Every third Wednesday we meet. Every third Wednesday we attempt to hone our craft. Stretching beyond rhyme, metre and description to tanka, cento, haiku, and abecedarium while we sip frothy cappuccinos, or perhaps indulge in cake, we go on a journey. When the blending of our words seems like rubbish, we laugh. When they fall flat, we groan and move on. Every now and then, someone will read a poem and we all sit still, poised in silent surrender to the soaring of our spirits and we are grateful for the places that poetry takes us. "Most pleasing of all is the profusion of poetic styles and forms... Running through all this are familiar and consistent themes: the power of the wry observation, condensed into verse, to remind us of life's absurdities ... the inescapable nature of loss ... and landscapes transformed by poetic eyes ... Read these poems and enjoy the verbal worlds created for you by these five poets." David Musgrave, poet, writer, lecturer, publisher

You know us. We are your cousin Alice, who tells the story of Nanna's funeral; of how all the cars followed Uncle George in the wrong direction, while a priest stood by the grave, waiting to conduct the burial. We are your dad, who you visit on warm summer nights, and he talks about the old days; when he met mum; when he worked in the cane fields. We are the migrant family next door, who laugh till they cry, telling of how, when they arrived in the fifties, they went to the milk bar for a gelati. The owner just kept saying "Gilleti" and offering them razor blades. We are the Vietnamese mother who tells you one day how she came to Australia. She quietly talks of three weeks at sea in a small boat, crammed in with twenty others, knees to chest, cold, wet and hungry. We are anyone who has lived in Australia. Often, our stories will be your stories; but some will be strange, different; some will be funny and others will bring tears. We are the story tellers who started with memories that turned into stories. We wrote them down, and learned the frustration when the words wouldn't come; and experienced that magical moment when the words took over, and the story wrote itself. We became authors. Now here we are. These are our stories; our country's living history.