My phone flies through the darkness and lands with a thud/ knocked there by an outstretched hand and my muffled laughter/ I muffle the story too/ a small, but necessary death// #tinytwitterpoem
IMAGE: Seeing Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhales at Bordertown in February 2022.
I haven’t done a reflection blog for the past couple of years. I mean to, and then January starts to unfold and I don’t quite get there and then it just seems silly to be writing one in February or March. But I’ve felt the lack of it. The space it gives me. Space to collect my thoughts, to gather together the loose threads of the year and do my best to make sense of where I’ve arrived and where I might be heading next.
These reflection blogs are too long and unwieldy really, more a space for me. It’s the process of writing them that is actually useful, and maybe I shouldn’t bother publishing them at all. But I remember the little glimmers of golden thread I find in reading the reflections of others. The ways it helps me to see others navigate the(ir) mess.
This year was big and hard. I knew going into it that it was going to be (the choices we’d made heading in meant that it was going to be challenging even without the extra things life always throws). Knowing it was going to be hard didn’t make it less hard. There was a lot to carry, and no buffer (time, money, emotional space) for things to go wrong (which they always do). I entered 2022 feeling like it was a year I was just going to have to get through.
The word I chose for 2022 was “cherish”. It was to remind myself to cherish the small moments, to hold my loved ones close, and to do my best to protect and care for myself within there too. It was a call to action for me to cherish (love, protect and care for) everything that is important to me. To keep what really matters in focus. I kept forgetting what word I’d actually chosen, but I managed to carry the intention close anyway.
I really did cherish the small moments. And in turn, I felt so very cherished. By my loved ones, and by my wider circle. I have felt so surrounded by love and care this year. It has been an incredible gift. A thread to hold me steady.
I’ve really needed that thread this year. My self-talk is possibility the worst it’s been since 2014 and I’ve struggled all year to maintain perspective about anything. I knew this year would be hard but I’ve still felt like I’ve been failing everyone (including myself).
IMAGE: My workspace, including laptop with a large sticker created by Anastasia Beasley. I’ve always been one of those people who collects stickers but never sticks them to anything because it feels too permanent. This is the first time I’ve stuck a sticker to a laptop. The sticker is an illustration of a female frog riding a motorbike, surrounded by the words “Suffer in silence or learn to roar”. IMAGE: I became an Awesome Black Box subscriber this year.
This year felt like three years in one, and I know I’m not alone in that feeling. So many of us are exhausted by the cumulative impact of the past couple of years. It’s been a lot.
IMAGE: A little snap of my daughter’s Appa plushie resting on the bed.
There was a lot of juggling in our lives this year and I found myself referring to things that had happened “last year or the year before” and having Nic and others correct me with “that was this year!”, so here’s a couple of little lists to remind myself of the key things I was actually doing in 2022.
My (external) paid work this year (ie. dayjobs):
Continued as a casual part of the Community Awareness Team at headspace Berri, supporting the hERO (youth reference) group and the new Community Awareness Officer. I was the Community Awareness Officer from September 2020, and handed over the reins to Jordii Enright to take up the role of Statewide Regional Manager for Writers SA in 2021.
Continued as the Statewide Regional Manager of the Writers SA No Limits program. My job title transitioned to Statewide Program Manager mid-year when I also took on the seasonal literary program, including in-person Adelaide events and online events for all ages & locations, alongside the final delivery of No Limits. I decided to finish up with Writers SA at the end of 2022, and my last work day was 16th December 2022. On November 25th 2022, No Limits was the recipient of the Arts South Australia Ruby Award for Outstanding Regional Event or Project, which was a pretty spectacular way to close the year.
Commenced part-time with Riverland Youth Theatre as the Digital & Community Artist (a new role supported by Variety SA), which will be my primary dayjob in 2023 for two days a week.
IMAGE: Installing Raining Poetry in the Regions in Naracoorte. One of the many No Limits outcomes we delivered.IMAGE: Detail from the Ruby Award for No Limits.
Independent/freelance projects this year:
Further development and refining of the script for Guthrak. Guthrak will premiere at the dreamBIG Festival in Adelaide in May 2023. Tickets for school shows are on sale now and general public sales will open early next year.
Part of Things. Although we did less visible work in some ways in 2022, I felt more proud than ever of the impact this initiative is having. Some of the visible work:
We hosted another SALA exhibition and a scratch night as part of Adelaide Fringe.
Provided a venue for Writers SA Riverland activity led by Kirste Vandergiessen, and the Barmera venue for Zacharie Steele’s weekly Delving Around Gamez group, and the birthplace of P.O.T. Luck by Jess Weidenhofer.
Wrote 3 x short sci-fi scripts for Illuminart’s Constellation project. My stories were featured on the Wallaroo Silo Light Show, Quorn Silo Light Show and Port Pirie City Park Projection. Constellation has been nominated for the Australian Street Art Awards (finalists will be announced in January 2023). One of my favourite parts of this project is that the story I wrote for the Quorn Silo was illustrated by the same artist who did my beautiful wrist tattoo back in 2017! This was entirely coincidental, as I wasn’t the producer of Constellation so had no hand in selecting any of the artists/team. I adore Danica’s interpretation of my story & characters, a real highlight of this year.
I was a member of the Minister for the Arts’ National Cultural Policy Expert Advisory Group. Our role is largely finished now, but we’ve been asked to provide comments on some final drafting. We are expecting the final policy to be launched in early 2023.
A participating artist in OSCA’s Rethinking Participation workshops.
The chapter I co-wrote with Claire Glenn and Dr Sarah Peters, was published this year in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Young People. Our chapter is called ‘Making space: a community-engaged youth theatre practice grounded in care’ and is a celebration and honouring of all the brave, creative, clever and complicated young people we have collaborated with individually and together.
IMAGE: Detail from Guthrak creative development in Slingsby’s Hall of Possibility.
My formal learning this year:
Completed the final unit for the Bachelor of Creative Writing I started in 2019. Some background on my very big feelings about this here. My graduation ceremony is in February 2023.
Completed a Certificate IV in Celebrancy, and became a registered marriage celebrant *just* in time to officiate my very dear friend Kimberlee’s wedding to her beautiful new wife Amanda. I got the final registration clearance a week out from the wedding (we had another celebrant complete paperwork ready to transfer to me) so it was tight! Kimberlee is also a celebrant and officiated the ceremony for my husband and I back in 2014, so this was a very special full-circle moment.
Started and completed a Graduate Certificate of Creative Business with University of Canberra and Compton School. I’d never heard of this program until it was mentioned to me by Kirsty Stark after a Zoom chat during my Regional Arts Fellowship last year (2021). The biggest value for me in this course was the rest of the cohort (including Kirsty, who is an absolute gem). All of the participants are at various stages of starting or running their own creative ventures. I was focused on exploring some structural ideas to underpin the creative vehicle in development from my fellowship. This is ongoing work for me.
IMAGE: Completing my last assignment for Cert IV in celebrancy with this fake wedding! IMAGE: Cute plushies created by Ruby Altschwager in the foreground, with illustrations by Sam Wannan in the background, both presented as part of our 2022 SALA exhibition as an outcome from my 2021 Regional Arts Fellowship.
Other things:
I did a great job of avoiding COVID all through 2020 and 2021, but it finally caught me in June this year and really knocked me around. I still don’t feel 100% in terms of my fitness since having it (I get puffed and tired much more easily).
In April we sold our first home, after it was trashed by our tenants, they owed us many (many) thousands of dollars in unpaid rent and I had to report them multiple times to the child abuse report line. There is a really long story attached to this that I’m not going to go into here, but everything about all of this was hard and horrible. I cried a lot. I am incredibly grateful to my brothers who loaned us money to help ease the strain of this situation over the past 18months.
I put my hand up as a candidate for the City of Mount Gambier in this year’s local government elections. I wasn’t elected (and never expected to be) but created some wonderful connections and conversations in this new community I’m now part of for the foreseeable future.
Oh yeah, and my husband and I, and our 8yo daughter, moved nearly 5 hours away from the Riverland to Mount Gambier. Nic came down in January, with my daughter and I still based in the Riverland and going back and forth between the two communities for the first six months. We joined Nic full-time from end of July. My grown-up son decided to stay in the Riverland (in our house in Glossop) because his life and support networks are all in the Riverland. All of this has been challenging energy wise and financially. It’s a big thing to move away from the place you love (and many of the people you love most), to a new and unfamiliar place. I have a lot of complicated feelings about this still.
There was so much driving this year. I spent a lot of time in my car, solo or with my daughter sleeping in the backseat. This gave me a lot of thinking time.
