aoifehilton

#25: On The Record v Off The Record v On Background

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:28:34 GMT

Have you ever been approached by a journalist for information? Perhaps as an interview subject, for supplementary knowledge, or even a tip-off?

If you know me, you might understand the moment a conversation with a journalist stops being casual and veers into professional interest.

I’ve had quite a few of these conversations – about work in industries receiving lots of media attention, about alternate lifestyle choices, circumstances affected by new laws or policies – and so I’m familiar with the look of fear when someone is asked whether they would repeat themself for a story. I’m often told to speak ‘off the record’ but I do not think those words always mean what you think they mean. Let me clarify.

An on-the-record conversation is one which is literally being recorded, either with a recording device or by transcription. It will most likely be used in the story and likely by direct quote, attributed to you. Most interviews are on the record, and all interviews where you want your name there are. However, you can speak on the record and then request to be anonymised later – say, if you want your words public but there is some danger to attaching them to your identity. People often overestimate the danger in this, however, and you might find voicing your specific concern to the journalist or the news organisation’s legal team helpful in presenting a solution which still offers the audience the credibility of a named source.

An off-the-record conversation is most conversations. They aren’t being recorded in any way and furthermore, the information in them is almost useless to the story as far as following up for background research goes. We are all off the record by default and you don’t really need to say you are. Journalists overwhelmingly endeavour to tell you when you are being recorded, and negotiate honestly with you about alternatives like note-taking if you’re uncomfortable with that. If you’re afraid you’re dealing with a News Of The World wire-tapper type, stating that you’re off the record isn’t going to help.

A conversation on background is what most people mean when they say they’re speaking to a journalist ‘off the record’ about a story. If you want to help with the background information but not as an interviewee, the journalist can take notes about the content of what you say but won’t attach your name to them or directly quote you in the story. The information will just be used to take to the next places the journalist follows up with. It sounds mysterious, but it can also be used for the boring stuff – if you’re just explaining relevant jargon to a journalist about an industry-specific story and nothing else, you’re basically on background.

Mustering the courage to speak to the media can be difficult. It seems more difficult for more people lately. But breaking meaningful stories requires people to tell them.

Word Count: 482

#24: The Spreadsheet

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:43:42 GMT

Last month, I attended two launch events for two very different journals – Jacaranda literary journal’s ‘Scorched Earth’ edition and the British Fantasy Society academic journal’s 2025 Summer edition. When you write in a variety of genres, it can be hard to keep up with who is open for what kinds of submissions and who you’ve already sent your work to. That’s why I don’t keep up in my head. I keep a spreadsheet.

Here’s the layout of my main piece submissions spreadsheet if you want to copy it at home:

In the first column, drop the link to the submissions page you’ve found.

In the second column, write what types of piece the journal or magazine is accepting (poetry, memoir, reviews, academic essays, short stories, play scripts, etc.)

In the third column, plug in the closing date for submissions if it’s listed or ROLLING otherwise – this means they accept pieces year-round.

The fourth column refers to how much the journal or magazine pays. Note that it does not refer to the submissions fee. Obviously you don’t have to copy me to the letter, but my philosophy here is I only submit to magazines and journals which offer payment and no fee to submit. I recognise that I am providing work for them, and object to the idea that I should pay to work. However, I understand that not every journal and magazine has the means to offer what we would usually think of as a fair payment for the hours sunk into a piece. That’s why I’ll submit to journals and magazines which offer any payment – whether it’s $3 or $300. Even if it’s only a small honorarium, it’s a token of respect for the fact that you are doing work. As for fees, I’d rather monetarily support a journal or magazine by just buying copies and donating.

(Jacaranda Journal does not offer all contributors payment but I was recommended to submit by a former teacher and couldn’t find it in my heart to say no.)

In the fifth column, write the name of the magazine or journal.

The sixth column refers to whether the magazine or journal accepts ‘simultaneous submissions’. This is where you submit the same piece to multiple outlets. And this is possibly the most important thing to keep track of in the spreadsheet – if you submit a piece to an outlet that doesn’t allow simultaneous submissions, and they haven’t gotten back to you, you need to withdraw it before submitting it elsewhere. If you’ve already submitted it to an outlet that does accept sim-subs, you cannot then submit it to an outlet that doesn’t without withdrawing from the first one. If you – like me – get bursts of motivation to submit your work and then drop off for a while, you’ll need to check this column of your spreadsheet when the motivation hits you in case you’ve forgotten about any pesky non-sim-submissions. Personally, I favour outlets that offer simultaneous submissions and outright avoid outlets which don’t allow them and also don’t give you a reasonable estimate (within three months) for when they’ll get back to you.

The last column refers to the status of your piece: whether you’ve submitted it, withdrawn it, it’s been long-listed, short-listed, accepted or rejected. When you submit, you can also write in this column the date you expect to hear back by. Many magazines and journals will give an estimate – a number of weeks or months – of when writers should receive a response, or let you know on the submissions page that if you don’t receive one by then you can consider yourself rejected. If they don’t note the latter, you can take the number of weeks or months as their deadline and follow-up if you don’t hear back. This is the second most important part of the spreadsheet to keep abreast of, as letting a piece languish in an outlet’s slush pile might prevent you from submitting it elsewhere.

When I’ve submitted a piece, I usually highlight the row yellow to immediately signify to myself that something is out-standing. I colour-code the row green for accepted, red for rejected, purple for withdrawn, and orange for long-listed or short-listed. This helps me quickly focus on what I need to address when the spreadsheet gets a bit long, but you might prefer a different method.

Word Count: 719

#23: What is a vox-pop?

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 07:50:13 GMT

After the OpenField arts festival over the weekend, you might have seen me post a series of photos and videos I took in my capacity as a volunteer on the festival’s media team. These included some short interviews with festival attendees called vox-pops.

But what are vox-pops, and why do we use them?

Vox-pop is short for vox populi (voice of the people in Latin). It can also be shortened to ‘voxxie’ if you’re feeling particularly Australian and like to nickname everything twice. It refers to an interview, usually consisting one or only a few questions, with everyday people. This is as opposed to a longer interview with an expert or the subject of the story you’re writing.

The purpose of vox-pops is to show how people generally feel about a certain topic. At an event, for example, conducting vox-pops with attendees can offer insight into the experience of the audience which organisers, stallholders, artists and others involved might not get to have. Usually, a story using vox-pops will include multiple collated together for a general overview of how people are feeling rather than zeroing in on one person.

To conduct a vox-pop, a reporter will usually visit an area relevant to their story and stop passers-by to ask them a question on camera. This can be at an event, but it can also be on a busy street for a story that concerns a more general population. Most of the time, it’s best to ask for people’s permission to record them for use in a story.

The most effective collections of vox-pops usually include very few questions asked, and the questions themselves worded simply. Keeping in mind these are not in-depth interviews, reporters will mostly keep their vox-pop questions general and based in feeling. For example: ‘If you had to describe the event in one word, what would it be?’

The way a reporter chooses to present their collection of vox-pops can vary depending on the story – will it be played on radio, TV, social media? They can be weaved into the rest of the story individually or presented as a package, with the question included or the responses alone. If a collection of vox-pops is shown on its own, it will usually be most effective beginning with the most emotive response, then using the rest of the responses for context.

If you want to see an example, OpenField posted a collection of vox-pops on their Instagram. View them here.

Word Count: 411

#22: Referencing in Memoir

Mon, 19 May 2025 09:55:16 GMT

This newsletter references sexual violence and sexual health issues. Take care when reading. If you need help, please consider calling the Respect National Helpline: 1800 737 732

Not long ago, I submitted a short memoir piece – about the impact that poor sex ed can have on queer students and their relationships later in life – for publication. It will be published next month. And among the edits which took it from submission to publication were two statements which needed a reference.

To understand why they needed changing, I should first tell you what memoir does as a form.

It is a genre of creative non-fiction – which also includes biography, autobiography, personal essay, narrative essay, lyric essay, etc. – wherein a writer recounts from their own life.

While autobiography does something similar, memoir allows the writer to sacrifice breadth of information in favour of style.

This means a memoir piece often covers one or a few experiences rather than an entire life, usually for a point.

And with the genre building done, we can get to the point.

The point of my short memoir piece was to demonstrate with my own experience how poor sex ed impacted my queer relationships later in life. I juxtaposed two scenes – of a sex ed class and a poor attempt at sex – for this effect. But recognising that these two experiences cannot serve as a map for every queer experience, I also supported ‘the point’ with references to other experiences, other people, the bigger picture.

How do you reference the bigger picture? Well, you have to start making some truth statements.

Truth statement 1:

I was diagnosed with vulvodynia at 20 years old. This quiet monster is characterised by a burning nerve pain in and around a patient’s pelvis.

