What have I been up to? Over the past year or so, this blog has become less and less central to my work as a writer, but nonetheless remains important for occasional updates about where my writing is appearing and progress with projects not yet out in the world. I’ve mostly been busy with spoken word gigs and university assignments, and I’m looking forward to semester break, with overly optimistic plans once again for reading and out of uni projects.

I’ve come to realise recently, a lot of the kinds of writing I’d used to blog has now gone on to better things, such as guest blog posts for Overland. That began when I was encouraged by the Overland editors to pitch my ideas to them instead of pitching ideas on Twitter that people might like to read on my blog.

As well as that, my work editing MelbourneSpokenWord.com has been going really well, and the website has been growing in recognition and traffic. We have some terrific reviewers, our gig guide is growing quite long, we hosted our first spoken word gig a few weeks ago, printed stickers, and hit our daily pageview record yesterday after I reviewed Anis Mojgani’s gig at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. In the future, more commentary about the spoken word scene in Melbourne will take place there, and hopefully by a wide range of poets and performers.

It’s also surprising how many gigs I’ve been offered all at once. I went a little while without performing and then found myself performing at a bunch, including doing a feature for the second time at the Dan Poets on a Saturday afternoon. And I’m hosting the relaunch of Keep Left on June 22 with our feature being Maxine Beneba Clarke, which is quite exciting, especially since she won the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript on Thursday night, at the launch of the Emerging Writers’ Festival.

With uni, the main thing I’ve been working on is my novel, or that’s where my head’s been most of the time. The other assignments and work takes up a lot of time and I’ve been busy with that, but the novel writing is the most exciting and I want to dedicate more time to it. This is the novel I finished the first draft of in 2010, as part of NaNoWriMo. It was originally called Robbin’ Toorak but I’ve recently changed it to Screwjob. It’s coming together now in the third draft and if I can push forward to finish this draft, I feel like eventually this is one I will reach the stage of submitting for publication, which I’ve never felt about any other novel attempt.

All in all, this means I’ve been incredibly busy over the last few months and one of the sad things is I’ve missed more of the Emerging Writers’ Festival than I usually do. This has also been in part due to social anxiety I admit, so I’ve ran from the opportunity to network and catch up with other writers in Melbourne this time but I hope to get to a couple of events at least before it finishes on Sunday.

With Gaza on my mind, the bombing, the deaths of children and the mainstream media’s silence, I’ve come close to writing again. Horrors such as this always bring forth new words, but I can hardly say I’m thankful for it. I’ve got some disturbing images floating around inside my head. But I think these are important things to write about, it’s why I write in the first place, without some overblown expectation that my words will change masses or do as much as real action can, but I think writing is at its best when it engages with the real world.

On that note, Jessica Wilkinson and Ali Alizadeh’s manifesto, The Realpoetik Manifesto, speaks to me and how I approach writing, especially poetry. The manifesto is “an unavoidable and necessary code for the art of non-fiction poetry.” Manifestos haven’t really been in for a while so I love to see its return. There’s this old manifesto by these bearded guys called Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that’s worth reading too.

In the manifesto, which has been posted around various literary and poetic websites it states: “The Realpoetik recognises the unquantifiable potential of poetic writing to convey a deeper experience of reality and ‘real life’ accounts than may be possible through conventional non-fiction prose.” And so on it goes. Well worth reading.

I would like to publicly state my intention to join The Realpoetik. Perhaps it will guide me to write something about Gaza after all. Writing about something from home in Melbourne feels hard though, because it seems not as powerful or real as if someone had written a poem by Gaza. I found that when writing about the Egyptian revolution last year, when I wrote this poem, Egypt. It comments on the process of writing from where I was.

We talk about rejection a lot as writers. Rejection letters or emails are meant to be a staple of a writer’s development. We wear them like scars, brandish them as evidence that we’ve developed thick skins and are brave enough to just keep sending writing out there. Stephen King in On Writing talks about collecting rejection slips and spiking them on a nail on his wall. But acceptance letters are rarer, much less talked about. We hold them close to our chest. Do we feel like it’s ego or bragging to talk about them, place more importance on them?

I was conscious of that last night after posting exciting news of an acceptance of Facebook and secretly relishing every ‘like’ as a sign of people supporting me, but at the same time wondering if others were watching that status and thinking what a vain braggart I am.

But I feel like focussing on the rare acceptance letters and emails is better than collecting rejections as if you’re taking bullets. For one, with email and various submission systems, it’s easy to lose rejections. Some people don’t even reply to your submissions, but acceptances, especially from some journals need to be remembered, especially when it’s between a long time since you received one.

I printed a few out last night, am going to blu-tack them to my wall beside my desk and look at them whenever I doubt myself or one of those rejection letters come in.

It was once said, by some famous writer I can’t remember, or possibly misquoted anyway, that the moment you find writing easy, is the moment you know you’re doing something wrong. By that, I’m not sure they meant the current state I’m in with spoken word.

My relationship with the different forms of writing change. My ability at each of them is constantly in flux, like many things, so it often helps to blog about it. Right now, spoken word is hard. Poetry, the stuff for the page, the short, concise pieces tightened so much that people cough and miss them at open mic readings, they’ve become more successful, not so much that I think it’s so easy because then I would be making the first mistake. I even sent a few off the journals, but perhaps that’s a trade off because I’m constantly second guessing my spoken word, becoming too self-critical. Looking back at a whole bunch of pieces I performed a lot and feeling like never reading them again.

Perhaps I’m making one mistake and looking at my style, comparing it to others and thinking I’m ‘doing it wrong’ which could be a never-ending cycle. Who does spoken word ‘right’ anyway? We’re all so different. You can’t compare Santo Cazzati to anyone and then there’s the ‘slam poets’ and the page poets, the conversational type story tellers and people who do a bit of everything.

I think I have a style and perhaps I’ve been wondering if it works. A lot of it is influenced by radical oratory, the use of metaphor by revolutionary writers during the earlier 20th century. Perhaps I’m wondering if the style is successful or not. I don’t think my slam scores are a particularly useful judge, nor even the amount of features I get because that is in flux too. Feedback and whether or not what I’m doing is working, becoming repetitive, was boring to begin with, strange and totally off base. All of that is hard to gauge.

Perhaps all I can do is keep writing, trying to work out what people like, forget the things that don’t work and keep hold of the pieces that strike a cord. Maybe even I’ll win a slam one day…