Doing governance differently | Turn up the Volume | Why poetry has bad PR | Bad faith funding practices
Plus... an update on The Sealey Challenge, my chat with Fremantle Shipping News, and a rant about employers needing to read the room
Welcome to my words, thoughts and ponderings for September. This enews includes my latest governance discussion, thoughts on why poetry has bad PR (and why you read more of it than you think), my recent interview with the Fremantle Shipping News and more.
Governance discussion now online
I loved rabble-rousing about how we could (and should) be doing governance differently with Cecilia Anthony and Diversity Arts Australia's Lena Nahlous last month as part of Creative Australia's governance webinar series. You can now catch up with our whole conversation online (or watch a brief extract on TikTok).
Volume National Reading Symposium
I am thrilled to be part of the program for next week’s VOLUME National Reading Symposium from the team at Australia Reads. It’s a free, online day-long symposium dedicated to creating a stronger reading culture in Australia. See you there.
Don’t give up your day job
When I signed my publishing contract with Fremantle Press last year, my partner immediately started joking about resigning from work – to wave celebratory pompoms at my book events and writers’ fests, soothe my perpetually poetically-furrowed brow, and make sure my favourite brand of poetry-inspiring beverage was always close to hand.
But although the experience has exceeded all my expectations, let’s not give up our day jobs just yet. Clearly, we don’t get into writing for the money. We do it because we have to, because we love it, because it’s how we think or communicate or make sense of the world. Sometimes, it can also help other dreams come true – like finding a tribe or an audience, sharing and developing our ideas, or seeing our words come to life on the page, stage or screen.
As I wrote in a recent blog for Fremantle Press, for me, social media was the natural home for a decade of short, meme and video poems. But far from being an elitist art form, poetry is everywhere – in our TV ads and children’s books, music charts, birthday cards and social media feeds. Sharing digital poems in print is a celebration of hybridity and possibility, and an exciting cultural shift. Who knows how we’ll all be reading our poems by the end of the decade to come? Read more.
Free speech and Fremantle Shipping News
From poetry to social media and current threats to free speech, I hugely enjoyed my recent chat with Michael Barker from Fremantle Shipping News. You can catch our conversation on the podcast (or listen to a short extract on TikTok).
Bad faith work practices
‘Funders are seeking more information than they can credibly audit from organisations who are desperate for funding.’
YES THEY ARE. Proud to find my recent rant about Australian arts funding for Overland cited in Aden Date’s clever musings on bad faith arts sector practices.
‘The arts are perhaps the most undervalued and overmeasured sector of civil society, and so gaming the system is understandable. Kate Larsen, in a piece for the Overland Journal, found that organisations were spending “between thirty and fifty hours on each expression of interest [in multi-year funding].” However, assessors have comparatively little time to assess each application, such that the end result is that each assessor will spend “just one or two minutes of consideration for each hour of [the organisation’s] work [on their expression of interest].”’ Read more in Aden’s enews.
The Sealey Challenge update
Last month, I made it through an adapted version of The Sealey Challenge to read (part of) a poetry book a day in the month of August - which was an extraordinary opportunity to dip into the worlds and words of 31 wonderful poets. Since my last update, those books included:
And another thing
My latest 'and another thing' vlog is about our ongoing workforce crisis, the regressive nonsense of employers wanting to punish workers for standing up for their rights, and the one-year anniversary of my #LessIsNecessary campaign.
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These vlogs are usually exclusively for my Patreon followers. If you’d like more of these rants, you can join me as an advocate, ally or accomplice from just $2.50/month. With a shout out to Simone for joining Team Patreon this month.
And if you’re interested in Gurnergate, check out my pal Esther Anatolitis’ thoughts on how click-bait, conflict and outrage are making the ‘NO’ campaign’s job easier on The App Formerly Known as Twitter this week. (And then vote ‘YES’ on October 14th).