The cause? Researchers disagree. Trauma. Nerve damage. Symptoms from a secondary illness. Question marks on the many patients who don’t fit into these theories.

How it changed:

I got this information from the Royal Women’s Hospital Victoria website . Here’s an actual quote from them:

“Vulvodynia (said ‘vul-vo-din-ia’) is a condition where there is pain, burning and discomfort in the vulva that cannot be linked to a specific cause.

“This pain may or may not be triggered by touch and may be felt in one area or across the whole vulva.

“What causes vulvodynia?

“Unfortunately we don’t yet know.”

Although this statement was correct, the wording of this reference brought the story too far away from my experience. In a personal essay – wherein your experience is a starting point for a broader conversation – this is par for the course. In memoir, you want to stick a bit closer to you.

We changed the line to The cause? My doctors can’t agree. Just to bring it back to me.

Truth statement 2:

In eight years, I would learn the statistic that one in sixteen men are rapists and one in three would be if they knew they’d get away with it. I would count the number of men in a room and wonder which one planned to put their hand over my mouth that night.

How it changed:

I got the 1 in 16 men are rapists statistic from an article published with the American Psychological Association , and the 1 in 3 would be if they thought they’d get away with it stat from an article by University of North Dakota researchers .

While I would recommend reading through them in their entirety, they are also both contested .

The above phrasing posed the two stats as truth statements without acknowledging that other research found issues with the statements or different numbers altogether. I didn’t want to encourage the reader to blindly absorb this number as a hard-and-fast rule, but rather help the reader understand what it felt like to learn that the danger of sexual violence was everywhere. Once again, the solution was to bring the phrasing back to my experience. How did I first discover this information?

In the end, the line changed to: In eight years, I would hold a friend’s shaking hand as she told me that one in sixteen men are rapists and one in three would be if they knew they’d get away with it. I would count the number of men in a room and wonder which one planned to put his hand over my mouth that night.

What do you think of these changes, reader? Do they teach us more about where we draw the line between memoir, autobiography and personal essay? Or have I just rambled on about tinkering around the edges?

Word Count: 755

#21: The Gothic Fairy Tale

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 02:26:27 GMT

In my second entry to the British Fantasy Society Journal, I review the 2020 novel Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings through the lens of the Australian EcoGothic.

In an interview for this article, the author laughed off the idea that Flyaway could be categorised neatly into a single sub-genre – saying it could just as easily be analysed through the lens of literary fantasy or the gothic fairy tale.

I’ve previously written about literary fantasy as a sub-genre, but what does she mean by the gothic fairy tale?

Let’s do some more genre building.

The ‘gothic’ in the gothic fairy tale refers to a ‘notoriously difficult to define’ genre in itself, according to Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University Holly Hirst . She lists the hallmarks of the gothic fiction genre as ‘its darkness, its transgression, its excess and its celebration or exploration of fear’.

Meanwhile, she uses the fairy tale term ‘as a relatively loose term for a range of folkloric productions that may elsewhere be more divisively defined as “wonder-tales,” “folk-tales,” “myths” and other regional denominations’.

To hybridise the genre, Hirst poses, is to present gothic fiction’s characteristic ‘elements of violence, moral transgression and dark sexual desires’ in the style of a folk story.

Going back to Flyaway for examples, we could find standalone chapters in which fairy tales are told as stories within the story. When narrated by Bettina, a standalone chapter comes with a disclaimer like, ‘Gary’s grandmother Vi, who had her own reasons, told it roughly this way, with variations depending on her listeners.’ When narrated by Gary, the fairy tale comes with interruptions from Trish.

And this style contrasts with the sense of madness that pervades the novel; its persistent fantastical descriptions of mundane scenes leave the reader questioning whether a magical event is really happening. Readers may interpret fantastical foreshadowing as ‘flowery’ descriptions of mundane events or happenstance until the canon of the story officially recognises magic in its third act.

‘“Be birds,” I whispered. “Be birds.” I held my breath as long as I could, shut my eyes,’ Bettina narrates as she uses magic to transform her brothers for the first time. ‘When I breathed out, I heard a shifting: a long rustling, a beating of wings that stirred my hair and clattered past – broad harsh feathers, trailing silken ones, pinions that whistled in the air and down that fell softly on my hands.’

On the previous page, she presents her brothers’ belief that they were once birds as a delusion: ‘All I could think of was the cold pressure of the filthy concrete under my knees; the reek of birds and blood; the terrible ruin of two boys who had tried to take themselves apart into whatever they believed our father had made them from.’

I’m attending the online launch event for the BFS Journal edition with my Flyaway review inside on 24 June at 7pm BST.

Word Count: 483

#20: On Hilley Literary

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 09:51:11 GMT

In the last newsletter, I said I would talk soon about why we renamed The Braddyton literary community.

Our community is now called Hilley Literary, after two-thirds of us organisers (Bronwyn and I) moved interstate. Drink every time I mention moving.

We renamed it because The Braddyton was a space which belonged to the three of us. Its original name came from a combination of ours, and it referenced a physical location: our home. The Braddyton needed its lawn mowed. The Braddyton’s bathroom was upstairs. Guests were invited to a poetry night at The Braddyton.

This project began, as I’ve said before, as a backyard gig. The physical space we inhabited informed every one of our events. We had the nexus bedroom. The murder room. The piss-hand zone. The suspicious concrete slab. Until we didn’t.

When our events became slightly too ambitious for a backyard, we moved into Can You Keep A Secret in Woolloongabba. And when we wanted to get some writing done, we hosted sprints online. The project began to transcend the place. Then we moved out.

Rhys, who so generously mowed the lawn and helped set up the fairy lights for our backyard gigs, is still in Meanjin. But Bronwyn and I are now in New South Wales for her degree. We no longer have the place or all three people. It would have been disingenuous to keep the name.

Hilley Literary is a project that still seeks opportunities for writey-writey nerds to share their work, appreciate others’ and set aside the time to hone their craft. Its new name reflects Bronwyn and my continued involvement, and expands its reach beyond a property line.

Right now, we have a weekly quiet writing session on Discord . We are still settling in to see what other beautiful things we can conjure.

In the meantime, I am reducing the frequency of these newsletters to once a month – on the third Monday of every month. Be in touch soon.

Word Count: 328

#19: The Hottest New Writing Hack – Annual Leave

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 08:24:46 GMT

At some point there will be a time when I don’t start a newsletter with ‘I’ve just moved’, but it’s been like three weeks so give me a break.

I’ve just moved to the NSW South Coast. It’s taken a toll on my body, as I knew it would. Luckily, I had the foresight and the privilege to take plenty of annual leave at the end of my contract for my previous role in Meanjin – giving me time to set up and find another job.

I had been applying since November and getting a bit nervous when I didn’t have another contract signed by the time we were packing up the truck, but in a stroke of good fortune I got a phone call with an offer during the twelve-hour drive down. It meant I had a week of annual leave between arriving in my new home and starting at my new job. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

And I know how this sounds. BREAKING NEWS: Zoomer Last To Discover Normal Work-Life Balance Helps Everything, Including Writing.

And yeah that is pretty much it.

But I was honestly amazed by what I could achieve while I wasn’t worried about surviving. While I’m not being paid, I’m so caught up in the desperate struggle to get paid that writing creatively goes on the back-burner. And I can see immediately the difference after starting work – by the end of the workday my brain is already tired out, and the best I can do is cobble together another 500 words.

During that one week, though, I started on a fiction idea I’ve been mulling over for nearly a year but never getting down. And wrote half of it. I produced more creative work by word count in that week than I have in the previous six months. If you get the chance to take a paid week off work and write, I would highly recommend doing so.

How do you harness this extra time, though?

There were a few moments during that week when I felt the temptation to sink into my bed and scroll on my phone a bit longer. Part of me itched to check my work email. It can be difficult, even when you’ve taken free time, to appreciate it. If you’re burnt out, it’s hard to be anything but tired and do anything but be tired.

I also had house-setting-up things to do and so I structured my writing around that. I would start the day by making a cup of tea and chucking a podcast on, and sorting the house until the episode was over. Then, I told myself, I would write a page. More often than not it turned into two or three pages before I needed to think about what came next. And when I did, I refused to sit there and watch the still screen and think I’m so tired, I can’t do this . Instead, I would chuck a podcast on, get myself a little treat and sort some stuff around the house. It was doing the double-duty of giving me space away from the screen to think about the story’s trajectory in detail. Come back for a page, or three. Repeat. This method saw me through about 2,000 words per day. Maybe something like that would work for you?

Now that I’m back at work and groaning in misery at the thought of typing another word after each workday, I am really looking forward to weekends. That’s because every Saturday evening at 6pm-8pm AEST (7pm-9pm AEDT) I’m hosting writing sessions on our literary community Discord .

