A long way to the top

I've been pretty down the last few months (by which I mean, since 2017 began). Between toxic people in my life and the struggles of securing a job in the arts industry when you've just graduated, it's been a tough time. I've reached out for help, and kicked myself into gear to try to get out of the slump. Slowly, it's been working. I managed to remove some of the more toxic people from my day to day life and I started to find some validity in my job, even if it isn't in my preferred industry. But some bigger things needed to change, so I got thinking, and I've made some bigger decisions.

I chose to take a break from university. I withdrew from the one unit I was enrolled in a week before the census date so that it wouldn't affect my academic record. I can take this break for up to twelve months, but to be perfectly honest ... I have no intention of completing the Masters I am enrolled in. Although half of it was credited on account of my Honours degree, it was still going to take me two years to complete what was left at the pace I was going. Frankly, it seems to be a repeat of my undergrad, with perhaps a little extra detail and longer essays. In the long run, I don't think the stress or the student debt is worthwhile unless I'm taking away something more. After my twelve month intermission, I might do a course transfer into communications or marketing--IF I choose to continue study. Masters was never part of my plan, so I am not upset at the idea of dropping it altogether. It doesn't feel like quitting. It isn't. It just wasn't supposed to be from the start and maybe that's okay. I guess the only reason I didn't outright withdraw from the course was because I can still work on the student magazine as long as I keep my place in a course, even if I'm not enrolled in a unit.

I started teaching myself a little bit of design. I've never been able to get the hang of Adobe programs like Photoshop or InDesign, so I thought I'd try something a little more basic. I created a free account with Canva online and I've been experimenting with magazine designs using some of their pre-made templates and articles saved on my laptop from editing with WORDLY. Just for practice, of course, until I get the hang of it. One of my friends who is a bit of a designer herself gave me some really positive feedback on the attempt I showed her. We might start a little zine together, just for fun. I'm hoping that with a bit of practice using Canva, I'll be able to upgrade to InDesign and actually be able to include it as a skill on my resume; it's something a lot of the jobs I've been looking at want from their applicants.

I also intend to apply for an ABN (Australian Business Number) really soon, so that I can start freelance editing, and maybe freelance writing. I don't really know how that will go, considering how competitive and small the industry is in Australia. But hopefully, with a few testimonials and a domain name, I'll be able to get the idea off the ground. I know it's going to be an uphill battle, but I'd rather try and try and try than sit back and let myself be miserable at a call centre forever.

And of course, I need to start looking for a job in my field, at least until I can get freelancing to work for me (and I know there's no guarantee that will happen). Because, again, I have to try to make my dreams come true rather than sit back and let myself be miserable at a call centre forever.

Granted, the call centre isn't so bad when I put aside the fact that it's not the industry I did a degree to end up in, and I feel like I've gotten a really good grip on what I'm doing there recently. I've had a lot of good feedback from the members who call in, especially for cover reviews and hospital enquiries. Private health insurance is complicated, but I'm being told that I'm good at explaining how it all works and being thorough in the information I give. It still makes me feel pretty good when they take a moment to genuinely thank me at the end of a long call. It makes it worthwhile to endure all the people who call up just to yell at someone for no real reason ... I only wish the pay was a little more substantial.

How do you deal with the struggles of making it as a writer or editor? What decisions did you have to make to try and make things work? 

So you know how I said I finished uni ...?

In the midst of all the job hunting, attempts at writing, and finding places to submit, I ended up talking to my Honours course director. Who also happens to be the course director of the Masters of Writing and Literature.

Aaaaaaaannnnddddd I enrolled in Masters for 2017.

Apparently, I don't want to stop being a student. My enrollment is still a bit messy. My Honours thesis marks haven't been finalised yet, so I haven't got all of my Credit for Prior Learning registered. But I am definitely going to be able to fast-track the Masters to (hopefully) just one year of coursework towards a Creative Writing specialisation, with editing and publishing units to boot.

I am still job-hunting, but have re-secured a place on the WORDLY team again. Honestly, I wish I had made this decision before the Writers Club AGM, because I would have LOVED to stay on the executive committee for another year. Alas, a new team was elected in September, and although they're a little relieved to hear that I'll be sticking around to support them, I don't want to take this great learning opportunity away from them by over-imposing myself on my old role. I'm excited to see what they'll do with the club and the magazine (and let's be honest, it'll be nice to attend a magazine launch without having to stress over a running-sheet or if we budgeted for enough food).

I was going to hold off confessing this piece of news until my enrollment finished sorting itself out, but it's been over two weeks since I applied, and nearly two weeks since accepting the offer. I think I've been patient enough. Let's see if I can keep up the blogging at least until I start back in March.

How are your writerly endeavours going? NaNoers? All others? 

Bonnee.

Freedom!

I handed in my final assignment of my undergraduate degree on Thursday night last week. It was a weird kind of feeling to hit that little submit button and know that was it, even though I'd hit that button so many times in the past three years. In all honestly, I just wanted to hurry up and get to bed, because I had to be up early the next morning and it was nearly midnight when I submitted the essay. It didn't really hit me that it was all done until I finished work the next day.

So what to do from here? I've been obsessively checking the uni site to see if any of my final assessment pieces for any of my subjects have been marked yet. So far, no. I must be patient. I read a small poetry collection before I got out of bed on Saturday morning, From Grapefruit to Grape. It's a collection of poetry by Matthew Rocca, who was a Deakin writing student years ago. He wrote the poetry while he was battling cancer and his sister helped him put the collection together. I managed to find a copy in the library at uni where I work. I finished reading A Storm of Swords part 1 on Sunday. The friend who bought the A Song of Ice and Fire books for me was pretty happy to hear that. It has been two years since he convinced our group of friends to pitch in some cash and buy it for my birthday, as he reminded me. I will try to get at least A Storm of Swords part 2 out of the way before summer's end. But I have other things to read too and I'm not very good and sitting down and demolishing a series one book after the other. I need to take a break and read something else in between. I'm just one of those people, I guess.

And in the next week or two, I'd like to have finished writing and have submitted my application for Honours next year. I have my heart set on doing a thesis on the representation of disability in Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend of Korra, even though I have the option to do a creative writing thesis instead, as a creative writing major. I didn't do a literature major, but from what the course coordinator said at the info session we went to, it shouldn't matter as long as I've done some literature units; I've got a minor sequence in children's literature, and she said that should be fine as long as I've got good grades. Hopefully she goes through with her word and approves it. But this is really exciting to think about!

So the next few months will consist of me reading, writing, working, and possibly getting a head-start on some of my Honours research materials! I am EXCITED and I can't wait to read what everyone else has been doing with themselves now that I have time to visit your blogs again.

- Bonnee.

The End.

It's been nearly five months since I last posted something here. Admittedly, I'm a little disappointed with myself, although I know I shouldn't be. I've had a lot going on this year.

As well as being a full-time uni student in the final year of my undergraduate adventure, I was one of four editors producing Verandah, Deakin's annual literary journal. It was an amazing success, if I do say so myself. The launch was back in August. Wow, that was ages ago. It feels like it was last week. As editor-in-chief of the student magazine, I've also produced five editions of WORDLY, and continued to run the Deakin Writers Club which produces it.

All the while, I've continued working my jobs at the Library so that I can pay rent and bills. And save up for a new car. Because I crashed my car and they decided it was too old to be worth repairing, so they sent it to the wreckers. That was at the end of semester 1. It was like the crescendo, after which things finally calmed down, but they couldn't calm down until that happened. Semester 1 was rough with all of the commitments piling on top of each other, my boyfriend moving interstate for an internship at the end of the semester, and a bunch of personal stuff that I'm not going to go into here except to say that I was not in a good head-space for a long time there.

I hit rock bottom that day when I crashed; it really hadn't been a good day and I'm just glad no one was hurt, even if I lost my car. This second half of the year has been a hell of a lot better. I've still had my bad days. I've had some really fucking bad days. But even on my bad days, I know the feelings will pass, I'll move forward, I'll keep feeling better. I've got friends who will help me through anything and I know that it's okay to call the day off and let myself take a break when I need one without feeling endlessly guilty. This year was the first time I'd ever asked for an extension for an assignment. I haven't gotten as many this semester as I did in semester 1, but it's been good to know that the option to get a little extra time is there and that my teachers are, for the most part, understanding and compassionate people.

I still haven't gotten back into the swing of writing, but I think it's safe to say I'm past the major writers block that had me in its clutches earlier in the year. I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo next month. I'm finishing the major creative assignment I have for one of my subjects at uni, which is due this coming Friday. I'm preparing my Honours application, which I'll hopefully have submitting within the next fortnight. I've finished all my undergraduate classes and now I just have assignments to go and that's both exciting and terrifying and I'm happy with everything I have achieved despite the shitty year, but I'm also really sad to be leaving. I have a few close friends doing Honours with me, but there'll be people missing here and there. It won't be the same. But we're all going to be amazing.

