It’s holiday time for me…As I pack up my bags in Parkes, New South Wales, I’m almost at the end of my stint in the southern hemisphere. Last week, Robert Virtue of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation profiled me and my work in a short report on radio and online.
I’ve got a couple of new projects in the pipeline, but for now I wish you all a happy Easter.
I’m back on the road. See you after the break!
Last year, Parkes Shire ran a series of one-day publishing workshops for local teens. Our local libraries, high school, and TAFE joined forces to offer teens a game-based look at the business of selling books. This write-up lets you see what we did and run your own version.
Why publishing workshops?
Publishing is changing fast in the 21st century and people aren’t always clued in on how writers get their words out to readers. We wanted local teens to think about the business side of publication. What are the challenges of acquiring books for sale? How do publishers market their choices to the public in an age of social media? We wanted our event to be locally devised but relevant to the global publishing industry.
What did we do?
This week, screenwriter and critic Martyn Pedler joined us in Parkes for activities based on his 2011 movie EXIT.
EXIT follows a group of people who have come to believe that reality is a maze, thousands of years old. Human beings have lived in the maze for so long that some have settled down, had families, forgotten the impulse to escape. But the fabled exit door is still out there, for those who remember.
The Parkes team have already made youth activities featuring zombies, time travel, and kaiju. We wanted to build on this and offer something a little more cerebral. The premise of Martyn’s movie offers the perfect springboard for a range of games and creative play.
Martyn spent Tuesday in the library at Parkes High School, where he spoke about his career to over 200 students across two 90-minute sessions. They heard him explain how EXIT began with his 2008 exhibition Melbourne and Other Myths.
Martyn had become bored with the city he’d lived in for many years and was trying to reignite his love for Melbourne by creating new urban legends. For example, Houdini had visited in 1910. He dived into one of the city’s rivers. What, Martyn asked, if some of his unique magic had spilled into the water and infected Melbourne for generations to come?
The Old City Treasury Museum transformed these fantasies into a three-month exhibition. Melbourne and Other Myths presented Martyn’s words alongside found objects. In the exhibition, the stories became secret histories. And one of these myths, about a cult who believe the city is a maze they must escape, inspired EXIT.
In our first EXIT activity, Parkes teens created their own myths for an exhibition of weird and wonderful objects. You can find the instructions for ‘Curating Modern Myths’ below.
Curating Modern Myths
You’ll need:
Instructions:
1. Form a group of 3-4.
2. Choose an object from the collection.
3. Have each person in your group tell a story about the object. It can be as weird or as magical or as gruesome as you wish…
4. Choose one story from your group or combine your stories to create a single myth.
5. Write the main ideas from your myth on paper.
6. Collect a file card. You’ll use this to label your object in the exhibition.
7. Write a description of your object and your urban myth on the card.
8. Nominate a curator of your object, who will stay with it and explain its story to others.
9. Other members of group collect a token and walk around the exhibition, talking to the other groups’ curators.
10. Give the token to the curator of your favourite exhibit.
11. Each group’s curator will record all the tokens for their exhibit on the scoreboard (we used a whiteboard).
12. The urban myth with the most votes will win a PRIZE!
Over the coming school year, Parkes students will continue to create activites based on EXIT. Staff and students will make and play games based on the themes of mapping, puzzles, escape, and a world beyond the everyday – and you’ll find those games outside of the classroom too, on the school campus and even on the streets of the town.
My personal favourite from Tuesday’s activity was the “Cold War atomic briefcase” whose dual locks had to be simultaneously released to prevent a detonation.
I think the students who came up with that need to watch Kiss Me Deadly before too long…
“Growing numbers of men and women believe that this city is a maze. They are leaving their jobs, their families, their entire lives behind. Every day, they walk the streets, opening doors. They are searching for a door they are convinced has been lost for thousands of years: the exit. What’s behind it? Something else. Something new. Using a strange system of maps, symbols and measurements, one believer — Alice — now thinks she has found it.”
Hot on the heels of the successful Central West Comics Fest last weekend, I’m pleased to announce that award-winning Melbournian writer Martyn Pedler will be visiting Parkes Shire on Tuesday 25th February for a one-day event kicking off a series of gaming and storytelling activities which interrogate the boundaries between fantasy and reality.
Martyn will work with students at Parkes High School, before appearing at a Q&A discussion and screening of his 2011 movie EXIT at Parkes Shire’s Coventry Room at 6.30pm.