You might know it as The Braddyton, but we’ve renamed it Hilley Literary to reflect our new activities in this new place. I might do a newsletter about that in the future.

These sessions are a great excuse to set aside some time for writing. We’re using the pomodoro method (30 minutes of quiet writing, a break, repeat) so we can chat to each other in breaks but also actually get things done. Feel free to drop in at any time during the sessions, and don’t worry about making it to every one – even just the one little visit is great!

Word Count: 707

#18: Nature Writing and The Long Shadow of Climate Change

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 10:13:22 GMT

Before I left Meanjin, I performed one last set at poets@stones. It included some old favourites and some newbies, including A Galaxy Of . This poem captures an experience seeing glow worms for the first time. It’s probably my best attempt at nature writing to date – and I spent the entire time writing it under the long shadow of climate change.

I don’t need to explain climate change to you, but I will offer a definition of nature writing. Noted nature writer David Rains Wallace said in 1984 that works in the genre “are appreciative esthetic responses to a scientific view of nature”, and alongside essays there is “nature fiction, nature poetry, nature reporting, even nature drama, if television documentary narrations are literature”. He called it “revolutionary”.

I based my poem on a glow worm experience in Lamington National Park with one of my Americans. Not only did his visit inspire the endeavour (you never really think of exploring your own region by yourself), but the sheen of new-place enthusiasm in his eyes would rub off on yours if you looked long enough. Long after he left, I would drive across the Story Bridge or down a particularly dramatic hill and feel enough to cry. During the visit, I smiled our way up the winding and pot-holed road to Lamington – enjoying mother nature making us work for it.

My American came and left in the August heatwave, when temperatures never sank below 25C.

We attended a guided tour, a dozen in the group. The guide took us on a short bus ride from the tour centre down to a walking track, where we waddled single-file with red lights in hand. White light would burn the glow worms, so we squinted and huddled away from funnel-web spiders and gympie-gympie. When we arrived at the viewing site – three rows of benches a creek away from a wall of dirt overhung by moss – the water vapour around us had condensed into drops on the tips of our noses. Two kids swung around their red torches until they were wrested away, and the glow worms appeared blue on the wall after thirty seconds of darkness.

Our guide relayed glow worm facts to us one at a time in low tones, seconds of silence to let us soak it in. This is one of the only known glow worm sites left in Australia. Other sites have been destroyed by overtourism. Adults are flies which only travel a few metres in their life. Even the red light can hurt them.

The next line was not really true.

They’re actually yellow, he said. They only look blue to the kids because their eyes are damaged from screen time.

To be clear, Australian glow worms are blue. This is a story to scare children off their iPad. But it sparked a kind of grief in me: the rarity of the worms, their decline, that we wouldn’t recognise them as adults, that we maybe don’t recognise them either way. My American challenged me to write about the experience, and I couldn’t help but come back to this sense of loss. That if you think hard enough about any aspect of nature, you get to the part where we’re losing it.

Laura Pritchett, a modern nature writer of the American West, says acknowledging climate change is essential to the genre. She wrote in a 2024 piece that the best nature writing centres “the idea that caretaking of the planet is worthy of exploration, the highest of human endeavors, the best survival story of all survival stories … The themes are driven by enormous existential questions not about love or religion or economies, but the fate of life itself.”

A work of nature writing can be “celebration or advocacy. Delight or deep ecogrief. Investigative or informative” but the modern nature writing voice is often “stronger, more intense, more laser-focused” on the changing climate than before.

“It’s like the gentrified tea parties of yesteryear got taken over by ragers.”

Write what you know, I guess.

I can’t share the whole poem with you, but here’s a snip of the end:

yellow is my favourite colour, I tell him.

mine too, he says. I have a habit

of mourning worlds I’ve never seen.

we’re home to the most endangered

species on the planet, he says,

and we have a habit of measuring

our worth by how much we have lost.

Word Count: 739

#17: On The Future

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:48:07 GMT

I’ve made a big deal these past few weeks about leaving.

There was a newsletter on it. There was a farewell poetry event. Right now, I’m in a Canberra hotel room on my little ‘farewell tour’ seeing friends and family before I go. And during this process, a few people have asked: what’s next for The Braddyton?

For those who don’t know, The Braddyton is a literary community my housemates and I created in Moorooka, unofficially renaming our house and hosting events in it. As the events grew, we moved some into the Woolloongabba venue Can You Keep A Secret? and online on our Discord server .

We started hosting events because we felt Meanjin had lost some of its vital creative spaces in the past few years. This project was aimed at inspiring creators to continue sharing their work while giving organisers time to regroup after some heavy venue losses. And it worked. For those already attending poetry events and looking for more, SpeakEasy Poetry is returning at Echo & Bounce . We are so, so proud.

The truth is, we don’t know if we will continue The Braddyton’s in-person events after the move. We’re moving to a small town in New South Wales. Its creatives will likely have vastly different needs to those in Meanjin. In my opinion, the saddest and stupidest thing we could do would be to copy and paste this project in a different place. We would be neglecting local artists’ actual problems by serving our own egos. The Braddyton was made to help, so we need some time to figure out how best we can do that anew. That means we will take a break from running in-person events for a while.

However, I previously mentioned our Discord server . This was initially set up to facilitate a month-long writing sprint in November last year. Since some writers found it helpful then, we want to revive it for something more permanent.

Beginning the 1st of March, I will be hosting weekly two-hour-long writing sessions on the server from 7-9pm AEDT (6-8pm AEST). That’s every Saturday evening. Feel free to join as much or little as you like – just drop in for one if that suits you best. We also have a text channel for feedback if you’re not free at the allotted time but still want to share.

I’ve made a big deal about leaving, but I promise to haunt you. And if you still think of this as another loss, I dare you to do something even better.

Word Count: 421

#16: Five Blue Bottle Poems to Celebrate Five Blue Bottle Years

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 11:27:55 GMT

Blue Bottle Journal will celebrate its fifth anniversary in June this year. Founding editor Sean West brought the project to life during the lockdowns of mid- 2020 , and has been accepting submissions about every second month since.

Here are some of my favourite poems from each year of the journal’s life so far.

2020: House Hunters

While house hunting for an upcoming move, I am of course drawn to Rae White comparing me to a lapwing – the desperate search for shelter like the bird’s forage for food. The never-ending nightmare of mowing is too real. And the feather-friend answer to a cat’s “if I fits, I sits”: “if it flat, we nest”.

2021: Life is Occupation

This found poem from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of the Island evokes the tragedy and violence of a society occupied, the pain endured from the sanding down of identity into someone else’s normalcy. Svetlana Sterlin notes the surviving pre-occupation objects are “pretentions sprawling protectively / over no great art” while the subject will “go down to my grave / unwept, unhonoured, and unsung”.

2022: Angourie, NSW.

Have I become obsessed with New South Wales-based things since planning to move interstate? Is it my dream to write poems about the ominous quiet of a seaside town? Did I look up Angourie and add it to my visit list after reading? Look. We may never know the answers to these questions. But Emily Bartlett ’s words did something to me, OK?

2023: I am the swarm

Nikita Kostaschuk (ink.eyta) has written a few poems about executive dysfunction – ghosts of Meanjin literary events might be familiar with their sisyphean dishes. In I am the swarm , they seem to plead with their housemate to recognise their humanity beyond their ability to provide labour. It’s a worthy addition to the growing canon of their anti-capitalist, ADHD-coded work.

2024: The Pearl as Immune Response

As a sapphic, I can’t deny the appeal of heartbreak and the sea. Maddy Dale ’s picture of a heartbroken soul in the shallows satisfies the aesthetic urge. The sea creates wonders and destroys them and doesn’t care either way. After realising you did, too, maybe that’s the best place to let go.

2025: Ceviche

The first and only poem yet published by Blue Bottle this year, Ceviche automatically gets the spot. But it deserves it nonetheless. Paris Rosemont ’s biting description underscores the carnal want, neediness of a sexual relationship.

Blue Bottle is collaborating with The Braddyton – a literary community project by myself and my housemates – on a poetry event for Saturday, January the 18th from 3pm to 5pm. Join us for an afternoon of curated poetry by Rae White, Maddy Dale, Svetlana Sterlin and Shastra Deo!

Word Count: 447

#15: Reviewing The Exclusion Zone

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 12:26:26 GMT

“You are searching for something.
You have searched for a very long time.

You have crossed the length of this land and back on

your hands and knees.

You wait for someone to answer.”

Shastra Deo’s second book The Exclusion Zone begins with a dare: turn to page 5. But this isn’t the choose-your-own adventure novel of your grandparents’ childhoods. There are no dice. There is no prose. Sometimes there is not even a choice.