IMAGE: One of the fifty-gazzillion side of the road photos I took this year.
My word for 2023
connect
verb
connected; connecting; connects
to become joined
to transfer as a step in traveling to a final destination
to hit the intended target
associate or relate (something) in some respect
to have, or establish, a rapport
to join or fasten something together
What this word means to me for 2023:
connect to (this new) place
connect to self
connect ideas
connect others
connect with others
connect values to actions
connect skills, interests and curiosities
connect opportunities with resources
connect the dots
IMAGE: A mid-year selfie.
*
A small selection of significant things/places/people that inspired me, shaped me, moved me, or made me in 2022:
Sunflowers growing on the side of the dirt-road leading to our house in Glossop.
The Riverland Youth Theatre hall, and all of the creative and off-topic conversations I had there this year (after some years of not feeling welcome there).
P.O.T. Luck and the joy of watching Jess Weidenhofer host & perform. I wrote this little poem at the P.O.T. Luck held directly after Riverland Pride March capturing a little of what it’s meant to me.
Packing up my beloved home in Glossop and moving to Mount Gambier.
Watching the river slowly rise and rise (and rise) over the closing weeks of 2022.
The many dedicated, hard-working people in my circles who put their hands up to run for local council in South Australia this year. Special shout out to the always excellent Ella Winnall (who always inspires me) for being elected as the Mayor of Berri Barmera Council.
Seeing Bianca Feher perform live on the stage of the Chaffey Theatre. Bianca went to primary school with my eldest child and I first met her when she was in reception. It was a joy to see her skill and stage presence as a young adult musician.
Kate Larsen and her work & advocacy on arts governance.
Travis Akbar, Nelya Valamanesh and Katrina Irawati Graham, and their individual work. I met Trav, Nelya and Katrina as a fellow participant in AFTRS Talent Camp programs (2019 & 2021) and I’ve felt so much vicarious joy watching their projects and other work this year.
IMAGE: Detail from In the Margins, another No Limits outcome. This detail is from an annotated copy of Sharon Kernot‘s stunning verse novel The Art of Taxidermy, which features locations in the Riverland. IMAGE: Zines created by Stuart Watkinson, and shared at the Portal Fantasy Workshop Weekend (another No Limits outcome).IMAGE: a selfie I took after being swooped by a magpie in our front yard in Glossop, while no-one else was home. This was about 15minutes afterwards when I’d managed to get inside and was still loosing my shit (crying uncontrollably and shaking). I took the photo to send to my husband as we were texting about it to help calm me down. I have a bird phobia, which impacts my life in a lot of ways, but especially during spring (swooping season). This was the first time I’d ever been swooped in our yard and it happened twice within the space of an hour while I was trying to pack the car (as part of the move to Mount Gambier!).
*
This ocean of stars/ tethering me to memory and joy and the sharp grief of both/ gravel driveways and lead pencils undo me/ they carve the edges of this year into my throat/ I swallow it down/ all the things I might say/ when you ask/ are you okay?// #tinytwitterpoem
Written during a Slam Poetry workshop facilitated by Chris Best on Saturday 29th October 2022.
The final draft:
There is water.
Don’t use the f-word.
We are still open for business. But everyone checking. Screens on the counter. Screens in our hands. Screens next to the bed.
The chatter of our community Facebook group swells with the sound of water: seeping, roaring, dreaming, screaming.
I’m at a wedding. I’m at a BBQ. I’m at a 3year old birthday party. I’m at the shops. I’m at school. I’m at work. I’m at home in my bed.
The water keeps rising. Quietly yet.
I didn’t buy a four-wheel-drive ten years ago. I bought a Kia Grand Carnival to carry us home. 92milimetres of rain. Too much. Too quick. Tyres sinking. Skin flecked with fear. One bar to call for help. Make it count.
The water keeps rising.
The water is salt. The water is skin. The water is me trying to let the light in.
Water under the door. Filling the hallway. Filling the floor. Don’t say the f-word. Screaming through the current. The little tells and stains of a life. Insurance never covers what was lost. Community cracks open. Looking for the helpers. Looking for the how.
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The first draft:
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water is salt. The water is skin. The water is me trying to let the light in.
The water keeps rising.
Flood warnings trickle through. Don’t use the f-word. High river levels. We are still open for business. But everyone checking. Screens in our hands. Screens on the counter. Screens next to the bed. Screens back to then and back to here, and now we’re all checking. What were those levels? What were those warning? When is this meeting?
The chatter of a community facebook group fills with the sound of water: rushing, seeping, creeping, roaring, dreaming, screaming.
I’m at a wedding. Wearing a rainbow with an unbroken smile as the sky breaks overhead. I’m at a BBQ. Wearing jeans and the smell of dread. I’m at a 3yo birthday party. I’m at school. I’m at work. I’m at home in my bed.
The water keeps rising. Quietly yet.
I didn’t buy a 4WD ten years ago. I bought a Kia Grand Carnival to carry them all home. But now I’m trapped in the mud and the muck trying to get out after 92mm of rain. Too much. Too quick. The tyres sinking. Our skin flecked with fear. One bar to call for help. Make it count.
The water keeps rising.
Thick potholes in the overtaking lane. No-one stays left (anymore). Trucks at 40 and we’re all banked up waiting, just waiting. To get through. To get home. To get out.
The water keeps rising.
Fairytale edges of a wide-flat land. Seeping into the lines on my palms and the softness of a jawline I hide behind.
(nothing is worth anything. everything is worth everything)
The gutter is growing green grass and mud. Water pooling under the door and filling the driveway with brown. Flood water is always brown. Don’t say the f-word. Streaks of mud and broken things. Things ripped from where they should be and forced down-river. Through the current. Dragged screaming through the current. The little tells and stains of a life. Insurance never covers what was lost. Community cracks open. Looking for the helpers. Looking for the how.
The water keeps rising.
Slippery fish I try to catch with my hands. No fishing line. No worms. No calm weather. Just rain pelting into my face and wind tearing my mouth open into a snarl. Because sometimes rage is all that is left. Sometimes we are just moments that have nowhere to go.
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water keeps rising
The water is salt. The water is skin. The water is me trying to let the light in.
1. Are you submitting this submission (select all that apply):
X as an artist
X as an individual
About me:
I am a proud parent, daughter of regional Australia, writer, performance maker, creative producer and community organiser. I make performances, installations, experiences, presentations, poetry, essays, digital exchanges, and small moments of connection in public places. Once upon a time I was a disconnected and very angry high-school dropout & teenage parent who thought the arts was a waste of time and money: https://griffithreview.com/articles/not-for-me/
My work is grounded in Community Arts and Cultural Development (CACD) practice, and I am dedicated to nurturing opportunities for regional communities and emerging artists to connect, create and experiment. Because my work is with community and often with young people, it is most often thrown into the boxes labelled “engagement” or “audiences”, as though these words are somehow big enough to contain the raw and raging capacity of the arts to imagine and build new futures.
I work in the regions where arts infrastructure is patchy or non-existent, where reputation and the relationships we build are everything and where city companies frequently parachute in to bring us what they think we need, with no consideration for our own artistic voices, courage, needs, or vision. Where sport is often king and where public transport is so lacking that I bought a KIA Grand Carnival in 2010 to make sure I always had spare seats to transport artists, young people, and community safely home.
I am the mother of two children, an 8year old and a 19year old. They are my collaborators and co-conspirators and future cultural and community leaders. They, along with all the young people I collaborate with every year, shape the futures I want to build.
Regional Australia is my home, my heart, my art, my future. Young people teach me more than I ever teach them. My community(ies) deserves the best of me, and the best of a National Cultural Policy of vision and commitment.
2. What challenges and opportunities do you see in the pillar or pillars most relevant to you? Feel free to respond to any or all pillars:
First Nations: Too many First Nations artists are being asked to be all things to all people without proper and fair remuneration. The unpaid labour contributed by First Nations artists, often while simultaneously navigating hostile and unsafe institutions, has to be a consideration in any future planning. We need to demand more from any organisations with ongoing funding. Watered down quotas are not enough. Tokenistic Reconciliation Plans are not enough. We need paid leadership roles and paid and long-term collaborations that prioritise First Nations expertise.
A Place for Every Story: A place for every story must include children *and* young people as artists and creators, not merely audiences (or content for adult artists to exploit). Children and young people also need to be recognised as distinct from one another in their creative needs and expectations, rather than being constantly lumped together as a single category. This conversation also cannot be separate from the challenges faced by our education systems. In regional contexts in South Australia, senior drama, music, and art classes are largely disappearing, this will shape the future stories we might not get to tell. Advocacy for arts education at every level is critical. Alongside this, a robust youth arts framework that is enabled by dedicated (quarantined) youth arts funding is necessary for the future of artists like me, who thought the arts was a waste of time and money until I accidentally stumbled into a youth arts project for teen mums.