So I'm not really sure what I wanted to tell you guys with this blog post other than justify why I hadn't been around for a few months and apologise and promise that I'll be back around again soon, although probably not as frequently as I used to be. But definitely more frequent than every five months! I'll be visiting the people I usually follow on their blogs soon, so if that's you, expect a comment from me in the next few weeks when I've finished drowning in assignments and can officially say that I'm free.

Lots of love (I have sincerely missed blogging and the people of the blogosphere).
Bonnee.

I Miss Writing

Whoa, this whole blogging thing still isn't going well for me. It's been more than a month since my last blog post. What have I been up to since then? Not much in the writerly sense of things. My last post was before O'Week at my uni. I just about worked myself to death that week. But running the stall for the Deakin Writers Club was amazing. We got heaps of sign ups and handed out a lot of the O'Week edition of WORDLY. Speaking of: check it out online! We're having some trouble with this online version though--it seems that a few (really good!) pieces towards the end have disappeared for some viewers (though strangely not all) and we aren't sure why this is, and try as we might we haven't been able to fix it, which has been frustrating. But still, look at it! LOOK AT IT! IT'S SO PRETTY! 

I've managed to get together a couple of Deakin Writers Club events. Our first one was 'Lit-Mag Madness!' a couple of weeks into the Trimester, and it went really well! Especially considering I was winging it ... I organised it really last minute, and didn't put out notice for it until three days before it was scheduled ... somehow still ended up with thirty-ish people! It was great. One of the other Deakin Writers executives and I brought along our collection of literary magazines to show off and the whole point of the event was to show the members that there was an abundance of opportunities for them to get their work out there--they just had to know where to look. So I sat there talking at them for 5-10 minutes, just explaining some of the main ones we were showing off ... and then I decided they had to eat the food I brought them and socialise, so I told them to stand up, move around, talk to people and read some lit mags. Never in my life did I think it would work. I think the other executive's threat of making them play an awkward icebreaker game if they didn't start socialising might have given them that extra push, but still! Nek minet, all the writers socialising and talking! It was beautiful! Anyway, it was really fun and I talked to heaps of the members and I think people had a good time--at the very least, they enjoyed the free food, and the TimTams were the first thing to go, so I'll need to bring more of them next time.

I suppose I'll share here a couple of the things I showed the members at the event. First, there's this one page on the Australian Society of Authors website with a list of Australian journals and magazines they could submit to, and links to their information pages: Journals and Magazines.

I also shamelessly advertised Verandah Journal, which is the other magazine I'm on the editing team for, and you guys can submit to this one too, so check it out!

And then one of my lovely editors suggested we should put on a bit of writer-relevant music, which I can't remember whether or not I've shared here before, but here it is anyway. I quite enjoyed it:

That aside, I managed to get another event underway. Deakin Writers joined forces with Deakin TV club to host a script writing class, which we'll be following up with a script writing workshop after the Easter break. The only problem was that when I agreed with the DTV executive team on a date, I didn't have my week planner on me (because I'm an idiot who constantly leaves it at home), so I was relying on the fact that I know my class timetable off by heart and my work rosters get emailed to me. What I didn't take into account was that I'd been given an extra shift after the rosters came out, so a couple of days before the event, I looked at my week planner and realised I was working at the same time this script writing workshop was meant to be happening. Very devastating. We were able to continue running it even though I wasn't going to be there, but I felt so bad for suddenly ditching the team! Note to self: bring week planner, ALWAYS! 

Luckily for me, there was leftover pizza from the event, and the other Deakin Writers executive who worked on the event was waiting for me after work with a box. What a gem. Bloody legend. She even saved me some garlic bread. This is friendship. 

I've done no writing or editing for myself since before the summer holidays end, which I hope to rectify shortly, as we are going on our mid-trimester break next week. I still have work and I still have assignments, but hopefully I'll find time to get something written for the next edition of WORDLY. The theme is 'Freedom of Expression' and I'm really looking forward to all of it because we're working in partnership with Querelle, which is being published by Deakin students this year too! While the Querelle audience will be the queer-identifying community, WORDLY's will be broader, but we're sharing the same theme and the idea is to create some hype for them, especially among the Deakin students. They're great to work with, especially considering half of their editorial committee are either current or previous WORDLY editors, so we already know each other and find it easy to communicate. I'm hoping to contribute to Querelle this year as well, but first I must figure out what to write and then I must find time to write it! HOPEFULLY THESE TWO THINGS WILL HAPPEN THIS WEEK!

In other news, I'm not going to bother touching WALLS until the mid-year break. I don't have time to work consistently on any large projects at the moment and frankly I might actually die if I try to do anymore work at this point (and I haven't even CONSIDERED my assignments yet!). My plan for mid-year break is to dedicate every spare moment I have to editing and rewriting WALLS and then I'll be seeking a beta reader or two (probably people from my course at uni) to look at it over Trimester 2. If all goes according to plan, hopefully they'll have finished looking at it for me by the end of T2 and then I'll have the summer to incorporate whatever edits and suggestions they make and then I'll be able to consider what the next step I'm going to take is. Hopefully, the next step will be sending it to a professional of some description: either a professional manuscript evaluation person from Writers Victoria, or to a literary agent, depending on where I feel the novel is at. And of course, I'll be attempting to do NaNoWriMo again come November. I know that's quite a while ahead, but looking ahead to where I want to be is the only way for me to get through the slush-pile of work and study that I'm stuck in right now. I miss writing and I know I can't make sufficient time for it until then, so I'll patiently look forward to it instead. 

That's all for now. I'll try to be a little more blog-active over the next week for mid-trimester break. Happy Easter to those who celebrate it and Happy International Chocolate Indulgence Day to everybody else. :) 

What are you working on? 

Bonnee. 

You: What have you been up to? Me: A lot.

Whoa, it's been quite a while! I haven't blogged since the very start of December and a lot has happened since then!

'What constitutes a lot?' you may ask.

Well, for starters, I was suddenly thrown into full-time work in December, which was a good experience both for my resume and my bank account. The best part of this was that it was editing--yay for industry experience! The not-so-great part of it was staring at an Excel spreadsheet for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. This job was, you guessed it, through the uni, just like all my other jobs, because for one reason or another, apparently I'm super employable. What was I editing? Deakin University has teamed up with IBM to develop this thing called Watson, which is basically this program that we have taught to answer Deakin-related questions by getting all all the cohorts in the university to compile a list of questions they get (in all the different ways they can be asked) and then making a whole bunch of answers. So I was first of all helping the customer service team answer their questions and then spent a couple of weeks after that helping to make sure all the answers from everywhere were written properly and in a certain way. This program has now been launched so that new students can use it to get information about Deakin.

So I was doing that until just before Christmas, and then a couple of days before Christmas, my best friend from high school and I went for a bit of a road-trip. Well, two hours isn't that far to travel, but the point is we drove from the eastern suburbs of Melbourne to Torquay for an afternoon and slept in a tent for two nights. Our adventures while we were in Torquay included eating fish and chips on the beach, taking many silly photos, having very meaningful conversations, cooking breakfast on her little camp stove, going to a spa and getting massages, meeting up with an old high school teacher who had moved to Torquay very suddenly a few years earlier, before we graduated, eating a lot of cheese (we have a severe addiction to brie) and watching The Fault In Our Stars on her laptop. It was a lovely and much needed vacation!

Then Christmas happened. Nuff said. I put on about seven kilos and I'm still working on putting them back off (pants, plz, fit me!). But seriously, Christmas for me is just binge-eating with family. And I have to spend it with two families, so that's two very big meals in one day. Worth it. For Christmas, I got a GPS, which will come in handy next time I try to find my high school friend's house (I've driven to her house twice now and gotten lost both times). I also decided to get the piercing at the top of my ear redone, after it got infected and closed up a few years ago. So far, no infection. I've been taking extra good care of it and I've decided that if there's no sign of an infection after three months, I'm getting another three piercings. Going for the Winry Rockbell look (any FMA fans out there?).

And what's my excuse for not blogging after Christmas? I have been a headless chook. That's my excuse. I took on a big part of the administrative role in the Verandah Journal team of editors, including secretary, which leaves me writing agendas and taking the minutes for all the team meetings, as well as helping send out emails to potential sponsors and organising the stall we'll be selling our back-issues at (and promoting submissions for the new edition) during Orientation Week at Deakin. The latter task has proved to be quite difficult and stressful.

(Intermission ... for the Attack on Titan fans in my life) 

On top of that, I've been producing the O'Week edition of the student magazine WORDLY. Seeing as the entire production team is on summer holidays and people are travelling or taking summer classes or working a lot, on top of the fact that this is probably the hardest edition to get people to submit to because most are too busy soaking up the summer sun to write for us, this one has been a hard one to pull together. This is also the first edition where I am officially editor-in-chief and production manager without last year's team right there for back-up (although they did still give us a hand when we asked, because they're awesome). So we've had a lot of tight deadlines to meet this edition, but now we've sent the file to the printer and we'll be receiving our boxes full of WORDLYs on Friday, right on time for O'Week next week.

