Saturday 4 February 2023

The last half of 2022—what we did

Edinburgh, November 2022

7-ON
A quiet second half of 2022, but we have plans afoot for a new project. Stay tuned.

VERITY
Well, I worked away, as one does. The 2023 production of my adaptation of Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words was finally announced by both the State Theatre Company of South Australia at The Playhouse and the Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre at Sydney Opera House. It’s being staged from September 2023 (SA) to October/November 2023 (STC) and will be directed by Jessica Arthur. 
I’ve published several poems over the last six months. Six O’Clock, taken from the 7-ON playwrights’ project Long Shadows, was commended in the Thunderbolt Crime Writing (Poetry) Prize. In Which Miranda Returns to Her Island, taken from a suite of poems loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest was a finalist in the Neo-Perennial Press’s Heroine’s Festival and will be published in their anthology (out soon!); Hello and Farewell was published in the autumn edition of signalhouse edition 19; and Kangaroo Island 1819 was published in The Griffith Review #76.
 
That doesn’t look like much for six months’ hard yakka, does it? Welcome to the writing life. As I said, I worked away. I have three other projects on the boil but can’t talk about them yet!
 
 
HILARY
Much of the past 6 months was taken up with travelling. I counted up 13 different beds I’ve slept in since July!
 
I started with a visit to the US, the work part of the trip being with composer Greta Gertler Gold (and dramaturg Christie Evangelisto) on Picnic at Hanging Rock, which we’re adapting as a musical. We are thrilled to have attached US/Australian director Jo Bonney to the project.
 
On return to Sydney I dove into Marrickville Mermaid, a song cycle I’m writing with composer Luke Styles, presented as part of the Inner West’s EDGE Festival at the Annette Kellerman Pool. The team included director Sarah Carradine, producer Jane McDermott, accordionist Luke Sweeting, performer Christa Hughes, lights by Ian Reed, all held together by stage manager Ruth Horsfall. Two weeks later I went to the UK to do further work on it as part of the UK/Australia Season. Luke and I presented it at the Stapleford Granary Arts Centre with singer Jessica Walker and pianist Joe Atkins.
 
Home again, I have been writing at the State Library of NSW as a Visiting Scholar. I divided my time between working on a first draft of Picnic, a new play for the Ensemble called Summer of Harold, and rehearsing at the Ensemble for A Christmas Carol, which was directed by Damien Ryan and music by Phillip Johnston, with an all-star cast of legends.
 
In November, illustrator Antonia Pesenti and I welcomed into the world the special 10th anniversary edition of our picture book Alphabetical Sydney, and December started with a week’s writing retreat in Katoomba, thanks to the generosity of WestWords—the last bed of the year.
 
 
NED
Painting the Light continues to take me on all sorts of adventures. I have been travelling to country towns giving talks and chatting to people. Being a country boy, I love getting out to the bush (I think the modern term is ‘regions’). I have been to Dubbo, Coonabarabran (my birthplace), Gunnedah (where I was first sent as a teacher in 1973—that’s right 50 years ago), Orange, Yass, and Canberra (it is the ‘bush capital’).
Most of my audiences have been women and men over 50. I have discovered that the book is resonating strongly with a lot of this age group as it reminds them of their parents’ (or grandparents’) experiences. A lot of men have told me that their fathers never spoke of the war and were closed off. Women have recounted stories of their mothers who, like Nell in Painting the Light, were married to men they hardly knew, found themselves pregnant before they knew it and became virtual single mothers to one or more children. Then they had to deal with men who hardly spoke and almost never showed any emotion, except anger.
 
While this has been fascinating, what I have discovered on these road trips is that there are hundreds of older Australians out there who have stories to tell and poems to write. In Gunnedah, a woman mused that she loved writing poetry when she was younger. This admission came after I had talked about why I wrote my book. She seemed surprised when I suggested she should return to writing poetry. ’I just might,’ she said.
 
So, my talks have taken on another dimension. One part talking about my book. The other talking about their books, the books they have wondered about writing. Or poems. Or songs. One of my themes has been that everyone who creates art has the right to call themselves an artist. They don’t have to be famous or even any good. Create art and you’re an artist.
 
The other extremely liberating aspect to all this is the emergence of independent publishers, like mine, and the possibility of self-publishing. We playwrights need someone to do our plays. Writers can publish as they desire. One such case was in Yass where I was on a panel with four women writers. One had written an extremely personal autobiography. She had ten copies published and that was it. She only wanted a small number of people to read it. Of course, trying to compete with the big publishers is impossible. I have discovered that the book industry is more competitive than the NRL. I have found a few bookshops in Sydney and Melbourne who are incredibly supportive of local authors, like me. But, at the end of the day, it is a business. Just look at the promotion of Prince Harry’s Spare.
 
Gaining visibility (or even a review) is the big challenge. Social Media is good but only goes as far as your contacts. If you’re a celeb with thousands of followers, it might make a big difference. If you’re like me, you have to be wary of driving the few friends you have mad with posts about your book. You pray that they might post reviews or recommendations, but you can only ask so much. Fortunately, I love a challenge.
 
Towards the end of last year, I went to Kellyville to see a production of my play Alice Dreaming. A cast of 80! It was amazing. They were all having so much fun. Nothing could have given me more pleasure than to see 80 young people bringing Alice to life. Concurrent with this was seeing Sport for Jove run some workshops on Shakespeare that involved Year 8 students at the school I teach at. The workshop culminated in Shakespeare in 10 minutes. Each group doing a potted version with music, contemporary language, lots of ‘fight! fight! fight!’ The sheer joy on the faces of those kids made me think: Why don’t I do Alice with them? To cut a long story short, I am.

