On the Holding of Spaces for Essaying Into

By , , , and | 31 October 2021
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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.

*seashell distorted through a plastic bag

DUET TWO

Tina as Melody
‘The whole world is searching for hard borders, like yours’ quips my friend on the
phone from Berlin. ‘So, we can keep out the virus and all other undesirables while we’re at
it,’ she said.

Andy as Melody
‘Right!’ I reply. But I am nevertheless caught off guard by how simply she puts it and how
I’ve missed this analysis. Mine and perhaps the local political left more broadly seem to have
a blindspot on the hard border this time.

Tina as Melody
We’ve been so busy counteracting the narratives of the QAnon-ers, the anti-vaxxers, and the
‘freedom’ marchers, that we’ve forgotten to be present to the dark sides of Australia’s fetish
for border control.

Andy as Melody
The ideology of protection got us this time. Got me. The desire for safety, so visceral.

Tina as Melody
Texting my friend about this later: ‘I mean maybe we [the ‘we’ here being the
political left] do have a fear of being infected by the other. We just think we don’t.’

Andy as Melody
The ‘we’ being me.

Tina as Melody
All those years of thinking I wasn’t afraid of the other. Yeah right! The hubris of thinking one
is exempt from this stuff. I mean I have had other glimpses of the thing-I-thought-I-was-
exempt-from. As when crossing the street to avoid someone begging for money, or the
laughing along with a certain style of sexist teasing among people I don’t know very well, or
at all (like at the dentist this week, he teasing my daughter in the most gendered of ways and
me saying ‘he’s just teasing darling’).

Andy as Melody
Don’t take it so seriously being the message. Don’t overreact! For goodness sake, don’t cry!

*ATM declined

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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.

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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/

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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.

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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.

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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).

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