And then, with WORDLY comes the Deakin Writers Club. Actually, it's the other way around. WORDLY is brought to you by Deakin Writers. But basically, there's been executive team training and organising an O'Week stall (yes, I've organised two O'Week stalls and I will work shifts on both of them). Organising this stall wasn't half as troublesome as organising the Verandah stall--it was basically given to us, because we're a DUSA club. I just had to fill out a form. The stressful part about the Deakin Writers O'Week stuff is putting together membership sign-up packages. These are intended mostly for new members, and contain a back-issue or two from last year as well as the new edition. We're also hoping to include some flyers and stuff from a few Melbourne-based writerly organisations, namely the Emerging Writers' Festival. I'm even making a trip to The Wheeler Centre tomorrow to pick them up from their head office.

I'm also working in the Library one day every week in a permanent position for the year, covering for one of the full-timers there who's returning to study. Once Trimester 1 starts up, I'll also be back in the swing of my Student Rover job. I'll also be back to classes and studying and essay-writing. No creative writing units this Trimester; I've got three philosophy units and a children's literature unit, but I'm sure this Trimester will still be great! Except the Timetable Gods are vengeful--as punishment for managing to fit all of my classes into one day last Trimester of last year, this year I've been forced to spread them over four days. It's still a measly eight hours of class all together, two on each of the days I have to go in. I don't have class on Wednesdays. I do have class on Fridays. In fact, one of my classes was only available on Fridays, which was especially unfortunate for me, because Fridays is the day I'm always rostered on in the library. In order to keep this position, I had to put my hand up for the early shift. So, I'm really NOT a morning person, and I thought starting work at 9AM and working through until 5PM wasn't fantastic ... but the early shift, once Trimester 1 starts, means I start work at 7:30AM and work through until 3PM, at which point I race off to a philosophy seminar for two hours before going home. The shift is actually meant to go until 3:30, but the last half hour is meant for checking emails, making sure everything you were meant to do is done, tidying your desk, submitting your timesheet, etc ... so I spoke to my manager about it and basically I just get half an hour less pay, but that's alright with me if it means I don't have to skip class. Yes, I'm a nerd, what of it?

What else? I've been editing a friend's manuscript on and off. I'm about 50 pages in. It's quite an enjoyable read, when I've actually got time. It's children's literature and I think he's got a really great voice going for him, at least with this particular story. I wish I could read it faster for him. He actually gave it to me back in September and I just never got around to it until New Year rolled around. Hopefully I'll give it back to him this Trimester at uni. I've done bugger-all of my own writing or editing--WALLS has been completely neglected. It is literally a pile of pages hiding underneath my bed right now. I wrote a feature spread for the O'Week edition of WORDLY and worked with one of the other editors on it, but aside from than, no new material out of me. One of my friends at uni was involved in organising and running the Digital Writers' Festival and asked me to promote them a little, so I managed to 'attend' some of their events (online) and Tweet about them from the @DeakinWriters and @WORDLYMagazine accounts. My boyfriend and I started hiking together. We've gone four times this month for about two hours each time. I've started swimming laps again, which is something I haven't done since early high school. And just generally, I've been keeping up my social appearances with friends where I can. Even though I haven't done any writing for myself, I've got a lot of stuff I'd like to write in my head, from children's literature analyses about Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra (OMG DID ANYONE SEE THE FINALE OF KORRA OMG I WAS SO HAPPY), to another YA dystopia/post-apocalyptic/borderline science-fiction story idea I'd like to try and execute.

(How I'm feeling now ... except I don't think I'm quite that cute.) 

Source

My boyfriend was meant to move to South Australia for an internship last month, but that's been delayed for about six months, so we're living together. It's kinda sad, I just want him to hurry up and go so that he can hurry up and come back. I also preemptively took on a lot of work (see everything I've listed above) so that I'd be able to keep myself busy while he was gone and make it easier to deal with, but now that he isn't going, I feel like I've taken on too much. The busiest part of it (particularly the production of Verandah Journal) will all be over before he leaves. I suppose I've got to grin and bare it, though. When I make a commitment, I stick to it, and a lot of these aren't commitments I can back out of easily ... I just need to make sure I don't accidentally get given any more jobs, or I'll have seriously screwed myself over. I feel a little overwhelmed at the moment, but I know it's just a matter of getting used to, taking a deep breath and realising none of it is that hard. I just have to be organised and stay on top of everything. I say that now, but let's see how I actually manage everything as this first Trimester of uni gets started.

Well, this post has been long and rambly. It's 11:30 at night over here and I want to be at The Wheeler Centre pretty early tomorrow morning, so I'm going to throw in the towel now and hopefully I'll pick it up and write another blog post before several months have slipped away in silence.

I apologise for any typos or grammatical errors. I am too sleepy for that kind of coherency.

What's everyone else been up to?
Bonnee.

Writer's update: long time, no see

That moment when it's November and you realise you haven't blogged since August ... woops. I'm still alive, I swear! Well then, what the heck have I been doing? Yes, I've been asking myself this question quite a bit as well. And turns out, I've actually been up to a lot more than I realised.

Well first of all, I got a second job. Still at the university library, but a bit different to my job as a Student Rover. Throughout September, I was working 9-5 usually 2 or 3 days a week doing some writing and communications stuff for the head librarian. So that was pretty cool. I now have an access card to the staff only area and for a little while there I had a desk pretty close to all the offices of important library people. Then the head librarian was running out of time to give me stuff to do, so she got the service desk people to train me so that I can do all of that stuff too, so I've had a couple of shifts doing that in October. Now I'm finished with my second year of uni, so work at the library is a little slow. The Student Rover program won't run again until March next year, but in the meantime I'll still get the odd shift on the service desk during the summer teaching period.

But in between all that work in September and early October I was also still going to uni for eight hours on Mondays, meeting with the WORDLY production team on Wednesdays, and working on assignments. Well, actually, I kind of left all my assignments until the week before they were due, so in the space of one week I cranked out 3 essays ... and two of them were philosophy essays, so that made my thinker-box hurt quite a bit and I was filled with regret.

But before my assignments were all due, I was working both in the library and on the final edition of WORDLY for 2014 and I've got to say I am quite proud of what we produced for the Writers Club. We launched the final edition at the end of September and accompanied the launch with an open-mic spoken word event, and the Deakin Writers Club annual general meeting, where the new executive committee for the club and the magazine was elected. So, I am now production manager of WORDLY magazine and president of the Deakin Writers Club for 2015 and pretty excited about it. I have great faith in the rest of the executive team and I think we're going to work really well together to make 2015 an awesome year for all things writerly at Deakin.

So yeah, after all that and writing my assignments, I bummed around res for a couple of weeks while all my housemates suffered through exams (mwahahahahahaha suckers) and watched a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra with various people because it's amazing. I went on a bit of a holiday with two of my best writerly friends, Watson and Holmes, and we did nerdy writerly things for a weekend and a bit. Then I got all of my marks back and I was pretty happy with them. It was a good trimester at uni, overall. Then I went back to my hometown for a little and managed to get my probationary drivers licence, drove back up to uni, and moved all my stuff off res because it was that time of year again. It was very sad saying goodbye to all of my housemates and other ressie friends, especially the ones I've known since my first year on res. It was sad saying goodbye to res in general, because it's been my home for two years now and such an amazing place. I'll miss it dearly, but the lease was over and it was time to move to another dwelling. I haven't moved far from the university, so I'll still be able to get in to go to work pretty easily.

And last of all, it's November! Which mean I've started NaNoWriMo again. This year, I'm taking the idea I used for my fiction piece in trimester 1 and turning it into a full-length novel. I don't think I'm doing a particularly fantastic job of it thus far, but hey, what are first drafts for if not for making an absolute mess of a great idea? But what happened to my project from last year, the one I blue-tacked all to my bedroom wall on res? Well, I had to take it down when I moved out, but I did finish the first round of edits a little while ago now. Last month, I finally started transferring those edits to the document on my computer. After NaNoWriMo this year, I'll be spending most of the summer editing that, along with the work of another friend which he gave to me back in September. I've been intending to write a story sins blog post about WALLS, but I guess that'll have to wait for a little while longer. For now, lets see if being on summer holidays can get me back into the swing of blogging.

Where have your writerly ventures taken you these past few months?
Bonnee.

An Open Day Experience

WARNING: May contain ranting.

I was lucky enough to be asked by one of my teachers to work at the open day for my university last weekend. She wanted me to be a student ambassador for the Professional and Creative Writing major and because I am ridiculously organised and checked out the course rules and mapped out all my units for the entire three years the moment I enrolled I knew I wouldn't have a problem doing that.

So open day came around and I got a cool blue Deakin shirt that all the other student ambassadors were wearing. I stood outside the little stall set up for the PCW major. We were sharing a stall with Children's Literature, which I know a little bit about through my minor study, and Literature, which I only know of through a few friends doing it as a minor study.

