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.

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.

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.

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.”