Editing

23. On collaboration

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We talk to two women who make up a productive creative partnership: Mira Robertson, screenwriter, script editor, and now novelist; and Ana Kokkinos, film and television director and screenwriter. They have collaborated with each other, with other screenwriters, adapted novels and plays, and worked on their own projects. So we asked them about writing in collaboration, and in solitude.

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Our guests

Mira Robertson’s first novel, The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean, was published this year.

Mira Robertson

Mira Robertson.
Photo: Bonnie Elliott

Mira is an award-winning screenwriter who has also published short fiction. Her screen credits include Only the Brave (AFI Award for Best Script ) and Head On (AWGIE award for Best Adapted Script) – both co-written with Ana Kokkinos – and the documentary Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean. She has also worked as a script editor or consultant on many films including The Book of Revelation (again with Ana),  X,  and the documentaries Words from the City and Wilderness. 

Ana Kokkinos is an acclaimed film director and screenwriter. Her first feature, Only The Brave, Ana Kokkinosappeared at festivals around the world and one the Grand Prix at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Since then she has won numerous awards for her films including Head On (based on the novel Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas), The Book of Revelation, and Blessed, which won the Jury Prize for best script at the San Sebastián Film Festival. She has also directed episodes of some of Australia’s favourite television programs such as The Slap, The Secret Life Of Us, and the Time of Our Lives.

Poster for Blessed

Book cover, Emily Dean

18. On voices

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We talk to two spoken word performers, Lian Low and Eleanor Jackson, about writing for the page and for performance, and how they support other writers – especially through Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine, Peril.

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Our guestsEleanor Jackson

Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, arts producer and radio broadcaster. She is chair of the board of Peril Magazine and its former editor in chief, and is also a board member of the Stella Prize, Australia’s largest writing prize for women.

Her poetry is published in Overland Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, Going Down Swinging, Peril Magazine, Scum Magazine and the Cordite Poetry Review, FBI’s “All the Best“, RRR’s “Aural Text”, 3CR’s “Spoken Word”, ABC Radio National’s “Night Air” and the online poetry channel, “IndieFeed: Performance Poetry”.

Her radio play, Agent Ion, was featured as a part of Radiotonic for ABC Radio National, and her short fiction, The Transfer, appeared in Review of Australian Fiction.

In 2014-2015, she was Artist in Residence at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane.

Here’s Eleanor performing  ‘Shave and a Haircut’, one of the pieces she mentions in our conversation.

Lian Low is a writer, editor and spoken word artist.Lian Low

She is a former chair of the board, and editor-in-chief, of Peril.

Lian worked on the performance text for the sold-out Do you speak Chinese? which was part of the Dance Massive program, held at the Malthouse Theatre in 2015.  

Her work has been published in When Our Children Come Out: How to Support Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Young People, Growing Up Asian in Australia, ArtsHub, Kill Your Darlings, Chart Collective and various queer street press.

In 2013 and 2014 she was a festival artist at the Melaka Art and Performance Festival in Malaysia, one of the world’s largest site-specific art and performance festivals held on a UNESCO World Heritage site. 

Watch some of Lian’s community performance work as part of Melaka here.

In 2014, she was a selected playwright for Lotus: Asian Australian Playwriting Melbourne program and for the Kultour Artists Gathering in Melbourne.

PS: Accidental interview background music was provided by a nearby choir practice, loud enough to penetrate our soundproof studio. Think of it as community engagement.

3. On editing

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Historian Clare Wright and editor Mandy Brett talk us through the collaborative process of creating a book – in this case, the award-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka.

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About our guestsBook cover, Forgotten Rebels

Dr Clare Wright is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. Her first book was a best-seller, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans. 

In 2013, Clare released her second book, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, following years of research into women’s roles in one of the key moments in colonial Australian politics, the Eureka Stockade. It won the 2014 Stella Prize and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and just about every other award going. We Are the Rebels, a young adult version of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, was published in 2015.

Clare’s essays have have appeared in The Age, Crikey, The Guardian, The Conversation, and Meanjin as well as leading international scholarly journals. She researched, co-wrote and presented the acclaimed television documentaries, Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote and The War That Changed Us.

Clare is a Principal Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University.

 

Mandy Brett’s distinguished editing career began as an editor and publisher at IAD Books, an Book cover We are the Rebels
Aboriginal publishing house in Alice Springs, producing a wide range of titles in fiction, education, reference and dictionaries. She has worked as a freelance editor, as a production editor on a small magazine and, for a number of years, as a computer programmer at Penguin Books.

Mandy is now a senior editor with Text Publishing, where she has been since 2002, working on both fiction and non-fiction titles, including any number of bestselling books such as Toni Jordan’s novels and more recently Magda Szubanski’s memoir Reckoning. Her essays and speeches have appeared in Meanjin, Bookseller & Publisher, and Crikey.

She is a guest lecturer in fiction editing at RMIT.

 

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and We are the Rebels are published by Text.