For more details, contact Parkes Shire Library on 02 6861 2309 or at library@parkes.nsw.gov.au
Last week I gave a keynote at VALA in Melbourne. It’s a biennial conference for people who work in galleries, museums, and libraries. The text below builds on key ideas from my speech – you can see a full video at the VALA website.
The final preparations are being made for the first Central West Comics Fest this weekend, bringing together retailers, comics creators, and fans from across New South Wales to celebrate the art of graphic storytelling.
You can hear an interview with me and Parkes branch librarian Tracie Mauro on the ABC website by clicking on this link (mp3 audio). You can also read more about the festival on the ABC website.
If you live in the Central West and love comics, we look forward to seeing you on Saturday!
Last week, I was one of six keynote speakers at the biennial Australasian culture-and-technology conference, VALA.
My speech will be online later this week, and I’ll post a written version on this blog shortly, but in the meantime you can hear me being interviewed by Corin Haines in a special VALA Red Carpet edition of Library Chat.
Aaaand we’re……back from the long summer holidays in the sweltering Aussie heat! And straight into the whirlwind of adventure.
Saturday, February 15th 2014 is a historic date for comics fans of all ages from across the Central West region of New South Wales – marking the first comics festival for this part of rural Australia.
Australian comics creator Pat Grant, author of the acclaimed meditation on youth, migration, and coastal identity Blue, will be offering workshops to adults and older teens alongside Marcelo Baez, who has drawn for everyone from Marvel to Microsoft, National Geographic to GQ Magazine, and will be schooling us in the ways of comic-book storytelling. In addition, the lovely folk at Sydney’s Kings Comics are venturing out of the CBD to offer their wares to people from across the region – a chance to peruse and purchase the latest comics, merch, and memorabilia without making the epic voyage all the way to Sydney.
More information can be found on the Central West Comics Fest poster:
In related news, I was recently interviewed for Melbournian radio station Joy FM’s Sci-Fi and Squeam podcast, talking about pop culture, libraries, and, inevitably, zombies, with the smart and suave Emmet O’Cuana – you can find my segment on their podcast, from 26:50 on the Joy FM website.
There were also some kind words for Parkes Writers’ Group from 2013 Banjo Patterson Poetry Award winner Jim Cassidy (although I’m not sure how I feel about being compared to Andrew Flintoff!) – you can read them at the Parkes Champion Post website here and see the kind of strange, all-ages, continent-hopping, Barbra Streisand-themed activities we get up to at the group here.
Finally, next week sees my keynote speech to the biennial Australasian culture-and-technology conference VALA – expect Doctor Who references, current affairs, the history of librarianship, and musings on hipsterity alongside the usual celebration and championing of public libraries.
<vworp vworp!>
It has just been announced that I’ll be one of six keynote speakers at VALA 2014, the biennial technology conference for culture professionals in Australasia – you can see more about the event, which runs 3-7 February, on the VALA website.
My paper’s called ‘The Book of the World: Pushing Boundaries in Culture and Outreach”, and the organisers have assigned me to the conference’s publishing strand – so I expect they chose me on the basis of the recent debate about e-books, centralisation, and public libraries in Australia.
You can get a flavour of my views on technology and libraries in the latest edition of the American journal Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ). My guest column, “Less Like A Lesson, and More Like An Adventure”, was written earlier this year and describes the vision behind our original 2012 zombie roleplay in the Australian town of Tullamore. Thanks to the wonders of open access, you can read a proof copy of the article for free here. You can also find the finished piece online at the RUSQ site. (To see how the zombie game developed in 2013, check out this coverage from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
2013 has been an incredible – and incredibly busy – year for me, ranging from Foyles’ Future of the Book consultation in London to work at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila, via library burlesque in Auckland, live-action gaming in rural Australia, and interactive storytelling at the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. I’m looking forward to the coming year, but now’s a time for rest, remembrance, and celebration.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; see you in 2014,
Matt
I’ve been thinking a lot about heroes and villains lately – here in Parkes we just ran an event called Big Box Battle where teens made Godzilla-like monsters and kids built heroic cardboard robots to fight them; last month in Sydney I spoke at an event about monsters and villains in children’s literature; and, on a darker note, my Twitter stream just yielded Dean Trippe’s comic Something Terrible, courtesy of Dylan Horrocks. Trippe’s comic shows how fantasy heroes can be a beacon of hope and goodness in even the most terrible of real-life circumstances.
Given the huge part protagonists play in our own notions of what it means to do the right thing, I find myself exhausted by the long and seemingly unending trend for dour superheroes on our movie screens.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 