Storytelling and Technology: Books, Libraries, Rhythms and Films

In June this year ABC’s The Drum published Once upon a time loving books was easy, my op ed that explored the social experience of books, literacy development and technology. This week Screen Education ran Cutting With Rhythm, my new profile about Ben Joss (pictured), a film and television editor I’ve worked with on short film productions, and the ‘rhythmic programming’ that shapes the way he cuts footage. I’m pleased with how both stories turned out. Since finishing my Post Doctoral Research Fellowship I’m building on my interest in how people use technology for communication, but in media spaces beyond health promotion.

My short term teaching duties in the Arts Industries unit at Victoria University left me with little time and made writing, blogging and participating in social media more difficult. Now that classes and marking have finished, I’ve been able to reflect on these non-fiction pieces. What stands out for me from a writing and research perspective is that the articles consider the factors shaping how technology is used and applied – including where they limit engagement with storytelling, and where they facilitate creativity. Although they are quite different stories, and I did not plan to write them together, this work continues my exploration of the relationship between people and technology, and the context that influences the production of text and audio+visual content across a range of digital media platforms.

“Emerging writers should get ‘working through it’ tattooed on their arms, so they can see it when they’re typing.” (SJ Finn)

On Sunday I was the host of Working through it: first drafts, rewrites, fact checking, punctuation woes and working with editors, a panel at the Emerging Writers Festival. It featured Esther Anatolitis, David Blumenstein, Neil Boyack and SJ Finn, four great writers who reflected on their approach to writing from personal, professional and artistic perspectives. I enjoyed the session. The Yarra room at Melbourne Town Hall was packed by the end, and I think the writers provided a good opportunity for the audience to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of writing for publication.

My favourite parts were about:

• structure
• ‘organic’ flows in writing
• the value of redrafting

Anatolitis’ mind maps and comments about advocacy, artistic and critique pieces and the trajectory of the publication process helped to demonstrate how structure can be really useful for writers to create and give shape to content. Later, Boyack raised an interesting point about writing for a market as opposed to creating a market for your work – which he noted is normally a much longer road. He was speaking in reference to his short stories, powerful pieces that don’t shy away from the often bleak and decaying lives of their characters. It made me think about how structure itself can limit the scope and imagination of a piece, even though it provides a great skeleton to flesh out ideas, and a road map for publishing in spaces with certain conventions, such as features and columns in newspapers and magazines.

I’ve heard debate about structure in academic and practical contexts, but it was refreshing for me to see it played out with different forms of writing. It seems structure is a constant theme in discussion about writing. At the same time, I think this highlights the need for the anarchic, spontaneous and unexpected. I switch between carefully planned outlines and rushes of improvised prose when I’m writing, but I’m still trying to figure out why my non-fiction pieces tend to develop structure more quickly than my fictional work.

Finn spoke about her experience writing her great debut novel, This Too Shall Pass, and redrafting the opening 300 times. It reinforced the importance of redrafting and the sheer amount of work that goes into a piece before its ready for publication. It’s a necessary part of the writing life, which Finn also noted, but in a far more entertaining way:

“emerging writers should get ‘working through it’ tattooed on their arms, so they can see it when they’re typing.” (via @lou1sb)

Blumenstein reflected on early drafts of his web comic Showman? The Brett Braddock Adventures, and we could see in his illustrations (thanks to a handy use of slides) where he changed his work to improve the story. The animator, story board artist and “reluctant organiser of comics-related events around Australia” had an easy going, funny rapport with the audience, and it reinforced for me that humour in the writing process often comes from improvisation and play rather than calculated planning. It also seems that redrafting can be enjoyed for its moments of revelation and new angles to existing material, and is not just a hard slog of corrections and re-writes. Of course, as David argues, you also just have to knock stories out and hold off from being a perfectionist:

“I didn’t set out thinking I’d make it as good as possible, I just set out to get it done.” (via @lou1sb)

I look forward to reading more from these writers and checking out other events at the festival.