I was having a fantastic day. I love my course and I was really happy to have the chance to share my experiences and knowledge with potential students for next year. I'd start each conversation by telling them which units they had to complete and what they entailed. I'd tell them how amazing the lecturer Dr Pont is for the first unit they would have to do. They seemed so amazed by the flexibility they could have in choosing units and the opportunities for networking with other writers and chances they'd have to get published if they kept their ears and contacts open. I was impressed with myself for being able to answer so many of their questions, even the parents who would pipe up and ask me something seemed satisfied by my answers, especially when they'd ask something like 'what's your goal at the end of your course? What career opportunities will you have? What will you be qualified to do?'

Then this one guy was standing in front of our stall, looking at the names of the majors we were representing on big signs on the wall behind us. He stood there for a few minutes and eventually I stepped up to him and asked if there was anything I could help him with. For all I knew, he was a mature aged student, or the father of some kid who was about to finish high school with no clue of what they wanted to do next. At first he said no, he was just waiting for someone. Then he asked me what course I was representing and I held up my little info flyer and pointed to the Professional and Creative Writing heading.

I won't say he laughed. He didn't laugh. But he may as well have.

He made one of those sounds of disbelief that I never know what to call (I don't always want to say scoff, because it has some mean connotations, but it's probably fitting in this case). And he did it with such condescension that I physically had to force myself to keep smiling and appear unfazed.

His body language changed. He started casually hopping from foot to foot as if he was bored, and started throwing and catching the little stress ball in his hand. While he was doing that, he asked said, 'Alright, sell it to me.' Then he said something to the effect of, 'Why should anyone bother with this course?'

I was mad. Who the fuck did this guy think he was, knocking my course right in front of me? But I'd been selling this to people for two hours already and doing a damn good job of it. So I started listing the skills one could acquire and improve if they did the Professional and Creative Writing major. I told him how much better I am at writing, both professionally and creatively, and how I could edit other people's work like no one's business to make it better, and every business, company, corporation, institution etc. put out any sort of publication (text advertisements, information booklets, video campaigns which need scripts, etc.) needs a good writer and/or editor to do that sort of thing for them if they want it to look professional.

Then he cut me off and said something to the effect of, 'Wouldn't it be better if they just taught kids all that stuff in high school? I mean aren't you just creating a bureaucracy?'

He didn't care to listen to my defenses. Every time I started speaking again, he just cut me off and started going on about bureaucracy and speaking to me in such a pretentious way that frankly he was lucky I was working, in a uniform, with my peers and superiors nearby. Under different circumstances, I probably would have referred him to the My Vagenda article I wrote for the Awkward edition of WORDLY, to give him an idea of what I thought of him.

We were interrupted when his wife came over and I realised she was a staff member at my university. She was working at the next table over, representing the journalism, media communications, and public relations side of things. I had thought it was interesting that both of our stalls were together under the Writing and Communications banner, but not only were there two separate tables, we had taken up different colours to distinguish the obviously more creative majors under that banner from the more serious (for lack of a better word) majors.

In that moment, I knew that there was no way this man would ever be convinced that my course was worth undertaking. There are a lot of people I know who ask me what I'm studying, and when I tell them I study writing they immediately turn around and say, 'So, like journalism?' It ticks me off, probably to an irrational extent, that so few people (except those also doing my course) consider what I'm studying to be substantial, to be worth studying if I want to get a job at the end of it. I spent the rest of open day refraining from shooting this jerk dirty looks as he hung around the journalism/communications/public relations table and trying not to let it get under my skin.

Later, when I had some time to myself, I sat there contemplating all the things I could have said to this guy to shut him down and prove that my course isn't as useless as he makes it sound. I knew his argument had holes and then I could make them bigger if I poked them. If it weren't for the sake of maintaining professionalism while I was working, I wouldn't have let him cut me off so easily. I probably would have cut him off at a few points.

Describing him with a few choice words aside, I would have argued that for him to suggest that we just teach kids the things I was telling him about in high school makes him an idealist. While in theory, yeah, great plan, it would be like communism once it's put in to practice: epic fail. In saying that we may as well teach high school students the stuff I learn in my course, he may as well have suggested we teach high school kids everything a university student is capable of studying and cut out the idea of university altogether. But that wouldn't work. Not every kid is an Einstein. And frankly, even the ones that are usually only excel like that in certain areas. The thing is, we do teach all those things to high school students: at a high school level. For me, the point of coming to university was to take what I excelled in during high school and study it at a higher, more in-depth level to make myself even better at it.

I suck at science. My maths is pretty average. But I am in my element when I'm writing (especially creatively) and when I'm editing. However, there are heaps of people who have it the other way around. They might be ace at science or maths or IT, but have terrible professional English skills. The thing is, because we all excel in different areas, we balance each other out. I'm writing a pantomime for a bio-medicine student at the moment! If that isn't a perfect example, then I don't know what is. Does this guy, and everyone who thinks like him, want to live in a world where there is no creative stimuli for them to take in? No great books to read, regardless of whether you prefer commercial or literary? Movies and television shows couldn't exist if someone didn't write a script, and all those pop songs you hear on the radio sure as hell don't write themselves.

I had a great time working at the open day. Not only did I get to tell heaps of potential students about my course: I realised how truly passionate I am about what I'm doing and how much faith I have in what I'm learning and my potential to utilise it. No one can convince me that my talents are useless and no amount of condescension and narrow-mindedness can make me change what I want to do with my life.

What do you want to rant about this week? 
- Bonnee.

Writer's Update: I'm Still Alive

So in my brain, I knew I hadn't blogged in a while. But in my brain, it hadn't been a whole month.

Turns out, having only one day of class does not mean I have all the time in the world for the rest of the week. I've been working usually once or twice a week. This week I worked three times and might be working a fourth on Sunday for the university's open day. I love working in the Deakin Library. I feel very in my element surrounded by all those books...

In the first four weeks back at uni, I managed to marathon the entire Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series with a few of my housemates. I feel so proud to have converted them to the fandom of the awesomeness that Nickelodeon has created. So... that was 20 hours and 20 minutes of cartoon watching and a lot of time spent not studying or doing anything else productive.

We just finished week five of classes, and had our mid-trimester break. Just before the mid-trimester break, I forced myself to get it over and done with and finally finished editing those last five pages of WALLS. My bedroom wall is still covered in the pages, which are now covered in highlighter, red pen, and an assortment of sticky notes. It looks awesome and I am completely used to it. I have to remind myself to explain what's going on in there when people come into my room for the first time. I've gotten a few 'WTF' looks.

My original goal for the mid-trimester break was to type up the edited version of WALLS and start the next round of edits. That didn't happen, because another project with a pressing deadline popped up instead. One of my best friends, a girl I lived with on res last year, is heavily involved with her hometown's local theatre company and wanted to direct a pantomime early next year, during our summer break in January. She asked me to write the script. So before the break we sat down and ironed out some details. And then over five days of my mid-trimester break, I cranked out a 10500 word Alice in Wonderland pantomime script. I'm quite proud of it, if I do say so myself. My friend is pretty happy with it. Fingers crossed the theatre company will give her the 100% thumbs up now that we have a script and the rest of the process of putting on a play can get underway.

I had to read the book Rash by Pete Hautman. Young Adult dystopian set in a future United Safe States of America. It was interesting, a little absurd at a few points. Overall, I enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, we've launched the 'Awkward' edition of WORDLY Magazine. I love being on the editorial team and working with the writers and other editors. This edition, I got super lucky and had two of my pieces accepted. Poem Fuckin' Poetry which I'd originally written for my final poetry folio last semester, and an article we ended up calling My Vagenda, in which I express and defend my love for the c-bomb.

We've been collecting submissions for the final edition of 2014, which does not have a theme. I'm really enjoying working on the team and hope I'll always be able to get involved with something like this.

Meanwhile, I've convinced myself that there is some sort of gap between the end of August and the start of September in which I will find time to write my two essays due in the first week of September. I told myself today I would stop procrastinating and start writing them... so naturally, the logical thing to do is write a blog post.

I'm going to try and get back into the swing of blogging, because I really miss it and I miss reading other people's blogs. So I'll aim for a post every two weeks at least.

What have you been up to for the past month? 
- Bonnee.

Back to Uni

Whoa, so I disappeared off the face of the blogosphere for more than a month... oops.

I'm back at uni now. In fact, I'm in the second week of the new trimester. Yay! I missed uni and res a lot, so I'm not sure how I managed to go the ENTIRE mid-year break without blogging excessively... But that happened.

So here's what you need to know:

1. I only have eight hours of classes per week this year. And I fit all of those classes into one day. In other words, I only have eleven days of class for the entire trimester (trimester=11 weeks). It also means I have a six day weekend as far as classes go. This is good because I now have optimum availability to work at the library as I am available for all of the shifts that aren't on a Monday. Yay! This also means I have a lot of time to study, edit, write, procrastinate, and socialise without getting interrupted by class. This could go one of two ways. Either, I'm going to utilise all this uninterrupted free time and be ultra productive for eleven weeks... or I'm going to melt into a pit of eternal laziness. I'm hoping for the former, but we'll see!

