Tag: storytelling

Write Here: The Worst Song I Ever Loved

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In Library Journal this month, Henrietta Verma discusses writers’ groups and gives a shout-out to The Worst Song I Ever Loved, a writing project I ran for the Parkes Shire Library in New South Wales.

Library Journal calls me an “Australian librarian”; I’m neither of those things, but will let them off as the project was devised for a creative residency in public libraries Down Under.

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The Worst Song I Ever Loved was based on a university task created by Daniel Nester.

You can find out more about the project here at The Signal In Transition.

Brisbane Writers Festival

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Brisbane Writers Festival Logo

I’m appearing twice at the Brisbane Writers Festival this September.

The program is out today in papers across the city and you can see it online at the website of organisers UPLIT.

On Saturday 10th September from 4-5pm, I’ll be at Queensland Art Gallery speaking on “The Rules of Engagement“, a panel with Kate Pullinger and Caroline Keins exploring the changing ways that artists, institutions, and communities interact.

Then on Sunday 11th September, I’ll help a panel of scientists and science-fiction writers to explore science, imagination, and identity. Join Dr Maggie Hardy, Prof Tamara Davis, Ellen van Neerven, and Dr Maree Kimberley for “Science and Belonging“, which I’ll be moderating from 11.30am-12.30pm at The Parlour in the State Library of Queensland.

Find out more at the UPLIT / Brisbane Writers Festival website.

Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical: Move

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The people who made me came to England from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, and other places besides. My parents met in Spain, a country where I would work in my early twenties. From my first year of life, Germany and Spain were as important to our sense of family as the green fields of England.

I was born in London, that great world city, and I moved straight back there from the country when I turned eighteen. I was a student and a barista at the Soho YMCA. The people around me were from Finland, Austria, Colombia, Ireland, Brazil. I kept studying: my doctorate looked at refugees, exiles, and émigrés who came to Britain fleeing the Nazis, and from that I went on to work with asylum-seeking children.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to travel and work overseas.  I’ve been made welcome in communities thousands of miles from where I was born, found new family, found new friends; I hope I’ve done that, in turn, for people who have come to live and work alongside me.

It wasn’t so much a choice as a vocation. Everything in my life has involved crossing seas, crossing borders. So much of who I am is founded on a sense that our lives and identities are about routes more than origins; time more than territory. That freedom of movement is vital.

This week’s Marvellous, Electrical finds hope and horror and secret identities in an ordinary-looking Queensland cafe.

Marvellous, Electrical: Think of the Tender Things That We’ve Been Working On

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This week’s Marvellous, Electrical covers the opening night of Brisbane’s Cabaret Festival and an uncomfortable flashback to the winsome days of the early 1980s.

There’s also gender-flipped Spice Girls, paleobotanists, and a fumbled double-bass solo that grips like wet rope.

Check out Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical here.

Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical: Night of the Ibis

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This week’s Marvellous, Electrical explores the intersection of urban ecology and Brisbane burlesque.

Read ‘Night of the Ibis’ here.

Marvellous, Electrical: Everything’s Coming Up Kransky

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What links country Queensland, Barbarella, Judge Judy, and Agnes Bernelle, the World War 2 broadcaster who convinced a U-Boat captain to surrender with nothing more than her seductive voice?

The Kransky Sisters.

On this week’s Marvellous, Electrical, I interview Australia’s greatest contemporary cabaret act.

 

Where Do You Find Yourself? Space, Play, and Duty in the Australian Digital Library

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Are there still cultural backwaters in the digital age? Three months in to my year-long residency at the State Library of Queensland, I’ve written about Australian libraries, regional engagement, and digital literature for The Writing Platform.

I’m very interested in the vogue for locative literature, where texts are linked to physical spaces through digital or conventional media. But there are questions still to be asked: not just whether we add a virtual layer of story and literature to physical spaces, but who gets to create the content in that virtual layer.

Forest comic for Fun Palace

If writers are having a creative and critical conversation about the world, and in the locative age we are venturing outside of traditional venues, we still need to ask: who are “we” having those conversations with? And how could a simple online comic maker start expanding that circle of storytelling, literary production, and critical discussion?

You can read the full article, ‘Where Do You Find Yourself? Space, Play, and Duty in the Australian Digital Library’, at The Writing Platform.

Electrical updates

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There’s been some new entries on Marvellous, Electrical in recent weeks.

Here’s a few highlights:

You can sign up for weekly updates from Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical here.

Marvellous, Electrical: The Nation Coped

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Subscribe to Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical here.

This Friday, 25 March, would have been Bernard King’s 82nd birthday.

One of Australia’s first celebrity chefs and talent show judges, King was known and beloved for his sharp putdowns, his flamboyance, and his all-but-inedible recipes.

He was as iconic in his own way as Dame Edna or Crocodile Dundee, but he died in poverty in 2002. Today he’s all but forgotten. That erasure of one of Australia’s biggest gay celebrities highlights the tensions and troubles which still exist in a country on the verge of a referendum over same-sex marriage.

Find out more about Bernard King’s life – and the time he poached a fish in a soft drink – over at Marvellous, Electrical.

Read Marvellous, Electrical: The Nation Coped here.

We The Humanities: Interview with Ludi Price, City University London

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This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.

Today I’m joined by Ludi Price, who is a fanfiction writer, doctoral candidate at City University’s School of Library & Information Studies, and also works as a librarian in the Far Eastern Languages collection at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Ludi began by telling me about her doctoral thesis.

In a nutshell it’s about the information behaviour of fans on the internet. That means, how fans create, collect, organise, disseminate and share information on digital platforms. Of course, information can be instantiated in many different forms, from books to magazines to wikis to library catalogues – and much, much more. A lot of the information fans deal with are fanworks (what might be termed derivative, fan-created works, such as fanart and fanfiction), and, almost by their very nature, the circulation of these cultural artefacts is through, for and by informal channels. In an age of crowdsourcing and social tagging, this is something that is very interesting to me.

How did you come to choose fandom as a topic?

In short because I’m a fan myself! It’s been a huge part of my life since I was a child, when I used to write Malory Towers and Sailor Moon fanfiction, and draw Little Mermaid fanart. Read more →