Centrality of the Artist: Art is work and artists are workers. Our work should be valued with fair pay and working conditions, including sick pay, holiday pay and super and I echo the sentiments of Theatre Network of Australia’s National Cultural Policy Submission in this area. Greater security and support for freelance/independent artists who are taking (most of) the risks in our ecosystem.
Strong Institutions: Have succession plans that pro-actively build courage, creative risk-taking and imagine new futures (not just replicate the status-quo). Cycles of death and rebirth are normal, but the decimation of so many organisations, without the support structures to nurture new ones (including funding streams appropriate to this) weakens all of us.
Reaching the Audience: Invest in a Young People and Culture Framework, this should be a central theme of any National Cultural Policy (and deserves its own pillar). Even for companies who do not create work for children and young people, without an arts engaged next generation, we risk not developing artists or audiences for the future.
3. Please tell us how each of the 5 pillars are important to you and your practice and why. Feel free to respond to any or all that are applicable to you:
First Nations: We all live and work on unceded land. How can we all pay the rent and consider our interconnected impacts together?
A Place for Every Story: Regional artists face a cocktail of additional barriers to accessing funding, capacity building, networks, mentors, training and opportunities. Our needs are different and the responses to our needs also need to be different. I want to see more regional work produced in, by, from regional Australia (we are not just your audience).
Centrality of the Artist: Basic income scheme for artists and arts workers. Incentives for arts and non-arts organisations to have artists on the payroll working as artists. Art prizes, fellowships, grants etc to be tax exempt. Australia Council funds restored back to 2013 levels as a baseline and adjusted for inflation at a minimum. These actions will provide opportunities for me as an artist, and a future for the young artists I work with and nurture.
Strong Institutions: Reimagining formal structures (in particular incorporated associations and companies limited by guarantee with volunteer boards) to better enable flexibility and artistic leadership. I want to see more regional organisations based in regional locations with their leadership teams living and working from the regions (in the same way I want to see First Nations organisations led by First Nations people).
Reaching the Audience: The projects I have seen which have the biggest impacts were not always the ones with the largest audiences. How can our funding models/frameworks shift away from a “bums on seats” mentality/pressure to recognise a broader understanding of impact and audience development (especially in regional communities where the number of people we can reach is already smaller). Arts + health + work + life + community + regions + education = it’s all connected, and we need to think and operate in interconnected ways.
4. Are there any other things that you would like to see in a National Cultural Policy?
As a regional artist, the consideration of digital access is critical to me. This means education and building digital literacy, improved infrastructure, incentives for city-based organisations to collaborate with and embed regional artists as staff and collaborators.
The consideration of climate change, and the real effects this will have on how we live and work and make art over the coming decade.
Artist in residence models embedded into non-arts organisations, in particular local councils and schools.
DID I SAY A ROBUST AND RESOURCED YOUTH ARTS FRAMEWORK? I just want to be really, really clear this belongs everywhere, under every pillar, threaded into how we imagine and build the future. What is our 200year vision?
5. How would you like us to attribute your words?
I give permission for this submission to be published and attributed to me, Alysha Herrmann.
Heartburst on repeat and sugar in my mouth. We keep planting trees and trying to give the sky back to ourselves, and to each other. These lines on a map we’ve tried to tame. These ideas we’ve turned into borders (borders closed/borders open/borders closed/borders open/borders broken).
We are nine million doses of courage
We are needles of hope
Spinning
Spinning
Spun.
This year was made of time
The slow kind of time we tried to hoard
The fast kind of time that left no room to mourn
This year
This year
This year
I leave behind.
Today I will be dreaming,
And asking, always asking—
My small bestie checks the weather. My lover and I read the news and laugh at yesterday’s memes. Tangled in sheets beneath an Australian air-conditioner and the weight of unforgotten shame. Neck sticky with cobwebs and sweat. Hands gentle with fear. I ask questions that have no answers. An uncultured laksa simmers in the kitchen. We toss away the rain-ruined cardboard. We toss away the old lies. I serve the laksa hot.
A termite-eaten doghouse falls apart in the backyard.
The man who carries it away closes his eyes.
Today is heavy with dust and heat and hope.
Today is
Today is
Today is
Over.
Happy World Poetry Day.
x
UNESCO first adopted 21 March as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard. World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media.
Poetry has existed on every continent and every culture. Soak it in.
This piece was written 21st August 2019 for a uni assignment. My lecturer’s original comments and edits are included below. I’m publishing it here, now, on 15th March 2022 because Jess messaged me on Sunday and asked me to publish it.
Walker was 19 when he died (a few months after I wrote this piece). My son is 19 now. I’m so angry.
*
Cause: Hungry for the Ocean of my Ancestor’s Care
Last year I heard Natalie Harkin use the term blood-memory and haunting. Her voice giving shape and texture to the itching beneath my skin. I wanted to leap up from my chair and hug her. I wanted to call my Nana and ask her to tell me. I wanted to cry. Big fat, shuddering I can’t breathe cry.
I sat silent. Still. Contained.
It was a panel after all, and I was just another face in the crowd[AH1] .
*
The man who killed Elijah Doughty was granted parole after serving 19 months in prison. He was sentenced to just three years in jail. Just three years. For killing a 14-year-old boy.
In various reporting about the case, Elijah’s grandfather Albert Doughty is quoted as saying, “It sends the wrong message: you kill a black and you can get away with it.”
Of course, the man who killed Elijah was found not guilty of manslaughter – and certainly not guilty of murder. He was jailed after being convicted of causing death by dangerous driving.
The jury that convicted him did not contain a single Aboriginal person.
*
I fucking hate cops. I really fucking hate cops. The way they swagger with their hands on their hips, bristling with guns and radios and power. The way they shine a torch in your eyes and assume they know who you are.
*
You kill a black and you get away with it.
You kill a black and you get away with it.
You kill a black and you get away with it.
This whole country is killing blacks and getting away with it.
*
“Disadvantaged and dying young. All odds against you before your life has begun.”
Jessica Wishart, Bidjara woman, and mother of two Arrente boys sings from the stage. Her right hand lightly touches the swell of her growing pregnancy. A third Arrente boy on the way.
“Two years in your sentence, you take your own life. The land cries for you, your mother weeps. Her greatest fear, a death in custody.”
Jess is my friend and I’ve heard this song before. This time she has a full band behind her and a captive audience. She’s asked me to record her singing this song on my phone.
I hold my hands steady. I hold my breath.
“Dark-skinned boy we don’t speak your name. But the problem is, nor do they.”
*
You kill a black and you get away with it.
*
I’ve never watched Jordan Peele’s Get Out. I’m afraid of horror films. They give me nightmares.
I read the script for Get Out last month. I thought a lot about the Sunken Place after reading it. A dark cavernous place where no-one can hear you scream. A place where who you are is stripped from you completely.
In 2017 I visited the Beechworth Gaol. There is a cell – just one – that was for mothers who had breast-feeding infants. It has a private courtyard for outdoor time so that they weren’t put out into the yard with the rest of the prisoners. The room is small, narrow, cold and dark. As I stood in the cell – I was there on a social enterprise tour in a $60,000 leadership program – I tried to imagine being locked in there with a screaming hungry baby.
The prison closed in 2004 – the same year I finished Year 12. My son – my screaming hungry baby – turned two a week after my last Year 12 exam.
*
The Guardian has an interactive database that tracks every known Indigenous death in custody in Australia from 2008 to 2018.
Filter by
Year
Cause of death
Issues flagged
Display by
State
Gender
Location of death
Coloured boxes with silhouetted figures appear when you enter your filters. I click on a blue square (New South Wales the colour code tells me) with a thicker silhouette.
A pop-up box appears.
“The young man made two attempts at self-harm before taking his own life in his cell.”
The other information in the box tells me he was 20.
I click on a yellow square (South Australia) with the same thick silhouette.
Male, 18, SA.
Cause: Self harm.
*
My son is turning 17 in November. He has pale white skin, blue eyes and shoulder-length hot pink hair. Our next door neighbours – a husband and wife with two young kids – are both police officers. My son has never met them. My daughter, aged five, keeps asking to meet them.
*
Elijah Doughty would have turned 17 this year.
*
My Nana was 17 when my mother was born. The same age as I was when my son was born[AH3] .
*
The Uluru Statement from the Heart says “We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them.”
