Sporting about | Book Events

Great Sporting Moments Another Monday lunchtime culture fest in Wellington. This coming ‘Writers on Mondays’ session (26 September, sees VUP publisher Fergus Barrowman in conversation with Damien Wilkins. Fergus has published the cream of NZ literature and is a very nice chap to boot.

They will be discussing the forthcoming anthology compiled from seventeen years of Fergus’s literary magazine Sport. The excellent name of the new book is Great Sporting Moments.

Funny story here: the new press office manager at VUP is Craig Gamble. He sent out emails to request the anthology contributors to give their permission for the book to go ahead, but the name of the email, Great Sporting Moments, combined with sender Craig Gamble, caused recipients or their spam filters to instantly delete it.

However, upon googling Craig (not realising, duh, that most people and most spam filters will trash anything to do with gambling), I found a little-known B-movie named Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, (1965) with Vincent Price as Dr Goldfoot and Frankie Avalon as… Craig Gamble. It’s based on the wild principle of an invading army of scantily clad fembots who are going to take over the world. Where have we heard that before?

The real Craig Gamble says he’s ‘strangely proud’.

21 Sep 05 | Filed by Kathy | Add your comment (1 so far)

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Comment by maggie ~ September 26, 2005 5:18 PM

Reporting back on the lunch-time chat with Damien and Fergus about "Sport" in general. Firstly, how disappointing that the venue was not overflowing (I expected hordes of hopefuls all wanting to be published in Sport to be hanging out the doors) - anyway, instead it was a quiet and reverent affair with Damien in the chair. He is so understated and eloquent and ageless (?) - how old is he?, Fergus (who I used to think was scary) was very candid and caring. Which was a very cheering fact for all of us who get rejection letters from him. Damien read from an intro he has written to the new anthology and it seems "Sport" was born in the back of a car that Damien was driving and in which Elizabeth Knox and Fergus were passengers! And Fergus spoke of regret in choosing the name "Sport" because he feels it has perhaps miscast the mag...for me, I love the name and it is a perfect fit... everyone knows we Kiwis take our sport more seriously than our literature, so how better to grab the spotlight.

The room was full of "names" like Barrowman (twice) and Manhire, and De Montalk, and Nigel Cox was there - and here was me thinking he was new on the literary scene (Tarzan Presley) and it turns out he was at Unity egging Fergus and Damien along with their dream of a literary mag - way back in 1988!

So, I no longer hold a grudge that "Sport" will be "published when it is ready" now that I understand the love and hard work that goes into it.... I now know we are lucky to have the magazine and that it even gets published. God Bless'em all (Damien, Fergie and Nigel and Kate Camp who edited Sport 27 in which I have a story...yes, I had to add that).

Mind you... it did cross my mind,.. what a lot of blokes. But then, such nice blokes. And they do publish lots of women writers, so I can't speak of bias.

Well - gotta go - and you should have gone... it deserved a bigger turnout!