I love EWF and have been to it every year since I moved to Melbourne, and it was one of the first outlets for me to meet other writers in Melbourne (as well as the NaNoWriMo group) that really helped me push forward with my writing and make a bigger effort at being published. It’s a great festival that I’d recommend any writer, no matter what level, attends as it’s invaluable for meeting other writers, engaging in debates and discussion around writing in Melbourne and helps you work out how to do.

That said, I wasn’t able to go to much of it this year, for the first time. I bought a ticket to the whole weekend of the Writer’s Conference, the best part, but missed most of the Saturday afternoon because I had my own poetry event on that afternoon, that I’d been booked for before the EWF dates came out, which is definitely not my gripe here, but the past few weeks for me have been fairly busy and I had to miss the Sunday, and a bunch of other events.

I study Creative Writing at RMIT. I’m in second year and started it after becoming engaged with the writing community in Melbourne and really love the course, the chance to study writing full-time. My classmates are all emerging writers too, but we found this year that the Emerging Writers’ Festival, a festival aimed at us, was right in the middle of the end of semester, as assignments were piling up, and with the stress of all those coming down upon me, I had to make the difficult choice of missing the events I wanted to go to.

And I know, speaking to other classmates in my course that they weren’t going to anything this year because of this. Last year, I took programs to my year level to give to everyone to try and get them to come to the festival. I saw myself as an unofficial ambassador because I knew the festival would be perfect for all these writers I’d just met, many just from high school. As I remember last year, the timing was a little better, but I think many missed it for similar reasons.

I realise that EWF can’t cater to every demographic’s whim and schedule and inevitably people are going to have clashes and sometimes miss things, but I feel like Creative Writing students should be a major focus for EWF and getting them along to the festival. EWF offers something quite different to what you study in class; meeting other writers, engaging with publications that you can submit to etc. and would be a perfect thing for me, my classmates and other university students to throw ourselves into during semester break. Our teachers do give us practical knowledge, encourage us to submit etc. but I feel like it’s more effective when our peers and the people were submitting alongside and for are the ones encouraging us.

I know EWF invited many of our teachers to speak at the festival and that’s great, but I think it would be worth keeping in mind next year timing the festival so its accessible to students too, because I love the festival so much that not only do I want to be involved in it next year, but I want to be able to encourage my classmates to come along too.

so real
very possible
moving scenes
unlike
history books and distant stories
and the dulling grey of cynics
shaking their heads
saying we, naive and optimistic

they say each country is different,
and then it happens in another
and another
and another
each a different reason
it can only happen there

it spreads
flash points out of nowhere
you never see it coming,
say it’s possible not today, but one day
and that day is today, yesterday,
and for days,
Taksim becomes today’s Tahrir
Istanbul today’s Cairo
and right-now and tomorrow,
Turkey is today’s
impossible revolution

Taksim looks so different
from the way we saw it
with flares, flags and infinite numbers

When we were there, just tourists
we stood afar from police
weapons at their side
armoured vehicles behind them
and my Turkish friend, warning me
it’s so unlike Australia
so hard to even march
so impossible to speak

how unlike Taksim now

Revolution is a new place,
a new time,
shakes off its impossibility
a defiant, stubborn thing

Photo by Michael Reynolds

but, but but, but
I’m not a racist but..
We’re all racist
No one is racist,
black people are racist too
I’m not a racist but it’s true

I’m not a racist but but
They need to come here legally
It’s not my fault, there’s a little racist in everybody
I’m not a racist but but

The racist. Evades capture
Feigning jokes,
reacts badly
on public transport
The racist survives
by their litany of excuses
their intimidating call of but but
so no one will challenge it

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.

It’s a subtle yet incredibly moving collection of short fiction that’s over-arching themes can be best described as dealing with family, those on the fringes of society and characters with something missing. After reading the story ‘Shadowboxing’ and his novel Blood last year, I have come to love not just how Birch is drawn toward dealing with marginal characters, like I do in my own writing, but his realist mode of writing. It is direct and unobtrusive. The danger I find with collections of short fiction is the pause between each piece and having to immerse yourself in a new one each time. But Birch’s realism allows for you to do that easily. You are not lost each time in thick obscure description in the beginning. Birch places you in the scene clearly and immediately. It is like the author is not even there.

But I guess critics of writing like Birch’s would argue that there is no art to it, and Birch often breaks the rule that you’re meant to “show not tell” but he does it so well. The statement of “fact” and the placement of those events without the intervention of the author is in itself quite moving. And to me, the style and the insignificant way in which he finishes most of his stories conveys a realism situated in the often mundane, subtle and trivial details that portray what it is to be a marginal character in society, so much so that they seem to be the kinds of stories that other writers would overlook and deem not significant enough to tell.

I’m someone who looks for books that punch you in the stomach. I look for great, cataclysmic events that leave me breathless. This collection is not like that but still leaves me thinking this is a very good collection of short stories. There are moments when pieces feel unfinished, but necessarily so and the sense of loss you get from some of them is a reaction that I think is not always the one you seek, but I think worthwhile all the same.

It is sharp and intense. It’s about a 19-year-old boy Ari who likes to have sex and take a lot of drugs, and it takes place over one night. The novel moves seamlessly through the various places he goes out to, to the various people he meets. It feels a little like a drug trip as you read it, but it’s never just drugs and sex and nothing under the surface.

