About the journal

Not Very Quiet is an online journal for women’s poetry from Australia and overseas. Our first issue was published in September 2017; the last in March 2021. We concluded the NVQ project with the publication of a print-on-paper anthology drawn from the eight online issues.

Why did we publish a new journal in 2017?

This is what we were thinking …

Our venture is a response to many things that we and other women poets have experienced over time – the number of rejections, the lack of journals to send to, the need for more readers and the need to share women’s work with a wider audience.

When we read Carol Jenkin’s article late last year in Australian Poetry Journal (6:1), ‘A response to A Gander @ Gender and Age: The Demographics of Contemporary Australian Poetry’, we were convinced by her careful research and analysis that there is still a gender bias operating in the poetry publishing world. This journal hopes to ‘do better and be better off for it …’ (p. 19).

Recent world events have provided the final impetus. In the words of Gloria Steinem: ‘Women must act’.

Not Very Quiet is our choice of action and our way of doing better. We will provide a space for women’s poetry that responds to a wide range of concerns, genres and approaches.

Our mission is first and foremost to publish poetry by women on topics and issues that matter.

We aim to encourage, respect, support and strengthen women’s writing by providing an online platform to reach as wide an audience of readers as possible.

When and how we published NVQ

Two issues per year – spring and autumn (southern hemisphere)

Theme

Each issue was themed – the theme presented as a quote by a woman author/poet. We provided a large a variety of quotes from a range of interests.

Submissions assessed through blind process

Submissions were be accepted anonymously via an online journal submissions management tool – it was vital to us that poems were chosen for the words on the page rather than the poet who wrote them. We did not publish previously published work.

Diversity

We celebrated the broad church that is women’s poetry. We did not publish rants or words for their own sake.

Guest editors

We invited five guest editors to extend the appeal and sensibility of the journal to a wide range of women poets and readers. The guest editors were able to shape the issue through their selection of themes, quotes and images.

Online publication

Online publication is great, but there were some limitations. The most important limitation for poetry is that we could not do the same level of fine-grained page layout that is possible in print-on-paper publications. This is especially true for unusual word spacing within a line.

The other issue that some poets found annoying is that the digital display wraps whenever the screen size is too small to accommodate a long line. Also, work featuring significant visual design was not appropriate for NVQ and, sadly, was sometimes withdrawn.

Copyright

All other text, graphics, design is copyright Not Very Quiet.

Republication
Please contact the editors at notveryquiet@protonmail.com if you would permission to republish.

Links
We would be very happy for anyone to link to any of pages on our website.

Who we are

Founding editors: Moya Pacey and Sandra Renew
Website and Production Manager: Tikka Wilson