UQP published The Exclusion Zone last year, and yes I’m only reviewing it now because Shastra is tragically leaving Australia for the United States and performing in January before she goes. But I would also argue its themes have only snowballed in relevance since its publication.

This is a choose-your-own-adventure poetry collection set in an apocalyptic hellscape. Which is certainly a string of words. When it first came out, Shastra appeared at a Brisbane Writers Festival event where she gave some insight as to how she can write poetry into an overall story, let alone many overall storylines with alternate endings.

“I’m a fiction writer,” she said at the time.

“When I discovered poetry, I thought, ‘Oh, I can write short fiction, but even shorter?’”

This attitude towards the form shines in The Exclusion Zone . ‘Aubade’ tells the story of a boy starving. ‘Transcript of a Fight Scene’ is, in fact, a fight scene. But it’s not really prose fiction, that it’s all referring to.

Also in that conversation, Shastra assured the audience there was no ‘right way’ to read the book. If you want to read it front to back and ignore the prompts, nothing is stopping you, and you should still have a good experience (a relief to me, a completionist worried about missing out on certain poems should I follow a certain path). She said she wanted it to feel like an open-world video game.

This is front-and-centre in The Exclusion Zone , which has a section called ‘The Game Room’ and poems which use controller symbols, language like ‘walkthrough’, structures like flow-charts. Although it doesn’t rely on specific game references, it’s heavily mired in the culture of gaming.

When we add that to the full-on sentence from earlier, the genre-mash up seems overwhelming. But from its first page, The Exclusion Zone blends these elements together to create the feeling of being inside the best eerie dystopian RPG. Think: if you could have all the Death Stranding vibes and none of the annoyance of actually playing the game.

These are not the relevant-to-2024 themes I was referencing earlier, though. I personally would love to see a suddenly ballooning market for gamer-culture choose-your-own-adventure apocalyptic poetry collections, but The Exclusion Zone remains unique. I was talking about why there’s an apocalypse.

The last line from Shastra’s Brisbane Writers Festival chat I’ll recall is an insistence that the poems in this collection are fictional, that she did not recount her own life events and experiences for this book but rather imagined a story where these poems would live.

But the story is rooted in reality.

While some of it only hints vaguely at a collapse of humanity (like in ‘How Deep’) and some suggests a far-future setting (like ‘Aubade’), many of the poems in this collection directly comment on modern historical events (‘Fukushima Soil’, ‘Things We Inscribed In The Voyager Golden Record’, ‘Undertakers Of The Atom’). Some appear to describe contemporary moments (‘Fishing at Caer a’Muirehen’, ‘Learning A Dead Language’, ‘Shastra Deo’). Even these create a sense of an ending.

The inclusion of modern history, contemporary scenery, near-future, indescribable collapse and far-future poetry implies a real opinion if it doesn’t actually tell it to you. When we face seemingly endlessly increasing disaster, tragedy, conflict, death, the core of this collection becomes less and less fictional: We are in the prequel of the apocalypse. We are searching for something. We are waiting for someone to answer. Sometimes there is not a choice. Where will we turn next?

Word Count: 653

#14: On Leaving

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:02:00 GMT

Those who follow The Braddyton literary community might have noticed a distinct lack of events this month. We’re taking a bit of a break from the literary madness following a thoroughly mad November, but we’ll be back in January with a very special poetry event at Can You Keep A Secret.

Why is this event so special?

Well. We’re leaving.

I set up The Braddyton with my housemates Bronwyn and Rhys to serve Magandjin’s literary freaks after some of our key events shut down. SpeakEasy. Gather Round. Lonely’s. Volta. The seeming mass dismantling of this city’s literary community became such a sticking point in conversation that we became annoying at parties. Our friends were exhausted with our complaining. ‘Why don’t you just set one up then?’ So we did.

It has been such a magical experience, from making tea and sharing poetry in our backyard to booking a venue for Halloween. An abundance of cheesecakes. Chocolate-chip cookies. Rooibos chai. Fairy lights. Too many cushions. Shouting poetry over road noise. And last month, a near-daily writing challenge on Discord.

But Bronwyn has been accepted into a postgraduate program interstate, and we’ve decided it’s time for a life change. Bronwyn and I are heading for the NSW South Coast, and we’re bringing this project with us – whatever it becomes.

January’s event is a collaboration with Blue Bottle Journal, involving Sean West, Shastra Deo and other fantastic writers. Because we’re also seeing Shastra off before she moves to the US. It’s just one big farewell party, y’all. Look out for more info coming soon.

As we prepare to say our goodbyes, I’d like to invite you to become the annoying person at parties. We set this up because we care about our literary community here. What are you willing to do for it?

Word Count: 300

#13: What is ‘Literary Fantasy’?

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 11:55:12 GMT

My academic piece 'A New Definition For Literary Fantasy' will be published in the winter edition of the British Fantasy Society journal , out on December 10.

This is a literature review looking at the ways in which academics and publishers have used the term ‘literary fantasy’ when writing, reading, studying, and marketing different works.

The subtitle on this piece is ‘Looking beyond publishing elitism’. And this is for a reason.

I found that academics and publishers have often used the term ‘literary fantasy’ to mean ‘good fantasy’ – couching personal preference in the appearance of ‘literary’ legitimacy, and falsely justifying elitism.

But I also found that the term is not actually well-known at all outside this circle. I surveyed a group of readers at UQ and online, and asked what it meant to them. Some used the term to mean ‘fantasy fiction’ – deeming the ‘literary’ not as a genre marker but simply a signpost that we were in fact talking about books.

Literary fantasy is a hybrid genre between literary fiction and fantasy fiction.

You might have seen hybrid genres before. Romantasy, or hybrid romance/fantasy, is one of the most popular. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a historic fantasy. Frankenstein is gothic science fiction.

But there’s trouble in hybridising with the literary fiction genre. Namely, no one seems to agree on exactly what ‘literary’ means.

Oh, you’ve seen it around. UQP is a ‘literary’ publisher – never publishing genre fiction except for all the times they do. The classics all seem to be ‘literary’. And contemporary ‘literary’ isn’t too hard to spot. Think Sally Rooney. Think The Lovely Bones . There is something identifiable about it, even if it’s hard to pin down. There’s a (dare I say, literary) essay which almost gets at this idea. It says when asked what an eshay is, an Australian might rightly answer, “You know, you see them on trains.”

But is that something just that the thing is good?

Um, no, I say. That’s a value judgement, not a genre.

In my piece, I argue that while fantasy fiction works are driven by the presentation of realities far removed from a reader’s waking experience, literary fiction works are driven by experimentation with form and the prose within it. A literary work doesn’t need to be good at this – this just needs to be the most important thing about it, above and beyond the characters, the plot, the worldbuilding.

And literary fantasy? Now it seems much easier to define. If your experimentation with form and prose supports your efforts at creating a magical reality, now you’re working in the hybrid genre. Whether or not you’re good at it.

To celebrate the BFS Journal’s winter issue, I'm joining Avery-Claire Galloway (fiction editor at The Peacock's Feet), Dr Joyce McPherson (biographer of George MacDonald) and Amanda Coleman White (Ink Sweat and Tears feature) for an online launch event .

Apologies to my Brisbane friends, it will be at 4am on December 11 for us – but for those across the pond I would be delighted to see you register.

Word Count: 510

#12: How to Deliver Effective Content Warnings

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:54:04 GMT

This month, The Braddyton is hosting our first and probably only open mic.

Events like these can kickstart an artist’s love of performing, building their lonely creative process into a collaborative one. It did for me. That’s why I appreciate other Brisbane open mic events like Ruckus and Echoes at the Cave Inn.

Unfortunately, organisers don’t often post advice on how performers can deliver effective content warnings before they speak about something potentially re-traumatising. A performer with experience in delivering content warnings might be able to anyway, but for someone just starting out those thoughts can get jumbled up in the regular jitters of speaking into a microphone.

The result is, in my view, catastrophic. A performer usually creates art on a topic like this for catharsis or connection, but their catharsis might cost an attendee a panic attack, a relapse, a waking nightmare – and connection becomes impossible.

To succeed in catharsis without causing pain, and making a true connection with an audience member, I believe performers must deliver effective content warnings. These are not crowd-wide platitudes, off-hand, half-baked asides. They are essential for ensuring those who cannot connect with you right now have the opportunity to decline on their own terms; and equally, those who can have the opportunity to choose to.

Before hosting a curated event, I let each performer know that we expect Braddyton attendees be given this opportunity to choose. Here is a more full guide for your reference:

1. What to flag

When looking at your own work, it can be hard to see what in it might affect people in different ways – especially if it was cathartic for you to create. Take a step back and analyse with a bit of coldness what subjects it actually broaches.

