The Heart of the Advocate. She received the High Commendation for Contribution to Arts and Culture, Merri-bek Award 2021, Katharine Susannah Prichard Poetry Prize 2022 and the University of Canberra’s Health Poetry Prize 2024. She is known as Αγγελική Κωστή among the Cypriot Greek diaspora. In addition to introducing her poem ‘The Carwash was meant to be Fun’ as part of our ongoing series of interviews introducing readers to the writers and poets in our soon to be published Places anthology, I hope that this interview will inspire you to seek out more of her work.
What inspired you to write ‘The Carwash was meant to be Fun’?
I’ve been working on a poetry manuscript that unravels how we survive with inherited ancestral and physical pain. Thinking about the human experience of how we carry our parents’ trauma. A quote that came to mind was from the novelist, Elif Shafak, who wrote ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ where the Fig Tree on the island of Cyprus says: “So I guess it is in my genes, this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin.” Melancholia/depression made its way into my Cypriot father’s psyche.
So, with this in mind, the speaker of the poem is a child who witnesses her father reliving a trauma he experienced when he was a teenager. The poem exemplifies vicarious trauma. It juxtaposes an ordinary routine event – taking the family car to be washed – with a life-threatening experience on a ship. It’s composed in long lines with a granular narrative.
Reflecting on it now, I sense it alludes or nods to the ancient epic poem, ‘The Odyssey’ in that the themes of sea voyage, monstrous encounters, being strapped to the mast, and the relief of returning home to a resilient wife are all depicted. The ancient Greek word for return is ‘nostos’ and it feels it’s also a central theme of my poem. The father’s journey of ‘going away’ into his turbulent past, experiencing a deep distress and then, his return to ‘the dirty streets’ of home are all witnessed by the child.
Poetry can be a form of distilled and revelatory storytelling.
How do you write about place in your poems?
‘Place’ is about the concrete, that is, the suburb, the village, the city, the home, the occupied land… and it’s also the intangible places of feelings associated with hearth, threshold, pathway, laneway, valley, gorge… and it’s also the placement of letters that make words into lines and spaced into a form onto a blank white space.
Because place for me is a vast landscape and wordscape, it often anchors my poems and sometimes my entire collections. With my collection, An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, I was mapping actual places from beginning to end. The very first poem in the collection is titled, From Bondi to Kyrenia, and poems travelled back and forth from the Northern suburbs of Melbourne to New Delhi, from Nepal to Minnesota, then returning to the small, crucial garden one inhabits in contemplation and recovery post-COVID. Place became multiple characters in that collection.
Angela Costi’s poem ‘Medicinal’ was published in Light and Shadow, the second anthology in our Seasons series. It was written as a response to Mary Oliver’s poetry, in particular ‘The Summer Day’ and it captures the interplay of light and shadow in nature and in our psyche in response to childhood and ongoing trauma caused by domestic violence and sexual abuse. This is an important poem as it takes on a topic with dignity and grace that many writers shy away from or struggle with.
How important was place to ‘Medicinal’?
The poem is grounded in two separate places that join at the end of the poem. To accentuate these two separate places, the poem’s form is in two columns but there is a dialogue between the two.
The first place accommodates the experience, influence and transcendental faith in poetry, particularly that of The Summer Day by Mary Oliver. The poem acknowledges Oliver’s abusive childhood and how in the writing of her poem, she eternalised the miracle of surviving well. Her poetry became widely used in therapy and social work due to its way of elevating life. The final question in Oliver’s poem – Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life? – inspires the surreal and magical to become ordinary parts of life, and I wanted to show this in ‘Medicinal’.
The second place in ‘Medicinal’ is the family home of the speaker of the poem (the voice of ‘me’), sharing the early life and mid-life traumas, moving from grief counselling circles to walking among layers of greenery, and finally resting with a line that hugs both places: ‘for a shadow becomes shade’.
What was the significance of place in your recent poetry collection, the Heart of the Advocate?
The Heart of the Advocate unravels the meaning and experience of advocacy. Not just being a legal advocate, which I was for a little while, but also an informal and familial advocate for immigrant family and refugee kin. Poetry can also be a form of advocacy, and so the spaces inhabited in the collection are vast, including a ship bound for Australia, the various classrooms and exam halls where we are all tested, and the Supreme Court of Victoria.
The collection was launched at the Old Magistrates’ Court – a formidable, historic place, which is now managed by the National Trust. The launch in that colonial, patriarchal, ‘judgemental’ environment enabled a reclaiming or restoring of my presence in the space, and the presence of other women whether as advocates, as witnesses, as survivors, as victims… The collection certainly examines and interrogates law and justice, but it also salvages what is compassionate and true within the spaces of advocacy.
How did you find your path to becoming a poet?
Poetry found me; the form found me. I wanted to explore language and express my experience of the world through the musicality of language. And when I mean language, I mostly mean English, but I also threaded Greek and Cypriot dialect into many of my poems.
The first poem I wrote was in Greek and in English, unpacking tradition, custom and the tension between myself and my grandmother.
Growing up in a Cypriot household, music was part of the family experience: the folk and the blues, rebetika and popular, Cypriot and Greek, lyrics and dances. My father was in awe of music. He entertained audiences with his harmonica and his dance skills. He was always playing vinyl records. He bought so many records, including English and Australian bands. They were stacked like precarious columns in our living room. I think the constant listening, reading, singing, moving to this vast array of music and songs across time and countries influenced my path as a poet.
In 1993, I studied creative writing at the well-regarded Professional Writing and Editing Course, RMIT. I resigned from being a lawyer. I gravitated to poetry and playwrighting. I wrote nonfiction too. The course helped me to focus on the craft and the discipline. I was able to make a living from being commissioned by various organisations, including local governments and creative organisations, to write plays, stories and poetry with diverse communities. One of my highlight projects was being the writer-in-residence for three years at the former Kensington Public Housing Estate. For that project I wrote a large-scale play and a poetry and community book with the public tenants.
What advice do you have for new poets?
One of the great gifts a poet has is to love their own company as they need to spend lots of time alone with themselves. It has been likened to a monastic discipline in that it is characterised by isolation and a deep devotion to the word and to language. But another gift is to collaborate with like-minded souls, to take on board feedback in such a way that strengthens your writing and enhances its engagement with the wider world. And this is one of the main reasons why we are here – to support each other as we embark or continue to embark on this mainly solo journey of being a writer. It’s essential that a poet has at least one person that they can show their drafts to. Most writers/poets have shared their drafts with someone they trust who has given them feedback, and most importantly the confidence to continue despite the challenges. Rejections or declines are part of the process, just as acceptances are. Remember you are compelled to write, and you must continue.
Melbourne is a vibrant City of Literature and there are many wonderful poetry and literary events to attend. Last year I really enjoyed The Readings Poetry Gala, MC’d by poet Tim Loveday, (you can find one of his his poems in the bar my mum used to work in our Light and Shadow, Seasons 2 anthology). This year it’s happening again on Saturday 13th November at the Church of All Nations in Carlton and you find out more can get your Poetry Gala tickets here
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