2. My units this semester are Power, Politics, and Texts for Young People (as a part of my Children's Literature minor), Editing and the Author (for the Professional and Creative Writing major), Ethics in Global Society (for the self-coordinated philosophy major) and Philosophy, Art, Film (also for the philosophy major).

3. I had to get an Australian Style Manual and Mackenzie's The Editor's Companion 2nd Edition for EATA. They are amazingly beautiful resources and I am going to keep them forever.

4. I read The Hunger Games again for the kid's lit unit. I maintain the opinions which I stated in this blogpost from early last year, though I would like to insert the word 'impersonal' to the part where I'm talking about the style of writing and the issues I had there. The class about it was pretty interesting and my first assignment is about the book, so I'll probably blog about it again in the coming weeks.

5. I didn't meet my own deadline for the WALLS edits. I was SO CLOSE to finishing it the night before classes started, but it was past midnight and I was really tired and I know I only had five pages left but I stopped and went to bed and haven't touched it since. I am a bad person. I really want to finish it. By the same token, I've enjoyed the task so much that I don't really want it to end, but I am eager to get into the next stage of edits and just generally keep improving the manuscript.

6. Although I still have five pages to go, my room looks pretty cool with all the pages covered in red pen and highlightings and sticky-notes stuck to the walls, if I do say so myself.

7. The next edition of Wordly magazine is coming soon with the edits well under way. We are expecting to launch in two weeks and start our call for submissions for the last edition of the year shortly thereafter.

What writerly things have you all been up to for the past month? 
- Bonnee.

Saturday Summary: Weeks 10 and 11

Yay, the semester is over and classes are all done! The only thing I have left to do now are my final assignments and then I can officially say that I am half-way through my course. That is such a terrifying thought; I have already been at uni for half of the amount of time I need to complete my course. I could have sworn I was only a first year a few months ago and now I'm already half way through my second year! Of course, once I finish my bachelor degree, I want to go on to further studies and go on to do my honours or something like that, but still!

So I decided to do the summery for two the last two weeks together. Here we go.

Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces. Open forms of narrative and The salt of broken tears by Michael Meehan, Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood, Videotape by Don DeLillo, My life with the wave by Octavio Paz, The sprouting month  and The clothes-lining month by Ruth Ozeki, and (Favoured by) babies by T Richards.

Week 10 was spent doing our final rounds of workshopping our classmates' work, then in week 11 we discussed open forms of narrative. Our theory reading talked about how in good literature, the reader ends up wanting to go back and re-read, the final line of the story drives them back to the first line, and the reader is often aware that they are missing a deeper meaning to the text upon the first reading. I can easily relate to this last point. I've lost count of the number of times I've been reading something and thought to myself, There's something in here that I'm not picking up on, and it won't be until I go back and read again that I realise what it was. With every re-reading, a reader comes away with more meaning than they had on previous readings. The meaning will also be different for each individual because of the different ways we understand and interpret what we read, and the reading will be different for the same individual as they re-read at different points in their lives, depending on how their interpretation and understanding changes. We also talked a lot about the creative process, but I would like to make a separate blog post about that.


Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: Ratbaggery editorial by Duncan Hose (my tutor).

Week 10 focused on ratbag poetry. Ratbag poets are poets who write about other people. They are gossips with an ideal for change. These poems can be callus, rude, direct, naming names and creating caricatures of the people they are talking about. Their purpose, as with all forms of poetry, is to manipulate the reader's feelings, though in this particular case they specifically want you to form a certain opinion about whoever they are talking about.

Week 11 seemed to lean back towards the Australian contemporary poetry, focusing on 'outcrop: contemporary poetry of country'. There were not set readings for the week and I think we spent more time talking about our final assignment and workshopping more than anything else. The two things I jotted down in the good ol' notebook were:
- the only cure for boredom is curiosity, and
- use nouns as verbs.

It has been an interesting and exciting class, though sometimes hard to know if we covered what we were meant to cover. I definitely enjoyed myself.


Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: Freedom Writers (Richard LaGravenese, 2007). Twilight by Stephanie Meyer.

I loved the film Freedom Writers, though I could see its flaws even while I was watching and enjoying it. Film is one of the most influential mediums in the world and a vehicle for constructing, negotiating, and resisting dominant ideas. However, while on the surface, a film like Freedom Writers might seem to uphold values such as acceptance of differences (particularly, race in this case), and treating teenagers like adults, some of the passive ideologies that come through aren't so flattering. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that while F.W is based on true events, it is not a 100% accurate representation of the characters and what happened, so these criticisms are directed at the film, not the true story. F.W. upholds the 'white hero' stereotype, as if the minority races are unable to help themselves and better their own lives. Speaking of the minority races bettering their own lives, there's another negative stigma; all of the minorities represented in the film are lower/working class with pretty messed-up lives and gang involvement, while the white characters are all upper/middle class with lives that don't seem so bad. Of course there are exceptions, like the main adult-teacher character, Erin Gruwell, who's husband gets all shitty at her for not asking him before she gets a second job and isn't very supportive of her trying to help the kids and ends up leaving her (he was more than a little sexist). Also, casting! Gotta LOVE how all of the white characters scored well-known actors, while the minority roles don't get any big-names. So, is Freedom Writers supposed to be about the students, or about the teacher? Because from the sounds it of, it SHOULD be more about the students, but after watching it, it seems much more centered around the teacher, Mrs Gruwell. I mean, it's not that I don't think Erin Gruwell deserves the credit or recognition for what she did in real life, but I think making the white character the star of the show kind of defeats the purpose.

I'll stop myself there before I rant forever, because there is a lot of stuff to pick at, but that's the worst of it. We studied Twilight in week 11 as our module of popular fiction for young adults. Twilight was HUGE, and not just within the young adult audience. I remember when it was about to be a movie, for Christmas that year, I wanted the books for Christmas so that I could read them ahead of all the other movies. It ended up that I had a box set of the books for myself, my little sister got a box set for herself, and my mum got a box set for herself. So, there were three copies of every book in my house. My mum was the most passionate about them, not myself (who read and enjoyed them at the time, but didn't think they were mindblowing or anything), or my little sister, who I don't think actually ended up reading them, although it was me and my sister they should have appealed to most as far as target audiences went. As I started re-reading the first book for class, I wanted to be sick. I'm actually not sure how I liked these books at all when I was thirteen and now I'm kind of ashamed of myself and everyone around me who put so much as a toe on that bandwagon. In short, Bella is a really flat character and ridiculously damsel-in-distress, especially when it comes to guys. The book condones girls pining after men and putting themselves in dangerous situations in attempts to get their attention and/or please them. Edward is actually a real ... I'm not going to use that word here, but to put it nicely, he's a condescending, domineering, jerk-face. Also, he's a stalker. Like wtf he sneaks into her house and watches her sleep, that is not okay! This book enforces outdated ideologies such as that women should be obedient to men, that men are allowed to be dismissive and generally treat girls like shit, and don't get me started on the virginity metaphor. On the outside, Twilight is a typical though poorly written paranormal romance that attempts to reinvent the gothic novel, and while the virginity thing is outdated I won't knock it too hard because that's a matter of personal choice (though Meyer is crafty and deceptive in the way she disguises its presence), but overall it sets a really dangerous example for young adult readers as far as what they should expect from love and relationships goes. And I was officially sick about Bella going on about how physically beautiful the Cullens were by the end of the third chapter. There's the other thing, Bella with no self esteem and poor self-image, then BAM it's all starting to get better once she's got a boyfriend (not to mention when they get married in the last book and she gets to be a vampire too... sparkle sparkle motherfuckers!). Seriously, could Stephanie Meyer give girls a worse role model?

We interrupt this blog post for Twilight movie sins.

I'm going to shut up before the Twihards come to get me.


Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: Workshop pieces.

Workshopping aside, we went over some last minute pointers to help us with our final assignment. When writing about true stories, we need to be mindful of how we compress and expand characters and events, whether or not our choices are ethical and whether or not they help get across the messages we intend the reader to receive. It is often appropriate to conduct further research and incorporate necessary information in order for the reader to get the best understanding of the situation you are writing about as possible, and who knows, maybe that research will influence the way you end up writing. Don't be afraid to experiment with the story's structure, and turn the structure into meaning. Also, Margaret McKenzie's Australian Handbook for Writers and Editors is a good resource... well, for Australian writers anyway. Use correct punctuation, etc...

The job of the writer is to make connections between things that people would not normally make connections between. Good class, loved my teacher and my class mates.


So! This concludes Saturday Summaries, at least for this semester. I hope my ramblings have imparted something or other that I've learned in the past 11 weeks to the blogosphere's population. Now, off with me to do my assignments.

