17. On forms

July 30, 2017July 30, 2017unladylikepodcast Leave a comment

Between them, this episode’s guests have written award-winning opera, plays, poetry, young adult and children’s novels, essays, columns, and goodness knows how many grant applications and submissions to government.

So we asked them about writing across so many different forms and genres.

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Our guests

Jane Harrison is a descendant of the Muruwari people of NSW and an award-winning playwright. In 2002, her first play, Stolen, was the co-winner of the Kate Challis Award. It has since been performed across Australia as well as the UK, Hong Kong and Japan. Rainbow’s End toured to Japan and played in 33 venues throughout Australia, and won the Drover’s Award for Tour of the Year in 2011.

Jane’s essays include ‘My Journey Through Stolen’, the award-winning ‘Healing our communities, healing ourselves’, and ‘Indig-curious; who can play Aboriginal roles?’
Her young adult novel Becoming Kirrali Lewis was published by Magabala Books in 2015. Jane was director of last year’s Blak and Bright literary festival.

Apart from the many projects and forms she discusses in this episode, Jane is also working on a stage adaptation of her story from the anthology Writing Black, and turning a play (The Visitors) into a film.

Alison Croggon is a poet, critic, opera librettist, playwright and bestselling author. Her beloved Pellinor novels have sold half a million copies around the world. Her young adult novel Black Spring was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, while The River and the Book won the Wilderness Society’s environmental writing prize.

Her poetry collections include This is the Stone, Ash, The Blue Gate and Theatre. Her opera libretti include Mayakovsky, Flood, and The Riders, which won two Green Room awards. She is one of Australia’s leading theatre critics and a columnist for Overland journal. And she has just launched her new self-published collaborative project, Fleshers.

Her New and Selected Poems has just been published.

16. On teaching

May 28, 2017May 28, 2017unladylikepodcast 1 Comment

We talk to three writers who teach, and ask them about the ways we learn and teach writing – in community organisations, schools, colleges and universities – and the skills and knowledge writers need.

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Our guests

Penni Russon

Penni Russon writes literary fiction for children and teenagers, and her books include the award-winning Only Ever Always. She teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne, having studied Children’s Literature at Monash University and then Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. She has been blogging since 2006 and has recently been involved in a creative partnership with Storybird and a research project with Orygen Youth Mental Health and Headspace.

Alexis Drevikovsky

Alexis Drevikovsky is a writer and the General Manager of Writers Victoria – a major statewide writers’ centre which offers an extensive learning program. She has taught English to Mexican children, and her own writing has been published in The Age, Killings and Australian Love Stories. Alexis is currently working on a memoir.

Alison Ravenscroft

Dr Alison Ravenscroft was part of the legendary Australian feminist publishing cooperative, Sybylla Press. She now teaches in English at La Trobe University, and supervises a number of postgraduate students working on creative and critical projects. Her own fiction and academic writing has been widely published in journals and in edited collections, and her short story ‘Object Lessons’ won the Josephine Ulrich Literature Award. Her 2016 book The Postcolonial Eye considers the ways we read, see and understand race and desire.

This episode was recorded in a meeting room in a beautiful local library, where we were surrounded by young learners in homework club and older learners and readers in informal groups and classes. Perfect. If a little noisy.

Disclosure: Co-host Kelly Gardiner also teaches at La Trobe University and is a tutor at Writers Victoria.

Professor Helen C. White demonstrates how to dress for a creative writing class (University of Wisconsin, 1954)

Image sources:

University of Wisconsin Archives via Wikimedia Commons, pennirusson.com, Writers Victoria, La Trobe University

8. On festivals

August 17, 2016August 17, 2016unladylikepodcast 2 Comments

Who chooses the writers we see at writers festivals, and how do they decide? Do they create their programs with gender and diversity in mind?

We talk to the women behind the legendary Auckland and Melbourne Writers Festivals, the North Texas Teen Book Festival, and Australia’s new Feminist Writers Festival.