It doesn’t matter how lightly, how nuanced, how true to your experiences, even how funny it is. If it covers suicide (+ideation), abuse, gendered violence, sexual violence or harrassment, self-harm (including skin-picking), disordered eating, grief and death, or drowning, it definitely needs a warning. If not, a good test would be: ‘Have I ever not wanted to hear about this for a bad reaction in the past?’, ‘Would I have appreciated a warning about this at some point?’ or ‘Would anyone I know?’

2. What not to flag

I want to reiterate here that a content warning is not an off-hand crowd-pleasing aside. It actually informs how some audience members will take in your piece, even if you don’t see anyone leaving. In the past, I’ve seen performers follow an act delivered with a content warning by standing up and delivering their own as a joke. Think: ‘The last act might have involved a lot of insect-talk, but content warning, mine involves a cute cat’.

I’m not saying these comments are made with malice – when you’ve seen a formula in previous acts and you can’t follow it, you tend to try to make up that you do. If you want to sing a song about a cute cat and there is nothing to warn anyone of, that can also be true. You are allowed to not say anything, even if you follow acts which discuss difficult topics with proper content warnings. I can assure you, the joking content warning route is only hurtful. It makes a mockery of a process designed to help people feel safe in a creative space, and instantly designates you as an unsafe person as a result.

3. How much time to give those affected

Okay, we accept when we need to deliver content warnings and that we shouldn’t make fun of them on the mic. But they can be kind of useless, right? When you’re in a big venue and it will take people two minutes to leave and you’ll be through the piece anyway by that point? Or when waiting will have others watching as those affected run off, red-faced, as if in a walk of shame? Or when people don’t really know where to go, whether they will be let back in if they step out, or where the bathrooms are?

When you haven’t been affected by a piece in this way, this can all seem very trifling. But in the moment, if you have something like PTSD, these things make you feel like there is no escape from the horror you once experienced coming back again.

My advice is to familiarise yourself with the venue so you can direct people to the bathroom, to a second room in the venue like a rooftop bar if they have one, and reassure those who choose to go outside that they will be let back in. This might sound a bit weird, but it is okay to waffle a little bit. It will give affected people time to leave if they choose to, without the awkward silence.

Here’s a little script if you need one:

"This piece references [subject]. If you just don't want to hear about that right now, feel free to take a piss, go for a smoke, grab some air, or pop in to the main bar. [Front door staff member] will let you in afterwards. It will take [however many minutes]. Here it is."

Word Count: 863

#11: If you write in November, are you pro-AI? (Um, no)

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 11:54:29 GMT

November is just around the corner and The Braddyton has a whole schedule planned to celebrate the National Novel Writing Month (which I’ve previously renamed the National Non-Stop Writing Month for the working writers).

The schedule includes Discord catch-ups for that healthy peer pressure to meet NaNoWriMo’s characteristic 2,000-word daily quota. I’ll be hosting most of them during the day and Bronwyn Bradley, whose poetry I’ve previously reviewed , will be hosting two for the night owls.

On the 24th of November, we’ll be hosting an open mic night where everyone is welcome to share the fruits of their NaNoWriMo labour!

Now.

For those amongst us who are interested in the literary tea, NaNoWriMo is not just a month of locking in. It’s also an organisation.

Earlier this year, the organisation NaNoWriMo released a statement about the use of AI tools in writing. The initial statement asserted AI can be a useful tool for those who are disabled or from marginalised communities who would otherwise not have access to the inner circle of the publishing industry. After backlash, they amended it to say there are “bad actors in the AI space” but that they find “the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic”. It has been updated again to remove the latter comment and instead states, “ AI is simply too big and too varied to categorically support or condemn .”

Those previously involved with the organisation had none of it. That people with disabilities would replace accessibility tools with a plagiarism machine was offensive. That people from marginalised communities needed to copy published authors’ homework to get their own books published was offensive. That anyone could simply ignore the “bad actors” involved in the development and rollout of AI was offensive. There had been scandals associated with NaNoWriMo before – with mods on their forums, with their children’s program, with managing games and local events, with promoting vanity presses – but this was the final straw.

Writers agreed to take their accounts off NaNoWriMo forums and set up their own communities. But can a community which still celebrates NaNoWriMo the month truly take meaningful power and resources from NaNoWriMo the organisation ? How close can you stay while still ‘distancing yourself’?

I mean, you can’t ignore the bad actors, right?

Those who broke away will argue one organisation does not get to dictate what we do with our time over a month, and writers around the world can still lock in together and find community without them.

On the NaNoWriMo subreddit, writers are still using the term to describe the month while sharing alternate sites for tracking their progress. I’m not especially interested in things like this, but if watching number go up was a big thing for you in previous years maybe consider Trackbear or Write November .

There’s an argument to be made that using the term NaNoWriMo tacitly endorses the organisation. I mean, their website is the first result when you search for the month. But like those breakaway writers, I refuse to let them take away our community activity – I would much rather take the community away from them.

Word Count: 518

#10: Announcements

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 10:36:25 GMT

Welcome to our 10th edition of Show Word Count ! So far, we’ve explored how much of yourself you might share in your art, how long you should look at it, and how you might balance it with your working life. We’ve begun the process of exploring the ways in which we consume news, poetry and comedy. And we’ve touched on the importance of supporting your scene.

But things are changing around here.

I’m switching to a bi-weekly newsletter

I started Show Word Count as a weekly newsletter and have loved the process of writing not-for-work as a habit every week. It’s helped me maintain the flow of writing for longer, so I can work on other projects as well.

But I’ve had to postpone two editions so far for literary events. Thinking about that, I’ve decided my various projects are now competing with each other. By making this newsletter bi-weekly starting from now, I may be able to keep it a bit more consistent.

I’m emceeing a spooky storytelling night

It’s spooky season, and while it may already be too muggy and mosquito-ridden to enjoy a campfire tale, it’s the perfect time to suffer four horrific chronicles around a (fake) fireplace.

Let our expert storytellers Killian MacDonald, Nora Banerjee, Avery Garrick and Henry Gimpel regale you with cautionary tales of a mother’s love, a child’s curiosity, and more.

Grab an excellent drink at the bar and consider , this happened 20 years ago in this very forest…

We’re preparing for NaNoWriMo

At the Braddyton, we’re hosting a near-daily online writing session on our Discord server so you can block out the time to write, post your word-count-accountability and get feedback on your work from fellow writers! We will also be hosting an open mic where you can share the fruits of your labour at the end of November, but more on that later.

We will be posting the full Braddyton NaNoWriMo schedule soon.

We are not affiliated with the NaNoWriMo organisation, especially in light of their comments on AI and bot usage. We would just like to celebrate a month of locking in together.

My academic work is being published in the British Fantasy Society Journal

Last year, I wrote a dissertation titled A New Definition For Literary Fantasy where I explored the genre of – you guessed it – literary fantasy as a hybrid genre. I argued that while some publishers and academics use the term ‘literary fantasy’ as a synonym for ‘good fantasy’, a more impactful way to use the term might be to identify the genre tropes of literary fiction and fantasy fiction and how those might be hybridised. I performed a literature review and textual analysis to propose a definition and point to examples of works that fit it. The literature review is being published by the British Fantasy Society in early December. We’ll see if we can find a home for the textual analysis.

Word Count: 486

#9: Aoife’s NaNoWriMo For Working Writers

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 10:36:59 GMT

It’s a busy time of year for writers. October’s spooky festivities have brought us out of the woodwork for various horror, thriller and horror-comedy themed events. We’re telling scary stories around a (fake) fire at Can You Keep A Secret at the end of the month, in a very special deviation from the usual monthly backyard poetry event. And The Braddyton has been redecorated with stretchy spiderwebs, costume-blood-filled goblets and skeleton toys for our October 5 event which welcomed in the season. But for those with a habit of constantly looking round the proverbial corner, you’ll know the busy-ness doesn’t end on October 31.

November marks the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a one-month marathon wherein writers around the world lock in to clock up 2,000 words per day on their chosen project. It’s a beautiful experience. It’s also kind of intense. And I would argue, not built for the working writer.

This might be a misconception, but I imagine three target audiences for NaNoWriMo. Those who can afford to take time off, those who don’t work except on their manuscript and those who work non-writing jobs and appreciate large swaths of writing time as a ‘break’.

Working writers, however, can regularly clock up to 2,000 words per day. And coming home to write more is not a break and may not even be productive. Try writing 4,000 instead of 2,000 words per day during NaNoWriMo and you’ll see what I mean – your brain can turn to soup about halfway through and anything left is unusable.