Do you find more meaning in a text the second time you read it? What kind of a poet would you be? Will you flay me for knocking Twilight or do I have your permission to continue living? Have you ever written a personal essay? 

- Bonnee.

Freedom of Expression: IDAHOT

I went to an awesome event on Tuesday night: a belated celebration of International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT). Deakin Writers Club and Deakin Pride Queer Society organised and hosted the event together at Hares and Hyenas, Melbourne's (most popular?) queer bookshop. Of course, being on the Deakin Writers Club team, I didn't even need an excuse to go and hang out with my fellow writers, my friends from the Pride Club, and those that belong to both parts. The event wasn't limited to the club member either, which was great. I'm not sure how many from outside of the Writers or Pride club were at the event, but I know there were definitely people from different universities.

It was a fantastic night, with beverages and finger food courtesy of the clubs, some great live music, and readings from whoever wasn't afraid to jump up in front of the mic to express themselves. The theme for the night was freedom of expression and it was great to see how many people got involved, attended the event, and made it a great evening. Even little old me jumped up at one point with a poem about refraining from sticking labels on people or trying to define them by one particular aspect of that whole. Some of the music and readings that were shared were funny, casual, and happy, others were sad, personal, and took a lot of bravery to share. I guess the best part of the night to me was that we had all come together in a place where no one had to feel like an outsider, or like they didn't fit in; a place where everyone could say what they wanted to say and be themselves.

I made a couple of new friends over the course of the night and didn't make it back to my unit until past midnight, but it was worthwhile. In class on Wednesday morning, my Creative Nonfiction teacher and I had a conversation about the event because she had been there too, and she had read some poetry (my goodness, she has an amazing voice!). I thought it was brilliant that she had been invited by the clubs to attend and that she had been so willing to participate. She was very understanding about me being all sleepy in her class.

Have you been to any writerly or pride events recently? Or a combination of the two? 

- Bonnee.

Writer's Update/Saturday Summary: Weeks 8 and 9

Wow, those two weeks went by quickly! Between returning to my hometown the other weekend for Aussie Mothers Day and getting all of my assignments done, I completely forgot to do my week 8 summary. So, here are the summaries for week 8 AND week 9!

Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Staring Out
Readings: Voice by Glenda Adams, Dialogue 1 and 2 by Kate Grenville, Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, Loose Ends by Bharati Mukherjee, Hills like White Elephants by Ernest Hemmingway, A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor. Workshop pieces.

In week 8, we focused on the importance of dialogue in our writing. To check if your dialogue is good, ask yourself if it is easy to follow who is speaking. Dialogue can be used to capture the voices of the different characters and it's always a good sign when you can follow a conversation between two or more characters without the use of attributions or dialogue tags, because this usually means your characters have strong, distinct voices. Of course, unless you're writing a script, you will want something other than dialogue on the page. Attributions are good to to assure the reader of who is speaking and break up the conversation at intervals so that they don't get bored of listening to your characters talk. The dialogue tags can also be used to describe the tone or way the character is speaking, like 'yell' or 'whisper' or 'stutter'. However, overusing descriptors in dialogue tags can become distracting to the reader. Another way you can both break up dialogue and attribute it to a character is to add action to the conversation. What are you characters doing, seeing, thinking and feeling during the conversation? What could you include in exposition? For example, the dialogue is not always the best place to convey lots and lots of information or to have a philosophical exploration, so when you're writing about such things, consider in each particular instance whether it would work better as a part of the narrative outside of the dialogue. And of course, don't get bogged down trying to imitate real speech; good dialogue sounds natural without looking like it's trying too hard.

Week 9 followed standard workshopping procedures. Nothing to report.


Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem by John Forbes, Newtown Pastoral and Kings Cross Pastoral by Gig Ryan, and To Greece Under the Junta by Martin Johnston. Patti Smith was Right by Pam Brown, Things to Say by Ken Bolton, and The Ash Range, Part Ten: Stirling by Laurie Duggan.

Both weeks focused on postmodern Australian poetry and the poets we studied in each week knew each other, were friends; John Forbes, Gig Ryan and Martin Johnston, and Pam Brown, Ken Bolton and Laurie Duggan. In poetry, these poets write about Australia as a historical necessity, and using the 'I' puts them (and us, in class, as we prepare to write our own poems about Australia) in a tense historical position. We have to ask ourselves how we want to represent our country, and due to the nature of poetry, more importantly, we ask ourselves what usually isn't talked about. Writing poetry can be writing about a community; writing about creating a community. We can write about how communities in Australia were formed and function.


Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: Digger J. Jones by Richard J. Frankland, and 4 episodes from the first season of Glee which I don't care to recall.

In week 8 we focused on indigenous histories, particular in Australia. The point of many Australian children's texts about our indigenous peoples is for the readers to develop and awareness and appreciation of their stories. However, there are two different ways of storytelling in this particular case: the traditional storytelling used by whichever indigenous group we choose to zoom in on (usually consists of oral storytelling under certain circumstances in Australia), or contemporary literature, which utilises western storytelling techniques in order to make the text easier to relate to for a non-indigenous audience. Contemporary literature usually has a dual target audience; it is written for both an indigenous audience and a non-indigenous audience. When reading texts from minority cultures, the reader needs to be open to the text, be willing to do some research, be conscious of where they're coming from, and not expect to understand everything.

In week 9, I had to put up with four episodes of Glee and my Gleek of a teacher (and a few Gleeky classmates). I was not impressed. How do people like that stuff?! I did most ofmy homework like a good girl and watched three of the four episodes we were meant to watch for class, but I just couldn't bring myself to waste another hour of my life on that awful excuse for a T.V show... and I really didn't want to listen to them rip off an Aerosmith song, which was probably the deciding factor. But in all seriousness, I understand why it was such a good text to be analysing. Painful though it was to endure, it was really interesting to see how although on the outside it embraces minorities and accepts them on the surface, it still treats them like minorities in the long run, when you look properly. The episodes follow the white, able-bodied, heterosexual characters closest of all and although they gave minorities the spotlight, at the end of the episode, they all went back on their shelves; the background singers and dancers while the non-minority kids were centre stage. Just because the show included all of the token minority characters on the surface, does not mean the show embraced equality and some of the representations of certain minority characters were questionable to say the least. For example, in the episode Ballad, token gay boy Kurt is depicted as predatory, plotting to turn Finn off women, and in Dream On (the episode I didn't watch, but we definitely discussed in class), the fact that token disability (paraplegic, for those fortunate souls who haven't been subject to the show) character Artie is singing about his dream to be able to walk again, depicting disability in a negative way... meanwhile, all of his able-bodied Glee-club members dance around him.


Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: 'What're yer lookin' at yer fuckin' dog' by Kevin Brophy, Introduction: portrait of an essay as a warm body by C Ozick, and Water by M Stanton, workshop pieces. The Journalist and the Murderer by J Malcolm, Whose Story is it? by R Robertson, and Lies and Silences by M Wheatley, workshop pieces.

The readings were not really talked about in class as we spent most of our time workshopping for our final assessment pieces. I workshopped in week 9 and was happy with the feedback I received. Many of the students are using their first assignment as a starting point and expanding on it for the final assignment, myself included. This is probably the only class ever where we are allowed to do such a thing.



And that sums up the past two weeks worth of classes for me! Sorry for disappearing from the blogosphere for a bit there, but I guess I've been saying that a lot lately ha ha. As I enter the final two weeks of the trimester leading up to all of my final assessment pieces, I seem to be scarily spread-thin for time. Between parties, assignments, work, Deakin Writers events, Wordly Magazine stuff, and the Emerging Writers' Festival, I have a very busy next three weeks and I am so excited to experience them!

Also! Seeing as the Deakin teaching period ends with the month of May, I have no exams, and I'm hoping to somehow have most of my assignments done ahead of schedule, my grand plan for the break (until 11th July, so over a month) is to print off WALLS and blu-tack the pages to the walls of my room so that I can edit the crap out of it without having to go scrolly-scrolling through the document constantly. I think the visual aspect of having everything right there in front of my like that will help me deal with some consistency issues I'm worried about, including characterisation, character development, back-stories, and (my favourite) worldbuilding. I suppose this is going to be my own little JuNoWriMo project, but with editing instead of writing.

What writerly things have you done in the past two weeks? Anyone else going to the Emerging Writers' Festival in Melbourne? Who else has something writerly planned for June? 

- Bonnee.

A Tale of Three Writers/Saturday Summary: Week 7

Greetings, all! It has been decided that my two best writerly friends and I are going to linky link to each other's blogs to tell an interwoven tale of three creative writing university students. So I would like you all to meet Holmes over at Life, the Universe and Everything According to a Writer, and Watson over at Not A Sexy Vampire. Whenever in the past you have heard me talk about my writerly friends, these guys are the people I'm talking about.

Once again, it is closing in on that time where all of my assignments are due in quick succession, but I think I'm ahead of where I need to be, so it isn't so bad. Here is a summary of what I learned in class this week, feel free to skip to your area of interest:

Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces.

