Poets' Corner with Jean McArthur and Linda Walker

We are delighted to welcome two established and much published Mount Gambier poets to our June Poets' Corner.

Linda Walker and Jean McArthur wrote a joint poetry collection, Weather Eyes, published by Ginninderra Press in January 2024, and have each published poetry collections before this shared book. Here is a snippet from a review of Weather Eyes: "Through highly-charged language and rich imagery Weather Eyes takes us on a journey to vivid album moments, of memories dark and light. Some scenes are blurry, others midday bright, or hazily surreal. Two masters of their craft distilling the intangible into words."

Linda is a writer, artist and independent curator living on Boandik Land in the southeast of South Australia. She has a PhD in literature. For almost forty years she wrote on Adelaide artists and artworks in visual art journals and catalogues. Her poetry, fiction and academic essays have been published in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK. She has a Jack Russell terrier and a small flower/vegetable garden.

Jean, the second of four children, was raised on a Limestone Coast sheep farm. She attended three primary schools, one high school, became a telephonist, a nurse, a class one clerk, a cook and has dabbled in art. Inclusion in a small surgical team took her to Guatemala three times and The Gambia in West Africa twice. Writing was a necessary communication tool in the 1940s and 50s – correspondence school, letters, lists and vague diaries. Jean only began jotting the word-rhythms in her head in the 1990s. She has works in three poetry books, five anthologies and with her sister, edited writings of their mother’s. She travelled through Australia, Asia, the Americas, the Pacific and now lives in a modern home with a wild garden at the foot of a dormant volcano.

This promises to be a highly entertaining session - don't miss it!