So I propose an alternate NaNoWriMo for working writers. The National Non-Stop Writing Month. The change is simple: clock up 2,000 words per day on anything. If you write 1,000 words of website copy for your marketing job in a day, come home and write 1,000 words of your project. Or of many. In this alternate version, I recognise that we’re not just working on novels and you are indeed allowed to finish a short story halfway through your allotted daily word count then begin something else. These pieces are valuable, too.

We’re celebrating NaNoWriMo at The Braddyton by launching a community Discord . Feel free to log on and post your daily progress for writey-accountability or feedback at any time – but we will also have scheduled writing sessions almost every day of November from 12:30pm-4:30pm AEST. The full schedule will be posted in the Discord and on The Braddyton community Facebook page soon.

During the sessions, we’ll be quietly writing until someone reaches their 2,000-word daily goal and then taking a break and exchanging feedback. After the break, we’ll repeat until another person has reached the goal. We’re Pavlov-ing ourselves into doing the thing, you guys.

You don’t have to be there for every minute of every session. Drop in whichever days you’re free, at any point within those times. If you’re here, you’re on time.

We will not have an in-person writing meet-up in November for this reason.

At the end of the month, we’ll be hosting an open mic where you can share your NaNoWriMo creations! More details on this later.

Word Count: 529

#8: What Is An Ekphrastic Poem? What Is Fan Poetry?

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 13:28:13 GMT

Towards the back of my zine I’ll Never Get Over Any Of Them is one of the shortest poems I’ve written, titled After ‘Professor Marston And The Wonder Women’. It goes like this:

After Professor Marston And The Wonder Women

you assign us each a main character

a real person who existed

we think about who they are alone

who they are together

and our answers change

‘I want to live in a house with you both,’

you say,

‘I want to have kids’

we all volunteer to die at the end

I wrote this after watching the 2017 movie with two partners. It follows Professor William Moulton Marston and his wife Elizabeth as they fall in love with their lab assistant, Olive. The Marstons worked in psychology and developed DISC theory, a theory of human behaviour they later infused with theories of BDSM. They invented the lie detector, though it’s now considered defunct. And Mr Marston is credited with the creation of DC’s Wonder Woman, whom he based on Elizabeth and Olive. But most importantly, the three of them built a life together until Mr Marston died of cancer in 1947. Elizabeth and Olive lived together for another 43 years, until Olive’s death in 1990. Elizabeth lived to be 100.

After ‘Professor Marston And The Wonder Women’ is an ekphrastic poem. You can probably now guess what that means from context, but essentially ekphrasis is the process of responding. Ekphrastic poetry is traditionally poetry which responds to a piece of visual art, but poets have expanded its meaning to any response – whether to music, a movie, an interview, an ad, or another poet’s performance.

But wait, I hear you saying. That sounds a lot like fan poetry. Just like fan fiction is fiction written in response to existing work, surely you can just write poetry which does the same?

The answer is yes, you can.

Just like fan fiction usually engages with a work by offering a new perspective on it, filling in a gap or adding a new element to it, fan poetry can do the same. This is where the two genres differ; where fan poetry usually engages directly with the text in a fannish way, ekphrastic poetry usually focuses on an emotional response. In After ‘Professor Marston And The Wonder Women’ , for example, I recounted my emotional experience watching the movie instead of inserting myself into it.

Have you written any ekphrastic poems, reader? Any fan poems to show? Or do you have a text you want to see reflected in a poem?

Word Count: 427

#7: Is Brisbane A Literary City?

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 12:11:28 GMT

If I asked you to think of a ‘literary city’, where would your mind go?

Maybe London, in which just the small district of Bloomsbury once housed Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Dorothy L. Sayers, and William Butler Yeats?

Or Oxford, the university town where J. R. R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis found their feet?

Or New York City, where three of the ‘big five’ publishing houses are headquartered?

Or would you think of a UNESCO City of Literature – one of the cities which has made a bid for the UN to promote their literary arts scene?

We have one in Australia. No prizes for guessing where (Naarm/Melbourne).

Meanjin/Magandjin is not included in the UNESCO Creative Cities initiative , but I want to argue for our place as a ‘literary city’ in maybe a less official capacity. Here’s my pitch:

1. Brisbane Writers Festival is the longest-running writers festival in Australia

Brisbane Writers Festival, hosted annually at the State Library of Queensland, is over 200 years old . When celebrating BWF’s 200-year anniversary in 2022, CEO Sarah Runcie noted the “culturally valuable and unique” scene in Meanjin/Magandjin where “you can hardly run out of talent”.

The State Library also hosted the now-defunct Queensland Poetry Festival, while this year’s Brisbane Festival Storytelling program includes eight events and Anywhere Festival has staged nearly 1,000 productions over its 14-year life so far .

2. The Avid Reader is Australia’s favourite bookshop

This independent bookstore in West End won the 2021 Bookshop of the Year award at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and its owner Fiona Stager this year was awarded the ABIA’s Lloyd O’Neil award for “fostering a vibrant literary community in Brisbane”.

The Avid Reader is the jewel of Boundary Street, along with its sister bookstore Where The Wild Things Are and friendly rival Bent Books. For those seeking independent bookstores a bit further out, Books@Stones down in (you guessed it) Stones Corner hosts a monthly poetry night , and Harry Hartog opened in Carindale just a few years ago.

3. We’re home to Australia’s darling writers

If you can think of an Australian author, I swear there’s at least a one-in-three chance they’re from Meanjin/Magandjin. Writers from our little-city-that-could are over-represented in our own and the world’s view of Australian literature, and that’s because we’re good .

Trent Dalton, of Boy Swallows Universe fame, grew up on the West side. Former 7:30 anchor and Any Ordinary Day author Leigh Sales went to the Queensland University of Technology . Kim Wilkins, the MVP of Australian fantasy, teaches at the University of Queensland . We have Benjamin Law. We have Nick Earls. We have Rae White. We have Melissa Lucashenko. Are you kidding me? We’re unbeatable.

4. We have a fledgeling publishing scene

During my master’s, my university mates and I were repeatedly told we should move to Sydney if we wanted to get into publishing. Sydney hosts the Australian offices belonging to the ‘big five’, they said. Our literary publishing scene is dominated by the University of Queensland Press, they said, with only a textbook publisher and a series of pay-to-print services nearby.

But zine publishers like Mid-Latitude and literary journals like Blue Bottle are diversifying the mediums under which we can produce literary work from home. This is an area in which I see Meanjin/Magandjin developing a bit further to support our literary talent.

5. Hollywood is pushing into Queensland, and our screenwriters are running with it

An hour’s drive south of Meanjin/Magandjin sits the massive warehouses Hollywood filmmakers are making more and more use of on the Gold Coast, thanks to its cheaper rents compared to Los Angeles. The move has provided work for crew members including make-up and special effects teams, editors, etc. But it’s also brought more money and attention to Queensland’s film talent, which Screen Queensland is leveraging to uplift voices across the state.

Brisbane International Film Festival kicks off next month , alongside sister events New Farm Queer Film Festival and Noosa International Film Festival. Shayne Armstrong, the script doctor who made Bait bearable, teaches at QUT and UQ.

But if you’ve been involved in our supposedly thriving literary community over the last couple of years, I’m sure you’ve noticed a change. The closing of Cinnamon & Co. in West End also brought an end to SpeakEasy Poetry. When Lonely’s closed, so did its poetry night. And I mentioned before that the Queensland Poetry Festival is now defunct – that’s because Queensland Poetry is now defunct, wrapped in to the Queensland Writers Centre with cuts to events like Volta.

In a period where our publishing sector is still hungry for more literary houses based at home and our screenwriters are only just beginning to see the benefits of a larger film industry presence in Queensland, we don’t exactly need cuts to literary institutions. As promising as Meanjin/Magandjin is as a literary city, it isn’t yet as established as London and New York. It needs help to grow.

We still need publishing houses to invest in an office in Meanjin/Magandjin. We need studios to invest in Queensland stories told on screen. And now more than ever we need a place for people to share their work aloud.

My housemates and I are putting on a monthly, curated backyard poetry gig featuring four poets and accompanied by baked goods and tea. But to regain our footing after blow after blow to the literary community in the last couple of years, we need poets and organisers to commandeer more venues. We need to re-sow now, so we can all bloom again.

Word count: 929

Photo credit: Chloë Callistemon

#6: The Freelancer Snowball Effect, & How I Accidentally Became An Industrial Writer

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:42:58 GMT

During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast with professional suck-up Josh Horowitz, professional Irish treasure Cillian Murphy re-ran his weirdly hustle-culture-influencer phrase ‘work begets work’.

(He also says ‘good work begets good work’, which, maybe I enjoy more?)

It’s his go-to interview line; he’s re-used it when speaking to The New York Times , The Washington Post , and The Irish Times . And I know this because of work which I got… from other work.

