i have a new article up on new matilda about racism in alice springs. i hope it stimulates some practical discussion.
walking and falling
june short story podcast: the air you need
Friday, June 4, 2010
the air you need is a weird story about a diver. it came from whidbey island in puget sound, where i was visiting family in 2008. it’s a small-town joy to read the crime reports in the local paper… one favourite was a report of a man who was arrested in the supermarket car park for standing there in full scuba gear. the South Whidbey Record didn’t offer an explanation, so i thought i would step in.
the diver sat around as an idea for a while and ended up attracting, with the special magnetic ability of stories, a lot of what i was reading and thinking about autistic kids and the parents of autistic kids. it’s not an explicit discussion of autism, but it’s in there. i hope you like it.
download the mp3 or play
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i am podcasting a new short story a month for six months. if you like, you can subscribe just to the podcast feed. if you want a print version, you can write in for a zine: send $5 or trade to PO box 3085, alice springs NT 0871.
thanks, new matilda
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tragedy strikes Australian independent media: New Matilda will cease to publish in a month. As the editorial states, the reasons are financial. Advertising has not risen to meet the losses from subscriptions.
The publication has gone from strength to strength in every other way, with readership doubling every year for the last three years. NM has consistently tackled the issues that are being overlooked, and rapidly become one of the few outlets for investigative journalism in a changing media climate.
I started writing for NM in its early days around 2005, and have always felt very loyal to the site. Not only because the editor, Marni Cordell, is a friend, but because the editorial vision, genuine support for media diversity and quality journalism, and humour have been such a wonderful staple in my media diet. I have also appreciated the fearlessness and willingness to take risks – with content, structure, and delivery. Plus they paid me. Which is important as hell.
As a writer, i have appreciated and certainly benefited from the opportunities to grow and develop offered by New Matilda. I have found writers there who I can trust to challenge me, make me think, or make me laugh. I have found a conversation there which i could not have found anywhere else.
There are now a few more kids on the block, with the drums and punches and whatnots. There is plenty of space for opinionated writing. I hope some of that space is staked out for a bit of depth too. Whatever the future of independent journalism, new matilda has made a definitive mark, taking a strong stance for independence, investigation, accountability, and diversity. In the online world, where so much is about our preferences making profits for others, it has been wonderful to be a part of a project which has survived on integrity and ingenuity.
Of course, NM published the horoscopes. Because we didn’t see this coming, i have already moved them off this site. I might find a new home for them come june 25th, or i might stop writing them. Ideas appreciated.
It has been a great 5 years for me with new matilda, and i don’t want this post to be an obituary – i want it to be a thankyou, and a call to arms. Let’s keep writing the difficult stories. Let’s take what works and learn from what doesn’t. I look forward to the next experiment.
(cross-posted at overland)
in precarious weather
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
this via bookninja has comforted me immensely, particularly the following points:
24 The writing life, like life in general, has a sacramental and a secretarial side. As years pass and duties accrue, the secretarial, clerical mode can grow like a lymphoma and start to squeeze life from the sacramental.
25 So learn to be irresponsible when necessary—without guilt. Let bills breed in unmarked drawers, let the inbox throng and fester. Lend yourself wholly to the momentum when inspiration insists; take care of marginal things in their own time.
Cultivating irresponsibility today… and applying for a credit card.
The money thing is metastasizing lately. Waiting to get paid, running down to my last twenty bucks, wondering how I’m going to make the rent – it is familiar territory. When I think about it it is actually a luxury that I haven’t been in this position for a few years. Freelancing is predictably insecure. I keep reminding myself I have traded security for being in charge of my own time, letting my curiosities off the leash, and being able to do my real work.
I was just in Darwin for Wordstorm, a fantastic festival which brings together a carefully curated collection of very passionate writers, with a host of Indigenous and Asian voices – not the tokenism you get at the bigger festivals but a real diversity of conversations – an honour to be one of the token whiteys for a change. the wet season was pressing on past its use-by date which was a bit exhausting, but i had a light event load this year and so got a lot of listening done and am injected once more with social purpose.
It was a good antidote to the post-partum depression I’ve been suffering after finishing the book which still doesn’t have an official name, aka Piece of Cake. It has been hard to stop writing. I hit the bottom of the well months ago and have been feeling wrung out, not uninspired exactly but hollowed and scraped, and then I kept working, hoping I would push through. I know that I have to give myself a break to explore and play and not think about a big project for a while, and so I am doing just that, but it has been much harder than I thought to stop working. To allow myself to stop.
i was whinging about all this in Darwin to the ever-motivated and generous Arnold Zable and he reminded me i have come a long way in a short space of time – it’s no surprise that i should be tired. i think what frustrates me is the feeling that i have ‘got’ nowhere. of course there is no literary utopia on the horizon. the only thing to be ambitious for is to write better.
i do tend to be hard on myself – i am bored if i am not trying to do six impossible things. But when writing gets caught up in producing work and getting somewhere, it loses some of its joy. I have run myself down, forgetting the nourishing stuff that doesn’t look like work but still is – the sitting still, reading, observing that sustains the mind and feeds curiosity. The giving and receiving that are at the core of stories, which really don’t fit neatly in the market at all. (I can’t help thinking that all the frantic scurrying around e-books is more a result of that poor fit than anything else.)
In order to get my energy back, i need to be more generous with it.
Hope to see some of you in Melbourne at the EWF – i’ll be talking books with Paddy O’Reilly at the zine fair sunday, as a fan – of hers, and of books in general.