*humming
REFRAIN
All
It’s a putting oneself into a space of deliberate uncertainty. Stepping into the unknown. A
practicing in that space. Training. It’s about thinking provisionally. Speaking small. Not for
all.
It’s about languaging. Being attentive to words, to meaning. To the meaning that can be smuggled in however unwittingly.
It’s about taking seriously – which might have nothing whatsoever to do with being serious.
*velco rips
FIVE SOLOS
Peta
I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to do another guest spot from the comfort of my terrarium. And so
I have travelled all this way to share an hour with you within which we may inlay ourselves
upon the essay unfurled.
Yet here I must furl this, instead, my part for this – ummmm – essaimblage. This essaying into.
To be furled is to be gathered into a compact roll and bound securely, such as one might wind a sail against a spar or a flag against a staff. And so, I furl myself this here, now, and lie on the floor in my terrarium curled up in a tight little ball to wait for an online appointment to do an online workout with an online guy who will talk me through a range of motions and exercise I could readily talk myself through, if I only had the will and the wherewithal to make the attempt.
*a round of applause
Melody Ellis is a writer and academic of Greek, Anglo-Celtic and German descent living on unceded Boon Wurrung country in the south of Melbourne. She teaches creative writing and literary theory in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, where she is a member of the non/fictionLab research group. She comes from a background in the visual arts and is interested in interdisciplinary, experimental, collective, and fictocritical approaches to writing.
Andy Jackson is a poet and creative writing teacher, and was awarded the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellowship. He has been shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. Andy has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal, and his latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the 2022 ALS Gold Medal.
http://amongtheregulars.wordpress.com/
Tina Stefanou is an Australian-Greek artist based on Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field.
Peta Murray is a writer-performer and late blooming academic in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her experience as theatre-maker informs her research on the role of arts-based practices as modes of inquiry and cultural activism. She is the author of plays (Wallflowering, Salt), blogposts (mmmmycorona), and multi-modal works of live art and diarological science. Her current focus is the making of HERD, a queer cantata with wreckedALLprods.
Khalid Warsame is a writer and arts–worker. His essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications. He has appeared as a facilitator and guest artist at writers’ festivals and his work has recently appeared in the anthologies New Australian Fiction (KYD), Growing Up African in Australia (Black Inc.) and in After Australia (Affirm Press).