The Uluru Statement from the Heart was written in 2017. The same year I visited Beechworth Gaol[AH4].
*
My Nana holds my history hostage. She doesn’t know that she holds it hostage. Or maybe she does.
I remember my mother saying “..and don’t you ever bring it up. Some things are too painful.”
There are lots of things my family don’t talk about.
Things I don’t talk about.
*
My dad grew up on a farm called Karinya. That is not an English word. My grandma – my dad’s mother – remembers my great-grandfather buying fish from Aboriginal people who lived at the bottom of the cliffs. The Karinya homestead sat at the top of those cliffs.
I’ve never been there.
*
You kill a black and you get away with it.
*
I saw The Secret River, a play produced by Sydney Theatre Company a few years ago and I thought about Karinya and the cliffs my dad grew up on.
In the play, the Aboriginal cast spoke in Dharug and it wasn’t translated into English. Unless you spoke Dharug (I don’t), the only perspective you had access to for most of the play was the English characters. Most of the audience when I saw the play were old white people.
*
You kill a black and you get away with it.
*
My mother remembers playing with her darker-skinned cousins. She remembers their nicknames but not their legal names.
*
Jordan Peele tweeted in 2017 “We’re all in the Sunken Place.”
2017. The same year I visited Beechworth Gaol. The same year the Uluru Statement from the Heart was written. The same year that I tweeted this about Elijah Doughty: I’ll trade you/ one life for a motorbike/ one story to hold the life/ one mouth to ask why//
We are all in the Sunken Place.
“No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.”
*
Earlier this year Jess Wishart and Nancy Bates were performing at a Reconciliation Week Event. Both of them are singer/songwriters. Both of them are teaching me that my voice matters. That our voice matters. That we have to keep screaming. Writing. Talking. Listening. Singing.
“If you won’t take our hand
If you won’t understand
If you won’t see that justice
is something we don’t have.”
When Nancy Bates – a proud Barkinji woman and friend – sings, you listen. When Nancy says “Please sing. Please sing, everybody.”
You sing.
And they did, the crowd of old and young that filled the Adelaide Festival Centre Quartet Bar in May this year, they sang. Together they sang the song that Nancy dedicated to Elijah.
Elijah who would have been 17 this year.
“Please take our hand
Let’s make a stand
Help shine a light
On our Human Rights.”
*
I am made of fragments.
Fragments of history.
Fragments of memory.
Fragments of song and skin and trying to let the light in.
[AH1]I think we need just a touch more context for this – the reader doesn’t know exactly what Harkin meant, so can’t parse your reaction.
[AH2]I want a little bit more here – maybe a comment on issues of race and incarceration in Australia?
[AH3]Doesn’t add as much as other vignettes. Maybe relevance not as clear.
[AH4]Like connections but not everything needs to be said.
If you haven’t already – go and have a look at the overall info for Novel November, my FAQ blog and the original announcement about my Fellowship. I’m going to assume anyone reading these blogs has read all of that already so that I don’t have to keep repeating background details.
You can also see the world details starting to develop here and all of the writing I’ve done so far here, with other updates on my FB & Insta.
Fellowship Process
I spent the weekend out at Pichi Richi Park (between Port Augusta and Quorn) attending an artist retreat organised by Country Arts SA and Performing Lines as part of the recently announced Local Giants initiative. Twelve artists, including me, spent 2.5 days with three mentors and staff from both Country Arts SA and Performing Lines exploring and unpacking individual project ideas each artist pitched in their application. I pitched Novel November and the longer-term 2040 ambition I have from this residency.
It was so, so lovely to spend this time immersed with other regional artists sharing hopes, doubts, ideas and questions. It was also probably the first time I’ve really talked about my big ambitions for this project directly and openly with people outside of my direct community (other than the mentor chats through my Fellowship activity) so felt like a bit of a litmus test for “does this idea actually make sense and have potential?”
Readers, I think it does.
My challenge now, especially as I come to the end of this residency period supported by my Fellowship, is to make decisions about next steps to grow momentum and continue building the overall vision in a way that has integrity and a structure that can sustain me and others stepping in and out around other commitments. No small task but I am excited by what we might build and develop over the next few years. My brain right now is very much thinking about initial resources to support that, including meaningful local partnerships. More to come.
*
This week I’m back to writing each day at Part of Things with an open invitation for people to join me in person or online. You don’t have to be working on ideas/stories set in the lands of the river, you’re welcome to just hang out and work on unrelated projects. You can also still follow along everything I’m writing in the g-doc.
I haven’t created as much space as I wanted to for the deeper reflection on practice during my Fellowship so far. I’m okay with this overall, as the mentor chats have been really rich and opportunities like the Pichi Richi artist retreat have functioned in this way too, but I do still want to carve out a little more time over this coming week for that space to reflect, dream and learn. I will report back next Wednesday with how I go.
This weekend I’m also going to work on a small grant to support Sam and I to work together in Jan/Feb on developing up the bones of an idea for a graphic novel out of the lands of the river so far. It’s always a challenge to be in the middle of the creative side of the work and having to think about the next steps from a forward planning perspective, but it’s just the reality of this kind of work. Funding cycles are long (planning six to twelve months in advance minimum) and it also takes time to build other kinds of stakeholder and collaborator relationships, so I’m always balancing both in my head as I go. The here and now, and the where to next. Some people hate these two sides but I actually enjoy both. I enjoy strategic planning and grant writing and documenting as well as being in the room writing, dreaming, creating and collaborating. I’m probably very lucky to find pleasure in both.
Novel November Progress
Across the last few weeks I’ve attempted to explore at least one character on all of the five primary worlds of the lands of the river (which we still need to name overall?) and in doing so, continue to develop the wider world logic and other ideas as I go. This week I focused on characters on Uttie and Lican specifically, partly because Sam has done such beautiful illustrations of Tael and Vespur over the past weeks and I wanted to explore the places that had received a little less love.
I shared the Tael illustration in last week’s blog, but here is Sam’s vision of Vespur:
You can see dotted around the market a number of flower-fairies based on mice:
Though I also love these variations on flower-fairies too:
Sam did these imaginings of flower-fairies before I suggested the version based on mice and I love both for different reasons. I think I am starting to lean towards Sam’s original concepts (directly above) over the mice-fairy concept just because it enables more exploration for anyone who wants to create things in this world. Perhaps we might turn the mice-fairies into another project entirely, who knows?
People have asked “what happens if people write stories or create ideas that don’t match?” and honestly I think that’s fine. We’ve created some core things as a foundation but if people want to take those concepts and develop it in ways that are inconsistent that’s okay from my point of view. I’m working to be consistent within whatever I directly write and create myself, but it doesn’t bother me if we end up with a multiverse approach of things that don’t quite align or contradict each other. The real world is messy too and versions of the truth tell very different stories. I’m more interested in the process of people creating and building things with shared connection than I am in a super rigid world/structure that is internally consistent. Those of us who decide to continue collaborating and building bigger outcomes from this starting place will of course have to make decisions about what we do or don’t include, but that would be true anyway because any process of adapting between forms requires that (books to films for example). It might be naive of me, but I think the canon of this world will work itself out over time as we explore, iterate, test, share, develop. Either way, I’m interested in the process and in making space for people to believe in, and explore, their own ideas and instincts.
If you haven’t already – go and have a look at the overall info for Novel November, my FAQ blog and the original announcement about my Fellowship. I’m going to assume anyone reading these blogs has read all of that already so that I don’t have to keep repeating background details.
You can also see the world details starting to develop here and all of the writing I’ve done so far here, with other updates on my FB & Insta.
Fellowship Process
As mentioned in last week’s blog I spent Thurs & Fri in Adelaide attending Reset, with two fabulous emerging artists, Kirste Jade and Jess Weidenhofer, who have both been part of Novel November (and have worked with me on other projects in the past). Lots and lots of food for thought and you can scroll through and have a look at my reflections during the two days over on my Twitter account, and see a wider cross-section of insight via #ResetArts.
Attending conferences and gatherings like this has always been an important part of my practice/creative career for a bunch of reasons, most of which I’m terrible at articulating but if you’re twisting my arm to pull out some key reasons:
a sense of connection to the wider industry (I talked about regional isolation in my first blog of this series).
I’m really aware of my lack of formal training and the professional development and informal learning from these kinds of gatherings is really valuable to me.
the general opportunity to be exposed to new ideas, new professional crushes, new networks and new projects. I always go away with a handful of people/projects/organisations that I want to find out more about.