Listen here:

About our guests

In May each year, the Auckland Writers Festival stages over 120 public events, gathering together 160 of the best writers and thinkers from New Zealand and across the world, with over 22,000 festival goers and more than 5,000 young readers.

Director Anne O’Brien has been with the Festival since 2011. A trained journalist, Anne has worked on the legendary radio show ‘Nine To Noon with Kim Hill’ and with Women in Film and Television.

Rose Brock is a librarian and academic, and one of the founders of the hugely successful North Texas Teen Book Festival. It’s a free, one-day event featuring over 70 writers for young adult and middle grade readers talking with each other and 6,000 fans about books. It also includes a workshop day for teachers and librarians.

We spoke to Anne and Rose on site during their festivals (hence the audible excitement in the background!).

Auckland Writers Festival theme for 2016: Read the World

Then we brought committee members from the recently announced Feminist Writers Festival and the director of the Melbourne Writers Festival into the studio to talk with us about their processes and decision-making.

The Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) is an annual, two-week celebration for writers, readers and thinkers, held in August. It includes events for people of all ages and its Schools’ Program is Australia’s biggest literary festival for students. Last year over 56,000 people attended the festival – its biggest year ever, after thirty years of festivals.

Lisa Dempster is the Director of the Festival, and prior to that was with the Emerging Writers Festival, and worked as a writer, editor and small press publisher.

Joining us from the Feminist Writers Festival are Veronica Sullivan and Stephanie Convery.

Veronica is Prize Manager of the Stella Prize. She is a 2016 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow, and was one of Melbourne Writers Festival’s 30 Writers Under 30 in 2015.

Stephanie is the festival’s Sponsorship Manager, and is a writer and the deputy editor of Overland. She was recently appointed as the deputy culture editor at The Guardian.

Melbourne Writers Festival theme for 2016: Identity

One day soon on Unladylike

June 19, 2016June 26, 2016unladylikepodcast Leave a comment

We’ve been plotting.

Now we have a few live episodes, they ought to keep you occupied for a day or two.

We’ll release a new one each month – or more often if we get a bit excited.

Here’s what we have in mind for a few future episodes of Unladylike.

Image of recording studio

On translation
Ann Goldstein on the art and science of translation, and her work on the novels of Elena Ferrante.

On festivals
Do writers festivals create programs with gender and diversity in mind? We talk to women making decisions for festivals in the US, New Zealand and Australia.

On labels
Anita Heiss and Jessica Walton on perceptions, constraints, representation and freedoms.

On heroines
Malinda Lo and Rebecca Lim on creating kick-ass protagonists.

On process
Charlotte Wood and Paddy O’Reilly on dreaming, plotting (or not), drafting and redrafting.

On rebellion
Lee Kofman, Silvia Kwon and Maria Katsonis are possibly not such dutiful daughters.

That’s the plan for the next little while. We’ve already recorded some of these, but others are in the calendar-juggling phase. It might turn out differently. Certainly themes can change or emerge when we get into the studio and start talking.

But we want you to know how we’re thinking and what might lie ahead.

Coming up

June 17, 2016June 19, 2016unladylikepodcast Leave a comment

Very soon, on Unladylike podcast, you can hear our first few episodes.

And they are stonkers*, if we do say so ourselves.

#1 On story

Vivian Gornick and Sian Prior, both journalists and memoir writers, in conversation about memory, imagination and language.

#2 On friendship

Fiona Wood, Simmone Howell and Cath Crowley talk about portraying friendship in writing for young adults, and their own collaborations.

#3 On editing

Historian Clare Wright and editor Mandy Brett on the process of creating an award-winning bestseller.

#4 On romance

Tessa Dare on romance fiction as a feminist genre, and why readers are in love with love.

#5 On swearing

Novelist Toni Jordan and playwright Patricia Cornelius on the power of purple language.

And after that? You just wait.

* stonker

noun BRITISH informal plural noun: stonkers

something which is very large or impressive of its kind.

(Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press)