This week was again spent mostly workshopping, but I wanted to bring up something I saw in one of the pieces a classmate brought in. It was a brilliant piece, so well written in my opinion, and she's paid attention to small details that helped to really establish what the character was like. By this, I mean, she made intertextual references: for example, she named a book, quoted from Pulp Fiction and referred to a character from another text. The way she wove it into her story, although I didn't know much or anything about most of the references she made, still allowed me (and from the sounds of it the majority of the class) to enjoy reading it. It didn't distract me from what I was reading and instead I got this idea of a character who was intellectual and into pop-culture. But our teacher disagreed and said that more detail about these references had to be made, because a reader shouldn't have to go and look something up from outside of the text. Now, if our teacher had stated this as a suggestion rather than a you must then maybe I wouldn't have such a problem with it. I just think this is one example of the exception to the rule, but our teacher couldn't recognise that although the majority of the rest of the class did. Our teacher has this obsession with concrete details and writing about the mundane, and while I understand the importance, the way she stresses that these are RULES makes writing feel more like a science than an art.


Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: Mina Loy Others and Feminist Manifesto.

The radical's radical was this week's topic in poetry. We spent a bit of time looking at Mina Loy, who wrote some very gritty stuff. In Others she basically breaks the convention of a love poem and turns writing about sex into something ugly and honest. I don't think the guy she was writing about would have been particularly flattered by some of her representations of him. I really enjoyed that reading, ha ha. Our teacher asked us to consider what part hatred plays in writing poetry. Two things that seem to be a large part of human nature (and should therefore be a part of poetry) are eros (erotic or romantic love) and thanatos (the death drive and the will to destruction). This led into a discussion about writing a manifesto, which, the understanding I got, is when you basically write a big rant about things you think are wrong with the world. Mina Loy wrote one about gender inequality. I'd probably write one about homophobia or racism or something like that.


Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter by Margaret Anderson and Patricia Collins.

This week we were focusing on identity, intersectionality, and the ethics of interpretation. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is Sherman Alexie's fictionalised autobiography, which I absolutely loved, controversy and all. This book was used to analyse how race, class, and gender are represented in books and how they intersect both in text and in real life. We also looked a step further, to see how sexuality, ability/disability, and religion are represented and intersect with each other to represent life in books. Basically, we were looking to see whether or not the book broke the characters down into labels and focused on one aspect, or if they too all of the aspects of a character into consideration whilst writing to show the way they work together to create an individual. For example, the main character, Arnold, is a Spokane Indian, but he is also poor, but he is male, but he is straight, but he was born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside his skull so now he has a stutter and a lisp, but he's still athletic and intelligent. So we were looking at how these different aspects of him were represented and how they came together to create one person. I'm going to review this book later in the week.


Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: The Boys of Beallsville by J Pilger, The Long Fall Into Steel by B Walker, and Consider the Lobster by DF Wallace.

This week we were talking about issues and stories and it it is important to find the shape of our story. Some people just want to write about relationships, or they just want to write about death, but they can't do that effectively unless they take an angle on the issue and make a story of it. You can write about relationships, or death, or poverty, or war, or happiness, but it needs to be within a context and a story. Something interesting that sometimes happens is that the structure of a story reflect or becomes meaning, and the form becomes content. I've noticed I do this subconsciously, and then someone points it out and I'll be like "Oh, yes, that was totally intentional" *shifty eyes*.


And that sums up what I learned this week. I hope something in there was useful to whoever is reading, and please check out my mates' blogs, because they're both very cool and unique people and writers.

Did you learn anything writerly this week? 
- Bonnee.

Saturday Summary: Week 6

I went missing-in-action for a couple of weeks there, so sorry! The past week has consisted of the mid-semester break and after missing the chance to upload this last Saturday, I figured I may as well just wait until this Saturday. Meanwhile, I have been indulging in chocolate, swimming with a bunch of writerly friends, working at the library, and having the unit on res to myself as all of my housemates stayed in their hometowns for longer than I did. Here is the summary of my classes from two weeks ago!

Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces.

This week was the week I workshopped alongside two of my best writerly friends. I was really pleased with the responses I got this week, everyone's pieces were really good and I thought the feedback was useful and very encouraging. This is why I love workshopping in class. I didn't bring in a full first-draft because I wanted to get an idea of whether or not the class thought the subject and the writing was 'literary' (as is required for this assignment) and to get an idea of where a first-time reader would think the story is going if they had to guess. I can't wait to keep writing this piece.


Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats, Ode on Melancholy by John Keats, and Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The reason our teacher wanted us to read these poems was so that he could tell us not to try and write poems like them. Keats and Shelly were the 17th Century romantics, but for our assignment especially our teacher wants us to write about the world as we have inherited it.

We took a look at some other poems in class to get a better idea of what our teacher meant by this. It was the small decisions within these poems that made them stand out; the unique use of words, the choice to refer to certain things that probably weren't around in the 17th Century. Good poetry is made up of small decisions.


Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi 

This week we were looking at graphic novels and memoir. The reading, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, is both. We started the lecture by looking at Australia's engagement with Asia, how texts represent Asia, and how they represent Australia. The Australian engagement with Asia is surprisingly manipulated and limited to particular aspects. In Persepolis, the setting is Tehran, Iran, in the late 70s and early 80s. We are told about political, religious, and cultural aspects of the time and place through the eyes of a young girl, between the ages of 10 and 14. Some time next week, I am aiming to write a review for this book, because I really enjoyed it.

The graphic novel is a long-form comic. It uses juxtaposed pictures and images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and produce an aesthetic response in viewers. Although they rely heavily on illustrations to tell the story, they are very different to picture books, for example: in the way they depict movement and the number of different pictures that are often on the same page. The images of a graphic novel are laid out in panels and strips rather than in spreads, the gutter is the space between panels rather tan the fold in the middle of the book, and closure* is what a reader fills in between panels rather tan what they fill in when they turn the page. (*in this case, closure is not referring to the 'narrative closure' at the end of the story where all lose ends are tied up.) 

Persepolis was used as an example of how texts represent childhood and adolescence as developmental stages, that identities are formed in particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, and that identities are formed in particular historical and colonial contexts. This book can be used to compare the representation of class and gender in a particular time and setting.


Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: Home Truths: Revisiting Wake in Fright by K Jennings and Hope Lives Here by G Linnell.

This week discussed the use of multiple voices and characters in a creative nonfiction personal essay and some methods of keeping them accurate, specifically the writer's responsibility to do their research and conduct interviews where appropriate. Writers need to research beyond their own means to write competent and true stories. Interviews, especially when conducted face-to-face, are useful for gaining information, observing behaviour, ascertaining opinions, facts, and observations about an individual, and to better understand the story. One of the great things about interviewing somebody is that although you might start with certain questions in mind, if you let them just talk and talk and allow them to go on a tangent while answering the questions you're asking, they might end up giving you information you never considering, stories you weren't expecting, and more material to work with than you could have hoped for. Of course, for this to happen, the interviewee needs to be comfortable enough in the interview setting to open up, which is why it is important to have good people skills and conduct the interview in a place and form that the interviewee is most comfortable with. The interviewer needs to be aware that it isn't an interrogation, but a dialogue, a conversation. After an interview, you might go back to the questions and answers and decide that some of the things you would like to include in your story are not entirely clear, and it is then the writer's job to verify the information and seek clarification, especially if the piece is intended for publishing.

However, just as we have to choose certain aspects of ourselves when we write the 'I' in a creative nonfiction piece, we also have to choose certain aspects of the story, otherwise it could become too confusing, too long, too complicated. The things we choose to include and exclude need to make the reader feel (or not feel) the way the writer is trying to make them feel (or not feel) and so that the intended message being conveyed isn't overshadowed or diminished by other things. However, this also has to be done with respect for the other people involved and their wishes.


That concludes the week 6 Saturday Summary. I apologise again for going missing in action for a couple of weeks there, I'll try to resurface and visit everyone's blogs again soon! Happy writing, everyone.

Did you enjoy your Easter/International Chocolate Indulgence Day? 
- Bonnee.

Saturday Summary: Week 5

It's that week before assignment due-dates arrive, submissions for the next edition of Wordly have just closed, and I almost feel like I went out of my way to over-commit to this weekend and next week. But here is a summary of the classes I've had this week.

Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out

Readings: Workshop pieces. 

This week, and I'm expecting the following weeks to be much the same, was spent workshopping our classmates work for our assignment. For lack of anything else to report about, I'll tell you about the assignment. We have a fiction piece due at the end of the trimester, worth 50% of our overall mark for the class. The piece(s) has to be 2500 words, which is a nice number for word counts if you ask me. Last year, my creative assignments all fell around the 1500 word mark, and I know I was not alone in thinking we were expected to fit too much into those 1500 words. Now with an extra 1000 words to work with, I'm thinking the classes will see some final pieces that are much more filled-out and well-rounded than in last year's classes. I'm scheduled to workshop my own piece this coming Monday, so wish me luck! 