I feel a sense of responsibility to be an active participant and contributor to the sector/industry/community, and that means showing up, listening, reflecting and adjusting what/how I’m doing things where relevant. For example there were some really thoughtful and direct calls to action at Reset about divesting from mining companies (ie. don’t take money from resource corporations because it’s implicit support and “artwashing” the damage these corporations are doing to our communities and planet). I’ve always had mixed feelings on this because all of the money we accept is “dirty” and has strings attached, but the conversations at Reset have asked me to revisit the absolutionism in some of my earlier mixed feelings. Context does matter and there is nuance and I don’t want my work to directly or indirectly contribute to the success of companies and individuals who put profit over community. I’m always learning. Always.
as I’ve moved further into my career and developed professional networks and friendships, gatherings like Reset have also become mini reunions, which links back to the first dot point, but also has a value in itself. Relationships matter and the relationships I have sustain me and inspire me. All of my work starts with and is founded on relationships (*side note, if you haven’t already read it, please go and read Jade Lillie’s The Relationship is the Project. A fab book that resonates with so much of my perspectives.)
Attending Reset was good timing for Novel November, because as mentioned elsewhere, this residency project is a starting place to explore and start building the foundations for a much bigger long-term project, so thinking about sustainability, about workplace practices, about collaboration and advocacy and community building is very much on my mind. It was valuable to have some outside provocation to keep stirring and stretching my own thinking. It was also personally meaningful to me to have Kirste and Jess there with me. Both acknowledged that some of the content was difficult for them to connect to and understand and I remember that the first conferences I went to often felt like gibberish, but I know how each opportunity kept opening up new learning and new opportunities for me and I hope it will be the same for them. I’m still unpacking all of the conversations and ideas presented at Reset – I’m a slow thinker – but you can find out more about it here.
*
If you’ve been following along in the g-doc, you’ll know I haven’t popped in any new writing since last week’s blog, which is why I’ve named this week’s blog: what does work look like?
I hear a lot of writers berating themselves for low word-counts and not producing enough content. I don’t do this (though I used to!) because I know that I produce a lot of work in lots of different ways across the many threads of my practice/work life anyway, but also because I know that “work” and “writing” doesn’t always look like sitting at a computer typing words into a document. Sometimes writing looks like taking a walk to process ideas and wrestle with a plot point, sometimes writing looks like planning out a practical schedule to give you more writing time and breathing space, sometimes writing looks like professional development and networking, sometimes writing looks like day-dreaming, sometimes writing looks like scrawling scraps of ideas onto serviettes while out to lunch with friends, sometimes writing looks like admin and the business side of making it all work, sometimes writing looks like research, sometimes writing looks like being out in the world and living your life, sometimes writing looks like rest.
This past week has included all of those things and more.
This coming weekend there are no community workshops because I’m lucky enough to be heading to Pichi Richi very early tomorrow morning to be part of an Artist Retreat with Country Arts SA and Performing Lines until Sunday afternoon. I’ll be working on my bigger picture ideas for Novel November during this retreat and connecting with other wonderful South Australian regional artists.
Next week I’ll be back to writing in the g-doc each day before wrapping up the Novel November residency with a little sharing celebration on Sunday 28th November.
Novel November Progress
Content note: grief, death, death of a young person, suicide.
As I mentioned in last week’s blog, a young person I know died recently and that informed some of my writing in the world of Novel November last week. Sam responded with this illustration to some of that writing:
Grief tastes like salt:
Too small in worlds too big
Mouths open with no words
The children hide in Tael
Beneath the surface of the sand
The children hid in Tael
Beneath the watchful eye of home
The children die/d in Tael
Beneath the echo of a lie
Sam has also created this beautiful rendering of Tael and folk headed to the library:
Sam’s illustrations are beautiful and I’m going to share more of them on Insta & FB across next week so stay tuned for that and my next update on Wednesday 24th Nov.
If you haven’t already – go and have a look at the overall info for Novel November, my FAQ blog and the original announcement about my Fellowship. I’m going to assume anyone reading these blogs has read all of that already so that I don’t have to keep repeating background details and boring the life out of you.
You can also see the world details starting to develop here and all of the writing I’ve done so far here, with other updates on my FB & Insta.
Fellowship Process
Surprising no-one (including me) I’ve contributed more time to the Fellowship and Novel November over the first week than I intended to. This is because some things just took me longer, I’ve added some extra things in and because I’m enjoying it! Having said that, I am still doing some work for both Writers SA and headspace Berri, and an independent projection outcome due this month so I do need to pace myself. The Fellowship is my primary focus, but it’s not my only commitment. Rest and downtime are important parts of doing good work too.
This week I’m only writing Mon, Tues and today and then heading to a conference in Adelaide Thurs/Fri. Sat & Sun are Novel November community workshop days with a poetry focus on Saturday and a scriptwriting focus on Sunday. Over the weekend just gone we had a short story focus on Saturday and on Sunday looked at graphic storytelling (comics/graphic novels/narrative zines) and branching narratives (twine games, choose your own adventure stories). There were seven participants on Saturday, including me, and four on Sunday.
Reflecting on the workshops:
Saturday I think I tried to make the short story workshop too general and didn’t bring enough of Novel November and the ongoing work of the project into the workshop. This is because I was trying to make the workshop content relevant to a broad range of ages and for people who wanted to apply it to their own outside projects. My intentions were good, but ultimately these workshops *are* for and part of Novel November so I think it’s important that the examples, exercises and content draws from and builds on wherever Novel November is up to. I’m still really happy with how the workshop went and the many conversations it started.
I also wrote this silly but fun little drabble during the workshop:
No-one ever thinks sheep are dangerous, making them perfect for smuggling. Which is how I found myself tied to the belly of a sheep in the middle of a cycle-night, ready to board the living-ship Fugenavis. Jared was ahead on another and I knew he’d be freaking out, but I just had to hope and pray he wouldn’t scream. We were boarded onto Fugenavis without any trouble but I’d lost all feeling in my legs by then. Unfortunately we hadn’t thought through how we’d get loose. Which is how I ended up a ghost on Fugenavis. Sheep are dangerous things.
Drabbles are a short story format where the story has to be exactly 100 words.
I tried to take this reflection into Sunday’s workshop with examples and exercises that directly related to Novel November content. The examples were good but my energy was not. I was exhausted and flaky and really struggling to bring the energy and care needed to facilitate the workshop (to my own standards). My mind kept wandering and I tried to fit waaaaay too much into the one day, meaning that we kept rushing over things to get to the next thing I’d planned. The best outcomes of Sunday’s workshop weren’t in the content, but were in the conversations between, when we spoke about other interests and projects people were working on. By about 2pm I’d just fizzled out completely and we collectively decided to abandon the rest of the workshop content I’d planned and just write together. Even that wasn’t working for me so I used the time for some planning for this week instead.
That’s not to say the workshop was a complete waste. I showed everyone the basics of writing a logline and we had a go with a little collectively made up story about a character on Uttie who has to deal with a setimret infestation.
Bee-folk illustrated by Sam Wannan for Novel November, with one of the loglines created during the workshop. The logline says: When a bee farmer finds out that his farm is infested with setimrets that constantly regrow his crops, he needs to call upon other forces to get rid of them before he comes a beasts next meal.
We also talked through the basics of what a pitch packet for a graphic novel contains and looked at a whole bunch of interactive narrative examples together, including these:
My point being: things don’t always go to plan and sometimes we’re just not in the right head space for a particular activity, but we can still find value in the connections and the sharing of small breadcrumbs to help people find their way.
This is for anyone who would like to write their own stories, poems, songs, scripts and ideas set in the lands of the river in between. I’m still adding materials, and some of the materials will be edited/change as we continue making discoveries but this is the starting place I’ve been writing from/in so far.
*
Each Monday during Novel November I am sending illustrator Sam Wannan a package of written material developed through the residency so far. Sam is then responding with illustrations to whatever grabs him within that material (and reading along in the live g-doc). Last week Sam sent through a whole bunch of concepts for many of the peoples we imagined during the world-building weekend and this absolutely glorious illustration of the ship Fugenavis:
This interpretation of Fugenavis was inspired by this little piece of writing I did on the very first writing day (Monday 1st November 2021):
A ship called Love
Coats flapping in a breeze that has no wind,
magic river running to a trickle, and questions.
Questions seep into the rock –
Like blood.
Like life.
Life joy.
They gather the misfits, the pirates and the pretty
and the curious, voiceless dreams
that sit crouched between their knees.
They build a ship, the first in this world.
Large, unwieldy and ugly,
she waddles and wails amongst the stars.
They call her “love” but her name is Fugenavis.
The ship that became a world.
The ship that became a home.