Image by Emerging Writers Festival

The Drifters @ Meanjin

A few years ago I began researching ‘creative non-fiction’ as a concept and platform for my writing, and found two fascinating books: From Hipsters to Gonzo: How New Journalism Rewrote the World by Marc Weingarten; and, Tom Wolfe’s collection of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I’m also a fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s work (like many other writers), particularly Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more recently Andrew Ricketson has written an excellent essay over at Meanjin about ethical issues in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I am keen to learn more about ‘gonzo’ and its relationship to non-fiction writing, and how narrative, subjectivity and fiction writing techniques can be applied to non-fiction stories.

The Drifters is my new essay that has grown from my interests in this field. It is about Billie Anne Baird, a young woman who is one of a small number of female drivers in Victoria that build, modify and drive cars in ‘drifting’ events. Drifting is a lifestyle that involves customizing high performance and other vehicles to increase speed and allow drivers to deliberately oversteer so that on a race track cars lose traction and ‘slide’ around corners. It’s an exhilarating, adrenaline charged sport, but is also very much about the art of car modification and the dedication and learning it takes to get a car safe, on the road and ready to drift.

The essay has been published in the new issue of Meanjin. It is the first time a photo I have taken has been included with one of my stories. I’m pretty stoked. The design team at Meanjin have done a wonderful job in terms of the colour and layout of the image – my aim was to capture Billie’s wide eyes, which are quite pretty in the photo, in relation to the leather of her jacket, the hard metal of the stall’s roof and the heavy black of the steering wheel and dashboard in her Nissan ‘Sil-eighty’. Meanjin’s reproduction of the image nails it. The purple rendering of the image is gorgeous.

I’m unsure how or if this essay contributes to wider theoretical debate and practice in the field of creative non-fiction. My research on the concept has been on the backburner due to other writing and day job projects. Reading the piece now with some distance and in print, it strikes me as fairly straight forward in that it combines personal narrative with a series of interviews and my ‘on the ground’ observations as a writer in the field. I wrote description of actual events in a way that I felt was evocative and using fiction writing techniques, and included the occasional dose of humour to signal generational differences. The Media Alliance Code of Ethics was also an important reference for me when writing the story. When I get my head around the theory, I expect to understand more about the challenges and opportunities of my writing process for telling stories about real people and events.

What I love about the piece is that it tells a story of drifting and car culture from Billie’s perspective. She is passionate, lives life on her terms and is keen to involve more young women in the motorsport. Yesterday, after reading the story for the first time in Meanjin, Billie told me, “It’s really well written, paints the picture perfectly.” I felt pleased when she said this because I was striving for accuracy during the story in terms of what it feels like to be on the race track, and to present a complex representation of a young person involved in car culture and her lifestyle and pre-occupations.

Engaging Africa/Engaging Africans: Knowledge, Representation, Politics

Last week I presented a paper at Engaging Africa/Engaging Africans: Knowledge, Representation, Politics. It was a fantastic conference and inspirational on many levels. I was particularly interested in the ‘history of knowledge’ relating to African diaspora communities, and its implications for the use and application of digital technology.

My presentation explored issues and opportunities related to mobile phone communication for health and wellbeing information with the Sudanese community. A key element of this was the consideration of a local/community perspective and technology strategies using a ‘differentiated’ approach based on age, gender, language, literacy and other factors. The feedback on my paper was quite positive. It has given me new angles and ideas to explore for an academic article based on the presentation, and a nonfiction piece.

Beyond my own work, I think it was an important academic event for Victoria University to host and support in collaboration with the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific. It demonstrated the complex experiences of African communities, the ongoing negotiation of power relationships between individuals, groups and organisations within and working with African communities, and what we can learn from research, training and development projects happening in the many countries within Africa, and across the world.