Poetry: Making It Strange

Reading: My Last Duchess by Robert Browning. 

This week we were looking at persona, irony, and satire in poetry. The poem set for the reading, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, was a great example of these things. What's great about poetry as with any writing is that you can speak as anyone or anything. Of course, poetry allows for a little more unquestioned experimentation than other forms of writing normally do. The possibility of who you could speak as in the poem is limitless. An interesting note that came up in class discussion was that it's easy to write characters we don't like, because of the emotions they trigger within us. The irony of this is that a lot of people write poetry in an attempt to capture and immortalise something beautiful and living, something that's always disappearing. 

Something else that can be included in poetry is pathos: a quality that evokes pity or sadness. I first learned this word when I was studying Drama in high school, as it was a technique we tried to use in our performances too. But pathos isn't something you can just insert when you write. You have to make it believable and real, give it life and ignite it so that it is actually felt rather than just represented. 

Another relationship poetry has with other forms of literature is the ability to start in medias res or in the midst of the action, rather than always starting at the beginning. 

Literature for Children and Young Adults

Reading: The Little Refugee by Anh Do and Suzanne Do.

This week we discussed the use of schemas and scripts in children's books. Schemas are knowledge structures, patterns and associations that we store in our memories. They are often culturally specific. For example, using the text we studied this week, the picture book The Little Refugee, we have the schemas of Vietnam, Australia, boat people, refugees, and multiculturalism, just to name a few. What do you think of when you hear any one of those words? Put simply, that's what a schema is. 

Scripts in children's books are much easier to identify. This is the expected sequence of actions and events based on previous exposures to the script. For example, there is the conventional guy meets girl, falls in love, can't have the girl for whatever reason, commits some heroic act, gets the girl, and they all live happily ever after. For an Australian audience, a refugee script would usually follow the path of an illegal immigration by boat. A less conventional script in the stories we read would be when the characters legally* seek asylum.  (*I have some very strong views on asylum seekers, refugees, boat people, and whatever other labels you want to stick on those poor souls, and the way the Australian government treats them, but I'm not here to argue about  them. I'll wait and fire my shots in my writing.) 

Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay

Readings: The Art of Personal Narrative by V Gornick, Who Stole the Soul of the Boy from Indiana? by P Conrad, and In the Giant Green Cathedral: Malcolm Knox on Tim Winton's Breath and surf writing by M Knox. 

This week's topic was narrative experiment. This is when the story is not presented as a conventional piece of prose. We ask ourselves how we can complicate and enliven our work and remember that our work does not have to conform to a particular formula. The only thing our work does need is a strong and appropriate narrator. We have to identify what the situation is, what is important about that situation, and what aspects of ourselves will animate the piece by being put into the 'I' character. 

I apologise if these notes weren't as thorough as they have been in previous weeks. I don't know if it's just me and my suddenly busier-than-usual schedule messing with my head, or if there was just a lot more practical work and less theory and notes taken this week than in previous weeks. 

Did you learn anything writerly you would like to share this week? 

- Bonnee. 

Saturday Summary: Week 4

It's actually Sunday night here in Australia, as I was visiting my parents over the weekend and did not bring my laptop or my study notes. So sorry if that inconveniences anyone. Here is a summary of my fourth week of classes!

Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out

Readings: Point of view and voice: 'where I'm calling from' by Jack Hodgins, If on a winter's night a traveler by I Calvino, Girl by Jamacia Kincaid, Man-man by VS Naipaul, True history of the Kelly gang by Peter Carey, White Noise by D DeLillo, and Cold snap by Cate Kennedy. 

My classes really like talking about point of view. In my fiction class in particular, we were asked to consider how different points of view limit or enhance a story. When you read or writing something, do you ever sit back and think, would this work better in a different point of view? Personally, I was to rewrite my first novel EVERGREEN in first person, as I think it would do better that way than the way it is currently in third person, though third person is my preference. This is something I love about drafting and redrafting a piece of work: just because you started in a certain point of view doesn't mean you're committed to it. When you're redrafting something, you have the perfect opportunity to go back and change things like the point of view you're using. One thing that was said during class discussion resonated with me a bit and I had one of those pleasantly surprised 'huh' moments: third person is just an 'I' that never steps out from behind a chosen mask. This can work with both limited third person, where the 'I'-mask is the character the narration is focused around, and in omniscient third person, where the 'I'-mask would be a god-like voice. 

Here, I want to make a note on the distinction between two different things people mean when they say 'point of view'. There is point of view as in narration style (first person, third person, etc, as I have been talking about above and last week) and there is point of view as in focalisation, or the lens or character through which the story is told. 

Poetry: Making it Strange

Readings: Project Papers edited transcript of Ted Berrigan's Sonnet Workshop, The Sonnets: I by Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets: III by Ted Berrigan, Sonnet 1 by William Shakespeare. 

This was an interesting class. The roll-call question was What would your gnome name be? We spent a good hour talking about gnomes. We wrote poems about gnomes. Somehow, talking about gnomes led to talking about sonnets. The form of sonnets, like many other forms of art, has been changed and adapted over time. Petrarch wrote them in two stanzas, of eight lines and then six lines. When later Shakespeare got a hold of the art form, he reformatted it to four stanzas: four lines in the first three stanzas and two lines in the final stanza. Sonnets are all about the pronouns - the 'you' and the 'I' and the 'we' and the 'they' - and the abstract phrases that describe the dynamic relationship between two things. They also, traditionally, follow the rhythm of iambic pentameter, which is using five couplings of soft and hard sounds per line. Read one of the above sonnets, or another traditionally formatted sonnet, and see how each line reads approximately soft/hard soft/hard soft/hard soft/hard soft/hard like a heartbeat. 

We ended the class with a brief discussion of dada art, we can be defined as anti-art, pranks against art, or conceptual art, depending on your stance on the matter (or the artistic merrit of the individual piece, if you're like me). Basically, you find something, take it out of its original context and put it into a new context and call it art. 

Literature For Children and Young Adults

Reading: Into the Forest by Anthony Browne

This week we were looking at the postmodern fairytale picture book. Having picture story books isn't important to help kids understand what they're reading. The visual representations of the words on the page are rarely limited to their literal meaning, and children are learning to understand image representation and analysis. There can also be a cultural impact on the illustrations. Picture books are transmedia texts, which use more than one medium. In class we analyse how the words and pictures affect each others meaning and the reader's interpretation. We can analyse picture story books with a rage of tools, including the spread (pages), protagonist, frame and layout, colour, shape and lines, style and medium, and composition.

We use postmodern techniques to retell fairy tales because we have to reassess the values of the original story for a modern audience. Sometimes, this also means we have to modify the meaning of the story. One of the postmodern techniques often used is intertextuality: when the text refers to other texts and the reference plus the relationship between the two texts add meaning to the new text. Parody is another technique, which can include intertextuality. The Shrek movies are a great example of both parody and intertextuality. Another technique sometimes used is metafiction, where the text openly comments on its own fictional status and/or the character are aware that they are not real. 

Postmodern texts draw attention to how stories are created and told, how narrative fictions are constructed out of other texts, how stories encode and transmit cultural values, assumptions and ideologies, and the relationship between fiction and reality. 

Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay

Readings: Taking Shape by S Perl and M Schwartz, Joe Cinque's consolation: a true story of death, grief and the law by H Garner, and Subterranean Gothic by P Theroux. 

We were talking about narrative structure this week. There are a few different ways in which we can order the stories we tell. This includes forms such as chronological, segmented, framed, compare and construct, multiple perspectives, episodic, Q&A, epistolary, multigenre, and inverted pyramid. 

Every story needs a shape, and often that shape isn't clear when we start out writing our first draft. Sometimes it doesn't start to form at all until we are at the stage of redrafting. That is another thing I find beautiful about writing and drafting and redrafting; the shape, or lack thereof, is something you can go back and change. Other times, the structure of the piece you want to write will precede the story and content itself. If you are having trouble finding a shape after you have completed a first draft, some of the things you can do is go through and star your favourite parts and see if you can find a connection between them, look for the narrative arc of the overall piece, and look beyond that first line in case there is a better place for you to start. Something creative nonfiction pieces need is scene, summary and reflection. Checking to see if you tick all these boxes can also help you find the shape. Avoid second-hand telling, ground your writing in the particulars, don't be superfluous,  bring something new to the story. Don't be afraid to go on riffs and tangent as long as you bring it back to the point of the story (and don't part from the main story for so long that the reader forgets). 

Alright my petals, my Sunday-night brain is kicking in after a long weekend of doing-too-much-but-not-really-all-that-much. Visiting the hometown just zaps the energy from me and my assignments and the deadline for submissions to the next edition of Wordly Magazine (of which I am now a member of the production team) are looming. I am going to go and cram some readings for tomorrow mornings classes and then try to be in bed before midnight. 

Have you learned anything writerly this week that you would like to share? 

- Bonnee.