I think you know what it means, but if you don’t, it means if you take a job and you’re good at it then you’re probably going to get another job through that one. Either someone at that job will offer you something (better) within the same company, or someone will remember you from that job when they move into another (better) project, or just having that job as a reference will be the reason you’re hired when you’re applying for something (better) else. It’s pretty simple, and also just a nice idea to remember when you’re in the rut of ‘why am I even doing this’ – like, remembering the possibility is essential for wondering what you’re going to do with it.

Freelancers sometimes call this the ‘snowball effect’. You get one gig, and it goes well, and that client kind of recommends you to their friends, and suddenly you have two clients, then three, then five. I had this when I was house-sitting and dog-sitting – suddenly I was spending every second week at an upper-class middle-aged lady’s place in inner-south Brisbane walking two Labradors and trying desperately to figure out how rich people showers work (it’s different, I swear).

But there’s another side to work begets work.

It’s not just good work begets good work; it’s this work begets this work.

Let me explain.

I came across Cillian Murphy’s quote while working for Cover Media, a UK-based news agency which produces a lot of arts and entertainment content for Yahoo , MSN , tabloids, and random sketchy websites you’ve never heard of before . I don’t work there anymore, but my path to getting the job was part of a long-haul ongoing project to write in the arts and entertainment space.

I started on this goal in university, photographing for events like Brisbane Writers Festival and Supanova Comic-Con, indie musicians like Patrick Williams and Amy Elise, and The Photo Studio in West End. I wasn’t the sharpest photographer in the world, but I was cheap (mostly free) and keen.

The Supanova gig led me to write for their website, on Supanova News . For four years, I (sporadically) produced interviews , reviews , and advertorials . It was this volunteer work on my resume which convinced Cover to hire me.

But I was foiled. During my volunteering years, I received a job offer at a marketing company which would come to be known as Constructiv Digital . Of course I took it; I needed money. There, I wrote website and blog copy for clients in the industrial sector and articles for the (now defunct) Flapping Mouth trade magazine. I do not come from a construction background, but I learnt the lingo and now play games with friends whenever we drive past a construction site: Name That Machine. I started asking industry folks the right questions, which meant I was hirable as an industrial writer.

My work at Constructiv Digital led me to One Mandate Media, which produces magazines like The Australian Farmer and Innovatia . There, I produced advertorials for The Australian Farmer and was eventually named the deputy managing editor for an Innovatia issue . I now had a string of industrial writing work under my belt, so of course, I could write a YouTube video script for the channel Engineering With Rosie – titled What Happens When Lightning Strikes A Wind Turbine?

You can see how I’ve fallen off my track.

If this is a cautionary tale for freelancers, the moral is to remember what ‘good’ work looks like to you. It can be difficult to work actively towards your goals when you’re taking whatever comes, and whatever comes can turn into a line of work you never asked for. Don’t forget the gig that made you say this is what I want to do more of.

I’m still working towards that pop culture writing dream, even now.

In a cost-of-living crisis, however, employees and freelancers are often forced to take whatever they can get. My strongest advice, if I’m in a position to give it, would be to employers: beware of specialising your workers to death, and believe in the people who want to be there rather than searching for those who already are.

Word Count: 772

#5: Utopia, And Why I'll Never Write Jokes

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 12:14:33 GMT

I recently revisited the ABC comedy series Utopia , which aired its first episode in 2014 and its last last year, for the third time. It follows Tony Woodford (Rob Stitch) as the CEO of the Nation Building Authority, a fictional government organisation which struggles to get anything done. Jim Gibson (Anthony Lehmenn), the government liaison, lands the Authority with impossible projects and additions in service of the ‘vision’. Rhonda Stewart (Kitty Flanagan), the media manager, endlessly pushes the latest digital or design fad onto the Authority and disrupts actual projects in the process. The rest of the cast is tasked with cleaning up the fallout.

This time, the rewatch was with a friend from the States. He was initially insistent on taking in all-things-Aussie, including Aussie media. I lent him a copy of our first Stella Prize-winning poetry book ( Dropbear , by Evelyn Araluen) for the trip, sent him on his way with the beautiful Australian gothic novel I analysed in my dissertation ( Flyaway , by Kathleen Jennings), and turned on Netflix during a sleepy weeknight in. The Australian movie offerings fast revealed our penchant for tragedy ( Jasper Jones , Storm Boy ) and so we turned to the old favourite.

During my master’s, I took an Independent Project unit which allowed me to write a single, longer work over the course of a semester under the tutelage of a supervisor. It gave me experience working one-on-one with a supervisor before my dissertation, but more importantly it offered an opportunity to fill the gap in the so-called-coursework-masters’ courses. No screenwriting class was available, and so I took aside undergraduate screenwriting tutor Shane and forced him to attend regular Zoom meetings with me. He taught me the structure of a script, I told him I wanted to test it out on writing for television, and so he taught me the structure of a show pilot. I soon discovered writing for television is considered the most rigid style of scriptwriting, and pat myself on the back for nailing it. I received a High Distinction. But that didn’t mean my idea was actually any good.

Let’s flash back to Utopia . My friend had a hard time with it, to say the least. He turned to me whenever a character spoke to confirm whether or not we were ‘supposed’ to like them. After an episode or two, he was distraught to realise they were all flawed; there was no clear hero to look up to and clear villain to beat down upon. He found the jokes depressing more than they were funny, as they represented the government as incompetent and unlikely to change. He couldn’t find a way within the show to see how it was ‘supposed’ to make him feel good.

I don’t tend to stake my personality on a television show. You can like or dislike Utopia . But I found these criticisms grating. Is it not childish, to need to be told what to think on your screen? To yearn for propaganda?

In one exchange, my friend became frustrated that the show was unclear how it sided politically. He said if it was anti-government, it must be right-wing. But it was anti-business, too. I asked him whether everything he watched told him who to vote for.

But when I wrote my pilot script, I was every bit as un-subtle as the American media I implicate in these statements. If only script readings had laugh tracks. I based my show idea partly off Utopia , but off my experience working at a volunteer radio station, too. I wanted to satirise how volunteer-run organisations can inflate themselves in importance without competence, becoming overly bureaucratic, involving restructures like a dying company without its employees or even managers ever having seen a cent. I did not, however, portray it accurately. I did not use the dry wit and pinpoint situational awareness that the Utopia writers used. My script included ridiculous antics and punchlines comparable to The Big Bang Theory .

“It’s funny,” Shane the supervisor said in one of our later meetings.

“That’s because you’re Gen X,” I replied, deflated, totally at a loss to write the comedy I actually enjoy.

My friend would've loved it.

That’s why I’ll never write jokes.

Word Count: 700

#4: Fighting 'First Manuscript Syndrome'

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 11:44:03 GMT

Last year, University of Queensland Professor Kim Wilkins warned a class about a condition plaguing young writers. She called it ‘first manuscript syndrome’.

Afflicted writers finish a draft of their first-ever manuscript and receive modest praise for it – whether that’s a commendation from assessors if submitting it for a PhD, or a mentorship, or a fellowship, or a longlisting or shortlisting on a literary competition. A manuscript might receive every encouragement without ever actually being published, she said.

This is the infection.

The primary symptom is obsession. Surely this means the manuscript is good, right? Let’s have a look at the feedback. It just needs a few tweaks to the characterisation, the plot, the themes, the prose. It just needs a rewrite or five. Whatever it takes to push it over the line for them, whether or not it’s good enough for me .

The illness can last for years, she said, preventing young writers from moving on to the next story. She told the class it’s easy to dismiss a rejection letter with vague reasoning like ‘We’re just not looking for this story at this time.’ But that’s often actually the case. It can be a good book, a finished book, and not hit the topics or genre specifications or themes that publishers are predicting the market will enjoy for the next few years. The problem can be you need to write a different story.

When writing on deadline – whether for school or university, work, a commissioned project or to submit to a market before their reading period closes – the old adages make more sense. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Done is better than perfect. Don’t be scared, just press the button.

But creative work often happens individually, then goes elsewhere. Theoretically, the only deadline is death. I could keep tinkering with that song or that personal essay until I rot away in front of my laptop. And I’m resistant to the idea that a piece should be sent off as soon as I punch in the last full stop. Some tinkering is necessary. So where is the line, and how do I resist the temptation to ignore it?

To answer this question, I turn to my poem Make me a woman from ancient Rome. A version of it was published in the Wingless Dreamer Wicked Young Writers Poetry Collection in 2020, before I reworked it for my zine I’ll Never Get Over Any Of Them last year.