Related links:

African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific

Sending the Right Message: Use and Access of ICT for Communicating Messages of Health and Community Wellbeing to Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities

Using ICT for Chronic Disease Self-Management by CALD Communities

Melbourne Writers Festival

Last month I spoke about my story This Is Not A Hobby at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival as part of Meanjin’s ‘Magazine’ session. On a cold, drizzly morning in Melbourne, about 15 people huddled together in a converted shipping container at the back of Federation Square to hear Ruby Murray, Adrian Hyland, Belinda Rule, myself and other writers talk about our work. It was an unusual pleasure for me to speak about creativity. I felt fortunate to be involved. Jessica Au’s questions were engaging and fun despite our discussion about how hard it is for writers to achieve publication, and the hassles of managing a day job with a commitment to writing.

Sophie Cunningham wrote about the event and her experiences at the festival over at Spike. Sounds like I missed a great Overland launch party later that night.

Thanks to @haikugirloz for the photo.

NBN and Refugee, Migrant Health and Wellbeing

Since Julia Gillard managed to get the Labour government back in power (kind of), there has been much debate concerning the National Broadband Network (NBN) in Australia. My research has found that the rollout of the NBN, or other improved broadband infrastructure, has implications for health communication with refugee and migrant communities. Expensive internet access means that many people are excluded from health, education, finance and other essential information.

Crikey published my new story that looks at the NBN in relation to refugee and migrant health communication, and in particular how Sudanese and Vietnamese communities in country regions of Victoria engage with digital technology.

Crikey is an excellent publication. I recommend you subscribe to read mine and many other great pieces! However, the story was re-published and is also available at the Cultural Diversity Institute.

Outside the Net

Australian Catholics Magazine invited me to contribute a personal story to their current issue which focuses on technology and social justice. This was a chance to reflect on my experiences working with the Sudanese, Vietnamese and Samoan communities in Melbourne’s west, and some of the discoveries I made about the way they interact with digital technology. I enjoy writing short, sharp pieces. It’s only five hundred words, but canvases some of the issues I address through my Post Doctoral research at Victoria University.

Writing Short Films: Radio Interview on YouTube

Jessica Au wrote a great post about short films at Spike, Meanjin’s blog. It explored some of the implications for short filmmakers who screen their movies at festivals and online. This inspired me to create a short video about writing and producing short films. I used a radio interview broadcast on Triple J featuring Zan Rowe and myself during the 2005 St Kilda Film Festival. I had heaps of fun cutting this together. It was great to revisit the interview and learn how to use iMovie, which I found to be both easy and frustrating at the same time – I’m used to using Premiere on the PC.

Flickr Photos

I’ve set up a Flickr account to publish a series of photos taken as part of my various writing projects and also the research I have performed at Victoria University. They include images I shot while working in Fiji, South Africa and Italy, and also my general wanderings around my home town Footscray in Melbourne’s west.

Most of these photos have been taken using a Canon Digital SLR camera. I’m certainly not a professional, and am learning as I go along.

This Is Not A Hobby

The Emerging Writers Festival was held in Melbourne last month. They ran some great sessions about opportunities, challenges, tips and tricks for writing and publishing in Australia. Being a writer is tough. Support networks do exist, however, and it’s refreshing to feel more connected in real world spaces when writing can be such a solitary pursuit. I only went to the festival’s opening night (which was very cool), but I did write an article about writing, rejection and uncertainty as my contribution to dialogue around young people and creativity. The piece was published by Meanjin in this month’s issue:

Meanjin is an important literary journal and it feels great to have my first story for this publication – plus Sophie Cunningham’s editorial about feminism really nailed how I and others feel about negative reactions to women in various cultural spheres:

“I’ll just say this: either women can’t sing, paint, write or think as well as they used to—certainly not well enough to offset their tendency to become less beautiful with age—or we live in a culture that does not like the things women say or does not know how to hear them when they say it.”