The ship that became a legend.
The ship that saved them all.
I have loved seeing Sam’s illustrations coming into my emails and really glad we were able to find the resources to make this happen. The illustrations feel like a lovely little gift to me, which helps with motivation and connection to the worlds/project, and they’re also something visual that I can share with everyone else on social media to help communicate more about the project as it unfolds. Honestly, I just want to win the lotto so I can pay Sam forever to illustrate everything I write!
If you’ve dropped in or been regularly following my writing progress in the g-doc, you’ll have noticed that I am hopping around a lot in all the ways: characters, location, form, genre. This is deliberate and something I will keep doing right across November. The purpose of this residency isn’t to have fully resolved material, it’s to end the month with 2-3 stories & ideas that can be further developed and built on in 2022. So I’m deliberately iterating and exploring and beginning from different places and in different ways. If there are characters or stories or ideas currently in the doc that you feel more invested in though, please let me know! Knowing that will help me determine which stories I should develop further or return to during November.
*
Content note for this final section: grief, death, death of a young person, suicide
If you follow me on social media or you read Monday’s Novel November writing in the g-doc, you’ll know that a young person I worked with when I lived in Adelaide died over the weekend. The death of anyone you know is always devastating, and the death of a young person especially so. I’ve felt so, so sad this week since finding out. I thought about taking a writing break from the residency on Monday and just giving myself some space this week but instead I found myself in the g-doc anyway, writing from that place and those feelings of grief and loss and hurt and worry for those left behind. The writing I did, the stories and the characters and the circumstances, was all completely fictional and grounded in the context of the lands of the river in between but it reminded me of why I love fantasy (and science fiction) as genres.
I spent so much of my own adolescence escaping into fantasy novels, and fantasy is still my preferred genre as an adult, though I read more widely across genres now. The thing about fantasy, or at least the fantasy I love, is that fantasy might happen on imaginary worlds with imaginary creatures and heightened action, but the stories, always, are ultimately about what it means to be human. What it means to struggle and question. What it means to love and to lose. What it means to grieve and betray and be betrayed. What it means to belong and to not belong. What it means to forgive and accept and make space. What it means to heal and to hope. What it means to hurt in every fibre of your skin. What it means to journey through all the unknowns of what makes a life. What it means to hold on and what it means to let go.
I love fantasy because it allows us a little space (through the fantastical settings and creatures) to really look and see. See who we are, see who we have been and see who we could choose to be.
I want Novel November to be something fun and enriching and welcoming for me and my community, but that doesn’t mean it’s fluff or without substance. The stories we tell in this world are about exploring the Riverland. Who we are, who we have been and who we might become. Those stories are fictional and metaphorical and subtle, but they are there if you look.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you attended the World Building weekend for Novel November or you are otherwise interested in what I’m doing as part of my National Regional Arts Fellowship. Across November and into December and January, I’ll be doing a series of blog posts about the project and my Fellowship and my process within both. This is the first blog. This blog series is a way for me to invite you behind the scenes of what I do and how I do it. You are welcome to ask questions using the comment section and I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments or future blogs in the series.
If you haven’t already – go and have a look at the overall info for Novel November, my FAQ blog and the original announcement about my Fellowship. I’m going to assume anyone reading these blogs has read all of that already so that I don’t have to keep repeating background details and boring the life out of you!
So….let’s talk about where things are up to and where they’re heading and some of what I’m currently thinking about and working on.
Fellowship Process
Novel November is a month-long residency project and the vehicle for my Fellowship, so there is kind of two things happening alongside each other – one is my development through the fellowship and one is the progress of Novel November as a project/outcome. Novel November itself, is also only the first stage of a longer term project and outcome/s.
The National Regional Arts Fellowships is an investment in the development of artistic and creative practice for artists and practitioners working and living in regional, rural and remote Australia. The initiative is applicant-led, cross disciplinary and open to multiple art forms. It addresses the need for creative development, career pathways, and supports individuals in time and place to develop their work, skills and networks.
In my application, I said:
My proposed fellowship activity will enable me to spend four weeks working full-time on my practice through a meaningful, tailored and self-directed collaboration with members of my community, including targeted mentor support. The activity will be a blend of solo time learning, writing, ideating, exploring, reflecting and documenting, alongside targeted mentor check-ins, and weekends spent working with community to co-create responses to an imagined speculative fiction world inspired by the Riverland.
(….)
Each week I will be actively iterating creative responses to this learning and to my weekends engaging with community members. The entire residency will be a repeated process of learn, dream, respond creatively, share, reflect, repeat.
I will be bringing together the many threads of my creative practice – writing (especially my interest in speculative fiction as a vehicle for community connection and resilience), socially/community engaged collaboration, reflection, performance making, producing and community organising and blue sky dreaming – to explore, experiment and test my own ideas and the next forms I want my practice and projects to take. Over the past decade, my creative practice has continually taken a back seat to projects and jobs that could generate a sustainable income, and this means my independent creative projects have almost always been rushed and forced to fit into the gaps between other things, this fellowship support would enable me to spend a dedicated chunk of time immersed in a single project and deeply interrogating my own practice and the next steps I want to take. This is particularly timely as a 2021 activity, as I have been actively working this year to reduce my paid “dayjob” work to three days a week to focus on independent creative projects across 2021, 2022 and beyond. This fellowship activity would provide me with the right stepping stone at the right time on this journey.
(…)
Documenting and sharing my fellowship experience will be embedded into the residency process, and I anticipate that I would spent at least 3-5 hours per week across the month on this element alone. This will be part of my reflection process to deepen my own learning, but I am also committed to turning my own learning into useful resources for others so I will be actively documenting the processes I undertake and making them available on my blog. This will include personal reflection notes, excerpts of writing and other creative material produced at various stages of development, photos and links to materials I am reading/reflecting on.
So Novel November is a project and an outcome itself, but it is also a vehicle for my own ongoing learning and development as a creative practitioner. Every project I do (independent or otherwise) is always both for me, especially as someone who hasn’t (yet) completed any tertiary education in the arts. I also want to acknowledge up front that my “dayjob” is also in the arts and I currently work 0.6 FTE (3 days per week) for Writers SA as Statewide Regional Manager and Riverland Coordinator. I wasn’t working for Writers SA when I applied for the Fellowship but after I started working there and was awarded the Fellowship, I had a conversation with my manager (Writers SA Director Jessica Alice) to talk through how I would manage my commitment to Writers SA and to the Fellowship. Through this negotiation Writers SA is supporting me to work on the Fellowship 0.4 (two days per week), as an investment in me as a regional writer and also because Novel November itself is directly serving the vision/mission of my work at Writers SA. I am so grateful for this support of my independent work and this flexibility from Writers SA. This means I can still be fully immersed in the Fellowship process without feeling like I’m letting Writers SA down, and also means that I’ve been able to add to the resources pool (ie. money) available to support my Fellowship activities.
Process wise so far, I’ve been very much in “doing” mode – we spent the weekend world building (which I’ll talk about below) and I spent a few hours Monday and yesterday just writing and thinking. Today has mostly been a bit of an admin day, though I’m hoping to tackle some writing before bed too. Tomorrow I’m planning to do some writing, and spend some time reading, reflecting, and planning for this coming weekend. Friday I have my first scheduled mentor check-in.
The mentor check-ins are 1-2 hour Zoom chats with a range of people. I reached out via email to a wide mix of practitioners from theatre, film, literature, games, community art, nerd communities, activists and many other circles to enrich my thinking and exploring. I want to talk with artists, producers, curators, ideas people, marketing folk and people outside of the arts. Some of the people I contacted I already know a little bit and others I know of but haven’t had any direct contact with. Some of the people I reached out to didn’t respond, which I completely expected – especially the “cold” emails to people I’ve never met – but most did and all in the affirmative, which is really lovely. In case you’re wondering this is the guts of what I sent people (with some additional notes at the beginning depending on if I knew the person and/or how I knew of their work):
I’ve been awarded a Regional Arts Australia Fellowship this year to tackle the first exploration of a project I’ve been dreaming about for a while. Thanks to the Fellowship, I’ll be spending every day in November exploring the idea of creating a new fantasy world inspired by my home here in the Riverland and how this fantasy world can be a container/foundation for a range of creative outcomes over the coming years. My Fellowship format is facilitating weekend workshops with my community and then writing/planning/ideating/creating independently each weekday. Some background and an overview of the schedule for November here (including a link to FAQ): https://partofthings.org/portfolio/novel-november-2021/And a bit of background on me/my work here if needed: https://alyshaherrmann.com/
Why am I emailing you? Within that month-long process of dreaming, ideating, writing, reflecting, exploring, I budgeted some time for me to access mentors as catalysts/ to bounce ideas with other brains etc and I would love to have 1-2 hours of your time in this capacity somewhere in November. I can be uber flexible about when as I know you’re a very busy person! I am deliberately reaching out to a wide mix of practitioners from theatre, film, literature, games, community art, nerd communities, activists and many other circles to enrich my thinking and exploring. I want to talk with artists, producers, curators, ideas people, marketing folk and people outside of the arts.
