TRIO TWO
Khalid, Peta & Melody in Andy’s Words (Taking one sentence each)
One word that keeps coming to mind is reticence.
A kind of hesitation, but heavier.
I hover over the blank space – yes, even this blank space, one we’ve collectively decided to dive into without preciousness or pretension.
Because now – more than ever, or just more clearly than ever – it seems that the spaces are not empty.
Airborne droplets in our breaths.
The hidden histories inside our words.
Capitalism in our desires.
I think I’m ok with hesitation.
Though I have to say, I wanted to write this with less thought, more bodily, with less gazing out the window, less hovering over the backspace key.
Can we hug?
Have I brought my mask?
How will others take what I say?
What chaos will these theories reverberate with?
The cat is cleaning herself.
A ragged, diseased sulphur-crested cockatoo is eating seeds we tossed into the garden.
A rat is turning the compost.
Buds are forming on bare branches, ignorant and with something we humans might call hope.
I am thinking about reticence, but I am also thinking about movement, small and present.
I am thinking how each body is connected to myriad other bodies, is actually inside other bodies.
I’m not saying anything extraordinary here, just wanting to repeat the mantra that has yet to sink properly in.
It’s better as a question, perhaps, how to love in the middle of crisis?
*farts from mother
UNISON
All, as 2001 Nokia
What does contradiction, borders and fear – or at the very least misinformation – have to do with essaying?
The act of essaying being a practice-of, or a practice-in, thinking. In nuance.
Thinking, being the thing we need now as much as ever. An ability to be in the thick of it without closing off or shutting down physiologically.
*anthemic murmuring
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).
