An ambitious project is calling on budding authors to submit their work, no matter their level of experience or subject

W hether you write for leisure, pleasure or necessity, “if you’ve got a book in you, we want to hear from you,” Tasmanian artist Margaret Woodward says. It’s not often that amateur and professional writers alike get such a direct and enthusiastic offer to write an original, book-length work in any genre.

It’s no false promise. The invitation, a collaboration with artist Justy Phillips, will be Salamanca Arts Centre’s major exhibition for next year. The artists’ goal is to publish 100 books by September. They have called the project the People’s Library, a name inspired by the scholarly involvement in the great ancient library of Alexandria and the notion of “digesting a work”.

Each chosen manuscript will be presented as a collective artwork, through live reading, performance, book groups, salon events and oration – as well as printed works. “We hope to bring the written work into living memory and language, within a living engaged space,” Woodward says.

Lyrical poems, crime novels and creative collaborations between children and their parents have already been submitted to the ambitious project. There is an April deadline for chosen manuscripts.

Woodward and Phillips hold doctorates in creative practice and have been life and creative partners for 10 years. Woodward says they decided to work on ideas together “because we were influencing each other’s work, anyway”. They have a passion for storytelling, how stories are committed to memory and then become folklore – themes explored most recently during a month-long residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada. So how does their creative relationship work? “It’s still fraught,” Phillips says. “But we edit each other’s work in a respectful and gentle way. We ditched Google docs because it was too harsh.”

The People’s Library is the third in a series of hybrid works coming under their creative partnership, A Published Event. Their last collaboration, The Fall of the Derwent, was long-listed for the Tasmania Book Prize.

“We are working in the context of contemporary art and writing as art practice, so to be recognised in the traditional literary genre was really encouraging,” Phillips says.

Both artists are contributing as peers to the Tasmanian arts community through board positions: Woodward at Creative Island, and Phillips at Contemporary Arts Tasmania.

Is their hard work paying off? “Well, I’ve just finished my shift at Fullers Bookshop,” Phillips says with a laugh. “You have to be flexible.” The People’s Library will run throughout September 2018 at the Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart. Expressions of interest are open until January 1, 2018. Submit your book proposal to www.thepeopleslibrary.net