What would this include/what do I want from you?1-2 hours of your time to chat with me over Zoom (1 or 2 sessions). I’ve budgeted $110 an hour for these chats. There is nothing to prepare and nothing to follow up afterwards, just being present for a conversation with me and wherever that conversation goes. During these chats I am hoping to:
– hear a little more about your career pathway and background and how you’ve developed big ideas and backed yourself when doubts creep in.
– chat through where the ideas for Novel November are sitting at that moment in time as a way for me to think through challenges/direction/ideas with different mentor brains.
– perhaps go away with 1-2 movies/books/theatre shows/games etc that you can recommend as further professional development aligned with my interests.
– if appropriate introducing me to other relevant networks of yours.
Eight incredible people agreed to have one of these chats with me, including people I honestly expected wouldn’t bother replying. A ninth person also rang me the day after I emailed them to yarn on the phone for over an hour about what I was doing, and how their work might be able to help. This person asked not to be named and not to be paid for their time but I still want to acknowledge that investment and input here by mentioning it.
For me the key reasoning behind these mentor chats and budgeting for them with my Fellowshop resources is because being a regional creative means I don’t have access to casually meeting people in foyers and workshops to have those more natural conversations (and I’m also an introvert who finds those environments a barrier anyway!), so in some ways I’m just really setting up a bunch of conversations to meet people and say hello and hear a little about different creative pathways/industries from different perspectives to inform my thinking and keep opening up my networks.
People sometimes talk about opportunities in the arts as “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” and in many ways that’s true. I think perhaps less so because of nepotism (which is often the implication) and more because of access and information. When we have relationships with people (working or otherwise), those relationships are a source of information and access – come to this thing with me/ hey did you hear about / I saw this opportunity that would be great for you/ etc, etc. When we live and work in spaces with lots of other artists or creative infrastructure (things like galleries, theatres, regular events etc) we have lots of opportunity to naturally build those relationships and that’s why opportunities tend to flow a little more easily to city-based artists, they are more likely to know about the opportunities and have access to people to help understand and unlock those opportunities. I know it doesn’t always feel that way to city-based artists who feel on the outer and outside of the cliques, but that proximity alone still does make a difference (in my experience of living in Adelaide for four years, compared to the rest of my life/career in the regions). Even just being able to regularly access a gallery or see professional shows at a theatre makes a difference to people’s practice: it energises thinking, introduces new concepts and artists to follow, it inspires. Those are some of the barriers and gaps we face as regional artists.
There is no professional gallery in my community and no professional theatre-makers who regularly create and present work here. We get a circuit of touring theatre work and commercial shows that parachute in, and a community workshop or two built in (with some occasional deeper engagement) and I’m really grateful for these shows. I love sitting in the audience of my local theatre to see them and saying hello to teachers, friends etc in the foyer beforehand. But it’s not the same as the organic and regular community of practice that I had access to when I lived in Adelaide (and people complain about Adelaide not having enough!). There are many creative people in my regional community but we do not have the buildings and gathering places and hubs and programs and active foyers and connection points and investment to provoke, share and inspire. It’s hard to find each other and even harder to find the ways we can collaborate and learn from each other. And harder still to find those people who are further into their careers as mentors, guides and door-openers. Most of them leave or were never here to begin with.
I love my community fiercely, but that doesn’t change that I also often feel isolated and lonely here as a creative.
So that’s why my Fellowship includes and invests in an opportunity for me to say hello to interesting people who I admire and want to know more about through the mentor chats.
It’s also why Novel November is a project with and for and in my community – I want the work I do to be a shared place for others who feel the way I do. The people who feel a little lonely and a little weird and a little lost and a little frustrated but know in their heart that the regions are where they want to make and create and strive and live and dream and be.
I want my work to be place for us to find each other, and to scheme and dream and create together.
Sorry, that was all a bit rambly and longer than I meant it to be, but I did say this was about my behind the scenes thinking, so there you go!
Novel November Progress
Over the weekend of 30th & 31st October 2021, eight Riverland folk (including my 7yo daughter and me) + one Adelaide visitor spent 12 hours creating the bare bones of the world, including some world logic, some humanoid species, some creatures and some random characters. That process of world-building will be ongoing across the month and we’ve really only skimmed the surface but I absolutely ADORED it. It was SO fun to spend the weekend coming up with wild and wonderful ideas together and talking about the Riverland and what it is to us.
The world ingredients we ended on really do have something from everyone who attended the weekend, which is probably my favourite part about it.
The two days started with an Acknowledgment of Country and then moved into some relationship building through an introduction circle and completing these little personal “character sheets” (I put everyone in pairs and asked them to draw each other’s portrait in 60seconds):
These character sheets were inspired by the tabletop role-playing games I’ve played and attendance at conferences and networking events. They were a way to get to know a little about everyone who attended the world building weekend, and gave us prompts to help start conversations across the weekend. I’ve always found small talk *really* hard so having some topics identified by other people that they love to talk about is a handy thing for me.
From introductions I then talked through the overall structure of Novel November and my longterm vision and asked everyone to complete and sign a Workshop Participation Deed. I talked through each section of the Workshop Participation Deed in detail to help everyone understand it, but also to be transparent about my expectations and the shared agreements the project is founded on. The gist is that everyone who participates in Novel November is contributing to developing this shared fantasy world and key materials that flesh out that world. That shared world material will be made available soon under a Creative Commons licence (specifically – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)) to enable others to make and create within our shared world but to retain the potential for all of the workshop participants as shared copyright holders to potentially commercialise elements in the future. All participants, including me, also retain individual copyright to any materials they individually create during Novel November – so you can read and follow everything I write but you can’t take my stories, poems, etc and republish them anywhere without my permission. The world material on the other hand – which I am currently collating and putting into a readable format – will be made available as Creative Commons (under the specific licence mentioned above) meaning that you can adapt, remix and use that material to write and create your own things for non-commercial purposes.
Why is this important?
First and foremost because my projects are always a learning space and so it was an opportunity to teach everyone participating a bit more about copyright in general and some common licensing terms and also let them know about resources like Arts Law. The Workshop Participant Deed we are using for Novel November was purchased from Arts Law. I am not a lawyer and made it clear that my explanation of terms was not legal advice and that if anyone wanted to query anything with me, with Arts Law or with a lawyer that they should. I signed so many things early in my career that I did not understand and I know it takes lots of exposure to certain kinds of language and terms before they start to make sense. By introducing contracts and licensing agreements to others early in their creative journeys, I hope that I can help them build their literacy in this area and their confidence to ask questions in the future (where the producer/organiser may not always have their best interests in mind). Questions should always be welcome in my work.
It’s also important to me that I am protecting the current and future rights of collaborators, especially young people. I don’t want to exploit people and I want people to get value from any collaboration or exchange with me. I want to be clear about how I’ll use things, what people can expect from me and how they can dispute any use now or in the future. This protects them and me. It’s not perfect or watertight – anyone who has had to dispute a contract will know that even very extensive legal contracts can fail to protect people and be misinterpreted – but it does mean we have something written down reflecting a shared understanding of what we are doing, why and what will happen to any content we create together. Of course I hope that we’ll never need to revisit those pieces of paper because our communication and relationships will be strong and nurturing, but it means if something does go wrong we are not relying on memory and we have a paper trail to guide us.
It’s also a useful tool to talk about that bigger vision I have with collaborators and what the steps are to get there, and what that would mean for everyone who participates in Novel November. Everyone who attends workshops and co-creates the world and key materials is a joint-copyright holder with me. If we further develop that shared material into other things in the future, any benefit should flow to all of us, not just me! At the same time, we want the world we are creating to be something others can play in as well, hence our use of Creative Commons for shared world materials.
We did spend quite a bit of time talking through all of this on Saturday morning. It was probably terribly boring for the younger ones, but a couple of the older ones said to me afterwards that they really valued my explanation and commitment to transparency and so I think the time was well-spent.
After all of that we got into some of the fun stuff!