The original version is by no means up to the standard that I write to today. But I still follow the process I’d developed at the time for finishing it:

Clarify the idea
Jot down the lines in your head
Bring them together in a beautiful poem
Edit until you can’t find a specific issue
Send to at least two trusted friends for feedback
Address the feedback and edit it again until you can’t find a specific issue
Leave it for a few days
Edit it again until you can’t find a specific issue
Repeat the last two steps until you open the document and immediately can’t find a specific issue
(If you suddenly have an epiphany within these few days, go ahead and act on it)

When I submitted the original version of this poem, I pressed the button with uncertainty in my chest. I still didn’t feel like it was ‘done’, but with my current experience writing poetry I didn’t have anything constructive to say about it. In the days that I left it, I could focus on other writing (Kim Wilkins didn’t mention that you might not be completely stumped before ‘moving on’). And in the years that I left it after submitting it and seeing it published by Wingless Dreamer, I finished my bachelor’s and started my master’s.

Three years later, I checked to see if it was appropriate for re-publishing in my zine. It wasn’t. But I had three more years of writing experience under my belt and could quickly see the problem. I essentially followed steps four through 10 again, deleting lines, re-tooling lines and adding stanzas. The result: I took a piece borne from insecurity over unrealistic beauty standards and added a secondary theme, that the body keeps the score.

It’s finished. For now.

Word Count: 710

#3: What does ‘with wires’ mean?

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 05:39:54 GMT

If you’ve seen my Instagram Stories in the last month, you’ve likely seen a screenshot of one of my ABC News stories. A screenshot will show the headline, byline, photo or video, and at least part of a summary box. Sometimes, the byline will read ‘By Aoife Hilton with wires’.

This is one of my newest stories I wrote ‘with wires’, meaning with the use of information from news agencies or ‘wires services’ like Reuters , the Associated Press , the Australian Associated Press , or Agence France Presse .

If a byline reads ‘with wires’ or no byline is included on a story, you can check which wires service has been used down the bottom. At the very end of the story, Reuters might be written in bold, or the AP, AAP, or AFP acronyms representing the other services. ‘ABC/Reuters’ or an acronym will be written when the article is a mix of information from wires and original reporting, while the two will be switched around when most of the information came from the wires. ‘ABC/Wires’ will be written when information from multiple wires services is used.

I write breaking news for the National news desk in Brisbane, so I’m often reporting from the Brisbane office on events which impact people all over Australia and beyond. I can’t pop over to Bangladesh – for example – when internationally-significant news breaks there, and retrieve information as a primary source. A correspondent from the Asia-Pacific News team also can’t report on every aspect of a breaking story happening there. But a large group of journalists working for these highly credible wires services can quickly source and collate information that many news outlets can include in their own stories.

If the information came from someone else, why is my name on it?

I actually produce many stories which my name doesn’t appear on. These are sourced entirely by wires services, and will include the service at the end of the copy but no byline at the top. The production process on these stories can include grabbing the wires copy verbatim – only editing it for Australian spelling, ABC style and clarity, and adding multimedia. It can also include re-ordering the information so the story appears as an explainer rather than a hard news article. Or, it can include taking information from multiple wires files and collating them together; in this case the attribution at the bottom might read ‘AFP/AP’ or something similar.

When I add my name to a story, that means I’ve included information I didn’t find on a wires service. This might be a statement from an official which I’ve clipped from the News channel, a social media post, information from a report or press release I’ve read or press conference I’ve watched, or lines from an interview I’ve conducted with someone related to the story. In the story referenced above, I took information from a televised address and local media reports.

And not every story I write is written ‘with wires’. When you just see my name in the byline, that means I’ve written the story entirely by original reporting.

Does ‘with wires’ make sense to you, reader? Or is it journo jargon that needs to be reworked?

Word Count: 535

#2: Reviewing Bronwyn Bradley

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 04:00:21 GMT

So today I announced my housemates and I are hosting a backyard poetry gig, ideally monthly, starting with our inaugural event on 26 August from 8pm.

It’s a curated event with four featured poets, three of which I will reveal in the coming days.

One of which you, dear newsletter reader, get to find out early.

Bronwyn Joanna Fyre Bradley does many things. For work, she teaches children how to swim and tutors students of all ages in basic English to university law. She also paints, crafts, writes fan-fiction and studies for the medical entrance exam.

When she performs poetry, she performs it with an electric energy. Bronwyn has an eye for a story and an ear for a rhythm and combines the two to craft ballads that sting.

Her rare love poem How to Re-Magnetise a Compass Needle captures the skin-crawling, sweaty withdrawal a long-distance lover experiences when they end a phone call – and the high of the answer.

Her slam piece Mother Raised a Prostitute stares hard into the face of the underlying assumptions which lead to victim-blaming after sexual assault.

Her portrait piece The Art of Self-Immolation problematizes the often-rose-coloured glasses with which we view toxic romantic tropes, including the manic pixie dream girl and the messy b****.

We could make a year feel like a one night stand.

No one taught you how to love,

And you never asked.

And I never offered.

Instead, I remember you like

a vigil

a mirror

a warning

Her World War II ballad William A. spawned a near-obsession with documenting the military mission which killed her great-uncle and the horrors of war more widely. She is currently working on a series of poems for this project.

Each of Bronwyn’s poems use a self-imposed rhythm and rhyme scheme which invokes a musical element into her performance. The pieces’ lyricism, percussive punctuation and theatrics prompt me always to beg for a spoken-word performance. I crave ambient sound, stage lighting, the pieces strung together like a story. It’s not often that I want these things in a poetry performance. I view spoken-word a lot like the semicolon: used much too often without insight into what it does. But Bronwyn’s poetry inspires a unique drive in me to seek it.

Bronwyn has performed at SpeakEasy Poetry and the Ruckus Poetry Slam competition series, being named a finalist at the latter. You can catch her at our late-night poetry tea party by going to the Facebook event .

Word Count: 412

#1: On Baring My Whole Ass

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 12:19:18 GMT

How much of yourself should you share in your art, before you’re oversharing?

The second edition of my poetry zine I’ll Never Get Over Any Of Them is yet to release, with three more poems, a new cover, and a couple of edits. The zine asks how we might navigate queer love – especially polyamorous love – following repression and trauma.

When I showed the first edition to a new partner, they told me reading it felt like ‘cheating’ in the game of getting to know each other – like I had given them the passcodes to my heart before they could open their own.

Other friends reviewed the zine by questioning whether they were ‘allowed’ the insights inside, feeling as if they knew ‘too much’ after putting it down.

And now I’m adding more to it!

Why?

In this zine, I use my emotional reality to connect with readers on topics of queer and polyamorous love, the effects of repression, and the effects of trauma. At no point do I explicitly recount a traumatic event, name the subject of any poem, or attempt to gossip. The parts of this zine which felt like ‘cheating’ to my loved ones, they said, were overwhelmingly the parts which included specific exploration of themes. By reading about my obsession with smooth marble statues in Make me a woman from ancient Rome , for example, a new partner could deduce that my unhealthy view of beauty and femininity had led me to skin-pick. By reading between the lines, my loved ones could piece together my past from my themes.

I am constantly asking myself whether this counts as oversharing. Recently, I decided to stop attending poetry events due to the increasing number of poets who would read explicit accounts of traumatic events without a trigger warning. Mostly, I didn’t want to spend $25 to have a panic attack. But the practice also offends my artistic brain; there is no aesthetic merit in screaming at the void.

Even without screaming at the void, personal poetry can veer far into one’s private life. While the endless line of open mic performers immortalising their latest breakups might just seem annoying, the popularity of celebrity poetry collections like Megan Fox’s Pretty Boys Are Poisonous tells us something more. In its prologue, Megan described the book as a therapeutic out-pouring of ‘desperation, longing, restlessness, rage and general anguish’. I could just re-iterate that screaming at the void holds no aesthetic merit, but this book didn’t serve an aesthetic purpose. It served a news purpose. It served as a source for celebrity news on Megan’s miscarriage and speculation on her relationships with Brian Austin Green and Machine Gun Kelly. This poetry was no longer poetry; it was cannon fodder. And though I couldn’t claim notoriety of any kind, I had to ask: would my poetry become cannon fodder for my social circle? At that point, would it still be valuable poetry?

The feedback I’ve received on I’ll Never Get Over Any Of Them indicates that my emotional realities have at least helped some readers to better articulate an experience or specific feeling which they previously thought isolated them from others. It is not unique, it turns out, to fall in love with randoms. To idolise marble statues as if they’re fashion models. To forget how the act of love works. To tie your sense of self to a lover and feel it rot.

But whether it seems ‘at once experimental and grounded in emotional reality’ to you, as it did to Sean West – or whether it’s just ‘too much’ – that’s not for me to decide.

Tell me, reader! Did I overshare?

Word Count: 607