It will be Alice's fortieth production and I’m very excited about directing it with a large cast in the school hall. Should be so much fun.
 
 
VANESSA
Last six months has been a tad hazy for me. A sort of steamy fog. Part Covid, part menopause, part MS, part general depression and probably part human aging, I suspect. Not great, no. But fingers crossed, I’m moving through all that.
 
My play The One was on at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre mid-22 and how wonderful it was to see it fly. I loved everything about this (except when I caught Covid towards the end of rehearsal and had to watch from home on zoom—that sucked). Being postponed and moved around turned out to be a good thing for development, the script was able to breathe and grow. And I, the playwright, had time to consider for instance, among other collaborative influences, Nick Fry’s costumes, say, or Michael Tan’s composition. The system of creativity is thus fed by other creative systems. I was very aware of the way The One was enabled and supported by every creative artist involved. It is both humbling and joyful. It was particularly important for me because the play delved into some of my own lived experience as a young Eurasian woman. As a Filipino-Australian, this sense of having a foot in two worlds, almost a cultural confusion, a liminal identity; it’s something I am still grappling with, in both my creative writing and my research.
 
In 2022 my play Captain Dalisay was highly commended in the AWG Shane and Cathryn Brennan Award and so added to the prestigious Playwrights’ Pathways site, where some theatre company searching for a groovy family show about a Eurasian sister and brother (hmm sensing a pattern here) who set sail with their mysterious seafaring grandfather and a human sized tarsier (hijinks ensue) will be able to find it with ease! 
 
And finally, towards the end of last year I won the inaugural Stoddart Playwright Award, huzzah! for my  play Chipper, a story about grief, forgiveness, infidelity and palliative care. A comedy. (Naturally) 
 
In 2023, along with my writing partner Ross Mueller, we have set up Pelican Nation.  We have some funding for development of a television narrative comedy, Love Chaos Theory and we’re also beavering away on another called Troubled Youth.
 
Jeez, looking back at that it seems a fair bit after all. Bugger the fog, I guess it’s full steam ahead.
 
 
NOËLLE

That last six months of 2022 were a mix of prose, performance, travel and culinary research. 


My essay Still Life With Cheese was published in HEAT (Series 3, Number 5). In our digital world there’s something quite special about seeing your words in real-life ink on real-life paper. But you can also read the piece online  at Giramondo (HEAT) or here on Lit Hub.


More culinary themes with my Visiting Research Fellowship at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Research at the National Library of Scotland and the ANL in Canberra. And attending the 17th Australian and New Zealand Herb Conference in Melbourne.
 
I continued working on my new performance essay cum monologue. Did some research for it at the British Library and elsewhere. And, as often happens with me, during my days of archival truffling at the library I discovered materials—and an idea—for a new work …
 
Travelling internationally again was exhilarating. I hadn’t been in London for about three-and-a-half years. Lovely to catch up with friends IRL and interesting to note how much and how little had changed since my last visit.  
 
Bit of an aside—or maybe not?—this question caught my attention: Since when did we begin to think we were all storytellers? From the beginning of time, or the 1980s? That took me to Literary Activism ‘dedicated to ways of thinking about literature and the arts that are different from both the market and academia’ and its recent ‘Against Storytelling’ symposium and some deliciously provocative and dangerous thinking.


CATH

Recently I have been researching theories of dreams and I am sad to say some of these ideas are so without wonder and magic they have the distinct taint of Silicon Valley. There’s one particular hypothesis that got my goat—'dreams are simply “noise” as the events of the day are filed away and old memories are jettisoned.’ Sure, it could be absolutely correct but just please don’t call my mythic wonderland little more than the sound of a leaf blower on a Sunday morning.


Of course, why should there be only one theory catchall? There could well be many answers to why we dream. But I just love, like most people, the sensation of a very significant dream. Those dreams, of such intensity, they stay all of our lives in the liminal space of sleep and wakefulness calling when they need to be heard.


I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams as recently I was a visiting artist with Theatre Kantanka on the experiment Dream Shutter


Dream Shutter began at the height of the Covid pandemic a cadre of artists (Carlos Gomes, Katia Molino, Nitin Vengurlekar, Samuel James, My Le Thi, Nick Wishart, Yong Zhi) came together to reflect upon on our dreams. We kept dream diaries consisting of writing, drawing and image-making. Our aim was to grasp the quicksilver elusiveness of our dreams to gather insight into our penumbral realms. As we immersed ourselves into the imagery and symbols of each personal dream this collaborative act begged the question—are these manifestations still dreams or have they become something else?


For me it was a captivating collaboration as we gave our dreams and ideas to each other and to watch this work build without simply being the writer/architect with the locked in floor plan. I called the process the Dream Machine as Carlos and the actors, sound and image creators dived in. They delved into unnerving, hilarious, visually astonishing worlds and it made me think what a world we live in with this shadow life within all of us? I do hope Dream Shutter gets another iteration. It deserves it.


Finally, I’m very busy with two other projects. One a play commission which of course I can’t talk about. I also have a children’s book I’ve picked up again after a long time. This all means I haven’t had time to work on my art projects but I do seem to be able to grab a photographic moment or two of where I am when in the midst of writing…






 

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