This is a very rough version of what we did, in approximate order:
sharing a Riverland story (in pairs)
post-it-note brainstorm of “Riverland things”
discussion around how/what ways the Riverland is a different place for different people (backgrounds, ages, race etc)
we had a look at a map of the Riverland
everyone (except me) completed a 10-minute observation walk in the mainstreet of Barmera, and then shared things they noticed with the wider group
we played “object story” with a piece of fabric
we then took the concept of object story and applied it to all the Riverland material we’d discussed and documented to populate a wall of post-it-notes of ridiculous ideas and imagined things (example – people noticed roses during their walk in the main-street and this became post-it-notes about rose fairies and flower magic)
we started a questions and names wall
we discussed using the Riverland as a provocation/inspiration/place to bounce off as opposed to rewriting/overwriting the Riverland and why this distinction is important (I will talk about this in next week’s blog)
we talked about some common fantasy tropes and ways we might subvert them
we talked about some of the themes, ideas and issues that matter to us (for example in my work I want to include a wide variety of queer characters, characters from diverse races/backgrounds and physical appearances)
we started discussing some big world ideas from everything brainstormed so far, from this common ideas emerged around exploring/representing sustainability and the idea of literal living worlds on the backs of giant creatures.
we had some overnight downtime to rest and reflect (rest is resistance, rest is always part fo good process and practice)
we gathered again and went around the circle sharing reflections on the day before and any ideas/connections we’d made overnight
we revisited our ridiculous ideas wall and grouped like ideas with like on a new wall
the world/s started to take some shape and link together some of the foundation work from day one
we spent some time ideating specific features of our world and talking through logic gaps and questions
I put up this set of post-it-notes and asked everyone to self-identify an area they would like to delve into individually or in small groups:
everyone went away and worked on their chosen areas individually
we came back and shared our work and discussed contradictions, questions and ways to adapt conflicting ideas
we started to refine and document the world/s using post-it-notes on a blank wall and seeing what was important enough to keep and what still needed to be developed
we each had some time to ideate and contribute a character that we were happy to have belong to the shared world materials and be used by others
we gathered to reflect on the process overall and where to next
we closed the circle and the world building weekend by each sharing one word that described how we were feeling. Words shared included: empowered, inspired, “ooooft”, thoughtful and others I can’t remember (I should have written them all down at the time because now I’ve forgotten!)
Monday morning I spent about two hours writing and then in the evening I sat down and wrote up some of the key world bits and sent them off to fantasy illustrator (and friend & collaborator) Sam Wannan who I have commissioned to respond to Novel November material with illustrations each week.
Yesterday I wrote for a couple of hours and shared a couple of social posts, including one of the illustrations Sam sent me at lunch time. Tomorrow I plan to spend some time on writing, reading, reflecting and planning for the weekend. Friday will be first mentor chat and some bigger picture planning/reflecting, with a half hour or so of writing.
This weekend will be a short story workshop and graphic narrative + branching narrative workshop. The structure of the workshop weekends for the rest of the month is a morning workshop facilitated by me focused on some skills sharing within a particular writing form, and then an afternoon of writing hangout. People can either work on their own projects in the afternoon or join me in writing within the Novel November world in that particular form. My reason for this is to enable opportunity for like-minded people to come together, invest in skills sharing/development, keep opening up the invitation to write and create in our shared fantasy world and make sure that I have some dedicated writing time focused on different forms.
I’m one of those greedy people that doesn’t want to specialise in just one writing/creative form – this is both a strength and a weakness, because the many strands of my practice inform and improve each other, but I’ll never quite achieve the kind of mastery and skill of specialising. I am 100% okay with this but it’s just something worth noting. Many people will tell you that you have to pick one thing (I’ve been told this many times) but the truth is you don’t have to. You do have to accept the trade-off and challenge of playing in many spaces though. All choices have pros and cons, but knowing ourselves and what brings us joy and challenge is the place to build from. I love writing short stories just as much as I love writing poems and just as much as I love writing plays and just as much as I love longform writing (etc).
If you want to follow along with my Novel November writing progress, a reminder that I am writing in this live google-doc so you can see every key stroke, deletion and word written as it occurs. This is because I personally love seeing process, so I feel it’s only fair that mine is open to you. We so often just see the hard-won, polished and finished versions of things and it can give us a skewed view of how much shit has to be written/created/developed/tried first! This first week I’m deliberately just writing little snapshots that keep exploring and unpacking the world a bit more. Next week will probably be more of the same, though I might start to revisit and further flesh out some ideas from this week. I expect (though could be wrong) that in weeks three and four, I will hone in on some pieces to start refining. By the end of the month I plan to have 1-2 pieces of writing that can be launching off points to further develop in 2022.
I’m hoping to have some of the world material and notes up by Sunday night for anyone who can’t attend workshops but would like to play in the world we are creating. In the meantime, here is a small detail from one of Sam’s illustrations:
You can see that our creature worlds are based on animals that live in Australia and I’ll probably talk to this in a bit more depth in a future blog, but please note that we will be deliberately stretching the features/aesthetic/logic of all the creature worlds to be more fantastical for a whole bunch of reasons but some key reasons being:
because we do not want to accidentally (or otherwise) suggest a connection to, or appropriate from, any First Nations Song Spirals (Dreaming, Tjukurpa, Creation Stories etc). That would be completely inappropriate and not at all in line with my values and the purpose/vision of this project. Of course everyone is influenced and inspired by many things, so if anyone following the project *does* notice content that has crept in without us realising and shouldn’t be there please let me know so that we can remove/adapt/address it and do our best to make sure the world we create is enriching, and not harmful, for our community. Not directly related but an important sidenote – this project is not a First Nations project and is not telling First Nations stories but I am always committed to including representation and ideas that help educate, inspire and break down negative stereotypes about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Peoples. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are less than 5% of the population in contemporary Australia. That means everyone has a role to play in ensuring more representation, however any story that deals with First Nations history, cultural knowledge or specific experiences should be led and told by First Nations people. Even the best intentioned people fuck up telling stories that don’t belong to them (true also of queer stories, disabled stories etc). My personal family history it not “fully white” (for lack of a better term) but I am white in appearance and have been raised culturally white, so it is not, and will never be, my place to tell/lead First Nations stories, irrespective of my lost/hidden ancestry.
because fantasy audiences want and expect fantastical creatures and we do want the world and stories we create to interest a broader audience than just those involved in the workshops/project/Riverland. Though we would love to weave in some nods to special Riverland things that help encourage people to take better care of our places, creatures and people.
we want to be informed and inspired and pay homage to the place we call home in the Riverland here and now, but without being constrained to what the Riverland is or isn’t. This project isn’t about rewriting the Riverland. It’s about imagining something entirely new, together.
Woo! I’m one of an additional three recipients who have been awarded a National Regional Arts Fellowship through extension funding in 2021. Six original recipients were announced back in May.
I’ve been dying to tell everyone for ages but it’s been embargoed since July.
Back in March this year I submitted my application for a National Regional Arts Fellowship. In May I got an email saying I was “unfunded excellence” meaning the panel thought my application deserved to be funded but that there wasn’t enough money to fund everyone and I had not been selected in this case. I expected that to be the end of it. I’ve had emails like that before.
In the last week of Term 2 (middle of July) the Director of Regional Arts Australia called to tell me they’d successfully lobbied for some additional funding and that would include funding my Fellowship.
Reader, I was unprepared for this delightful news (I was in the middle of mentoring a team for Australian Business Week at Renmark High School) and may have said swear words and/or screamed a bit.
It’s been under embargo since then, until Minister made official announcement, but it is now public and real and I can shout all about it!
Through the support of this fellowship I’ll be spending all of November exploring my community and writing and co-creating through my project Novel November:
“What would a version of the Riverland full of dragons and magic look like (and how can that help us better care for and build the real Riverland)? Novel November is a month-long collaborative experiment re-imagining our local haunts and habits. Writer and creative ‘doer’ Alysha Herrmann will lead a process of world-building and creative responses with other Riverland creative folk to generate short stories, poems, illustrations, songs, installations, experiences and ideas for the general public to explore a yet-to-be-named and yet-to-be-created alternate version of the Riverland.”
Novel November is the first stage of an ambitious multi-year speculative fiction project right here in our Riverland and I’m thrilled to have the backing of this fellowship to kick it off.
My long-term vision is that the fantasy world version of the Riverland created through Novel November will become a framework for future stories, theatre projects, visual art exhibitions, cosplay, LARP and other things here in my community.
image by Kirste Vandergiessen, created for the Part of Things 2021 program
Alysha Herrmann’s Novel November Residency is supported by the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund, with additional support from Writers SA through Alysha’s role as Writers SA Riverland Coordinator.
creating art in the desert 