As with many successful novels, I think Tsiolkas has managed to nail the voice, along with a kind of minimalism that is not too over the top. The casual language and pace make it easy to keep reading and finish in a short while. There is politics there. It alludes to a feeling of apathy and powerlessness that I think was a common mood of the 90s and it speaks a lot to me about the motivations for the kind of lifestyle Ari leads, without being patronising about it, perhaps because it also feels to me as if it might be semi-autobiographical. There are details that seem to match up.

I saw Tsiolkas speak at the Wheeler Centre a few weeks back, where I bought the book and got him to sign it. He did a reading from his forthcoming novel, Barracuda. Like someone like Tony Birch, he has a fascination for characters perhaps marginal, perhaps just those overlooked. I’m interested in that too as a writer. But I’ve only just discovered them recently, never the kinds of texts they gave to me in high-school, but then I wonder if I would’ve read them then.

What else have I been doing and what’s coming?

I was recently published on the Overland website talking about football, the Western Sydney Wanderers, ‘active’ supporters and their campaign against the police, media and other authorities. You can find the piece here.

Coming up I am involved in three poetry gigs:
Thursday, May 2 @ 8pm: I’m one of the feature poets in a line-up of poets performing ‘Twitter’ poetry at the new RMIT design hub.

Saturday, May 25 @ 2pm: I’m the feature poet at the Dan O’Connell Poetry readings, and will likely be reading an excerpt from the novel.

Saturday, June 22 @ 8pm: I’m the organiser of the revived Keep Left poetry night that will now be happening monthly. I’ll be MCing the first one as well, with our feature Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Often some atrocity committed by capitalism or some inspiring struggle against it throws me into expressing my relation to it through words. Sometimes it’s some sort of idea or debate that I want flesh out in an allegory or metaphor. Even though the usual fucked up things about the world are still kind of simmering there, there’s nothing really at the moment that is pushing me to the page. At least not in my usual sense.

Over the holidays, my passion for writing has been in part replaced by a strange return to a fascination with sport. Mostly football. But also my own fitness regime, getting back into running, some cycling and just last week, swimming. It’s a weird shift and perhaps something that seems a bit uninteresting. Why would I write about it? But I like the kind of measured progress of it and the ability to be able to perform regular movements and tasks that don’t require allusive and immeasurable things such as inspiration. But I’ve been wanting to write about sport and fitness nonetheless.

Why write about sport? I’ve become totally engrossed in the passion that football (soccer for those who can’t see the distinction) is developing in Australia via the A-League. I’ve been to a few Melbourne Victory games before and the atmosphere of the Norther Terrace supporters is pretty special, totally different to a League and AFL game. But this year, it was stepped up a notch with the introduction of the Western Sydney Wanderers into the league. The team created in the area I grew up in, has become an instant hit within the Western suburbs of Sydney, with a striking red and black striped jersey, their supporters call themselves the ‘Red and Black Bloc’ and are quickly become one of the loudest in the league. They have rehearsed chants and songs, and banners. It is not unlike a protest really. The Wanderers also have Youssouf Hersi, an Ethiopian born Dutch National who was been adopted by Western Sydney as a bit of a hero. He’s exciting to watch. Quick down the wing. And fancy with his footwork, able to change direction in a split second to trick opponents.

I suppose I am fascinated by the passion that people put into backing their team, the camaraderie they share in the highs and the lows. I have done it for so long with the Rabbitohs, a tradition passed down to me by my father like joining the union and not voting Liberal. It is interesting how often the fortunes and people’s aspirations and hopes are channelled through sport.

And I think in periods where there is not a lot of struggle and social change going on, this can be more so. It seems in contrast the impending election (yawn) that is about to be take place (or not really) throughout this year. Elections at the moment in Australia are characterised by their lack of competition and conflict. People can’t tell the difference for the most part between the policies of the two major parties and aside from Gillard’s speech calling Abbott a misogynist, Labor’s rule lacks the challenge to the right-wing threat of Abbott.

I kind of see football as an outlet for the open competition people would like to see. And that’s in part what I’m getting at which I want to put into writing. Well, I just did, but I mean in a creative form, perhaps through fiction or poetry, but so far my attempts have felt pedestrian, boring or clumsy.

Perhaps it will take practice, acceptance than some people might just not care this, as well as looking to the successes of other writers in this area. Suggestions are most welcome.

• Started and finished my first year of my Creative Writing degree, with 7 Distinctions and one High Distinction.
• Launched the website, MelbourneSpokenWord.com, held the inaugural Percy Shelly Poetry slam, and released a spoken word EP with Santo Cazzati, Duel Power which was mentioned by Ali Alizadeh as one of his top 10 poetic works of 2012.
• Had articles published in The Emerging Writer, Overland’s website and the Geek Mook, poetry in Overland, Social Alternatives and the RMIT anthology Little Spines.
• In the later half of the year took up running and cycling, and finished my first race, the 10km race at the Melbourne Marathon Festival, finishing 404th out of 9,000 competitors and running it in 45:17.

It was a pretty good year for writing, uni allowed me to focus on it more and I had more things published than years previously as a result. The fitness kick came as a surprise and made me realise that when I look after my body, I feel happier and more motivated, which is worth reminding myself now as I’m not doing much of anything. Oh and to cap it all off, a couple of days ago, we welcomed the uber cute Genie into our house.

Nero would have been so proud
Not just a mad man
fiddling whilst a city burns
but a whole orchestra
a bank of mad-hatters
stock brokers smashing cymbals
generals blowing horns
politicians fiddling on giant basses
and executives twiddling with flutes
a symphony whilst they sell us off
to the highest bidder
before we’re cooked to a cinder
and when the end of the world comes
they’ll sell us the box set of DVDs
with extra features
and tell us the soundtrack is to die for