Author: lefa

Feminist Family Salon: What is Feminist Parenting?

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Yesterday an idea that has slowly germinated and grown finally reached full bloom. Our first Feminist Family Salon took place with a sold out audience and over 100 people watching the live stream of our event.

Our guests Joyce Watts, Nelly Thomas and Amy Gray spent the better part of two hours talking with me about feminist parenting and the many aspects that we consider as we go about the business of helping our kids navigate the world.

If you would like to watch the panel it is available as a Facebook video. Within the next month I will have it captioned so that our hearing impaired and deaf community members can enjoy it as well.

It was frustrating not to be able to get too deep on some of the territory we ventured into, but as my co-creator Pia and I knew, there is too much to explore to ever feel like you’ve done it justice.

After such a resounding success for our first panel we’re keen to get our next event happening soon. There are a list of topics sitting there tempting us, so as soon as we can find the right venue (if only Farouk’s Olive could fit more people in!) we will be back with a new question to interrogate and a new panel to get our community thinking.

Reading Matters 2017

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There are some gigs you get asked to do and you do a little fist pump sitting at your desk. For me, Reading Matters is one of those. For those who don’t know, Reading Matters comes around every two years and is the Centre for Youth Literature’s conference on all things YA for librarians, booksellers, teachers and YA artists. The CYL team always put together an exceptional program – informative, engaging and surprising – and I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to host panels for the past two years.

This year I facilitated a panel on politics in YA fiction with local authors Lili Wilkinson and Jane Harrison, and American author AS King. The conversation was as excellent as I hoped it would be. All three authors write books where their protagonists (all women) are living and breathing social justice and politics. The discussion explored domestic violence, environmentalism, teens as agents of social change, racism in fantasy works vs racism in realism (and why we are more comfortable with the former than the latter), feminism and why personal stories can engage more fully with a political concept than dystopian trilogies do.

I left the session feeling really positive. Life is mostly about keeping a seven month old alive and happy at this point than it is engaging with politics, literature and words. That’s okay, but it felt damn good to be back using my brain to tease out a really juicy topic with three writers I admire. I recently received a request to chair some sessions at another upcoming festival and after yesterday I’m even more excited to start preparing for those.

City of Literature ILS Trip: Imminent Departure

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I’m about to embark on a trip to the UK to attend the International Literary Showcase as a delegate from the Melbourne City of Literature. It has snuck up so quickly that I haven’t had much time to take in what a huge opportunity it is and what it will feel like to immerse myself in a conference like this.

At the moment my work schedule is very very part time, which is as close as you get to maternity leave when you’re a freelancer who is passionate about their work. I’ve written some articles, facilitated some panels, launched a passion project (Feminist Family Salon) and can now add participated in an international showcase event. Not bad for a year where I have no childcare, an under one year old and a sleep deprived brain.

As well as the showcase in Norwich I will be popping into another sister City of Literature, Edinburgh, where I plan to re-visit some lovely literary spots like the Scottish Storytelling Centre.  I’ll pop in to the Glasgow Women’s Library before heading to the next City of Literature spot, Nottingham. After the ILS in Nottingham I will head to London and hopefully meet with some organisations there too.

It’s an understatement to say this trip will be a great opportunity for me to develop my own skills and networks. I’m so grateful to the Melbourne City of Literature Travel Fund and the Norwich International Literature Showcase for making it possible.

Speakers announced for Feminist Family Salon: What is Feminist Parenting

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Our first salon is fast approaching and I’m proud to be hosting such an excellent lineup of speakers. We announced over on the Facebook page that Amy Gray, Joyce Watts and Nelly Thomas will be our guests, diving into a conversation which we hope will set the scene for many salons to come.

Nelly Thomas is an accomplished comedian, writer and social commentator. Her book What Women Want was an erudite exploration of being a feminist in Australia. If you’ve seen her on stage, you know we are in for a treat hearing her thoughts on feminist parenting.

Here’s a taste of the kind of satire and insight Nelly is known for, an article in New Matilda earlier this year about childcare and working parents.

Amy Gray is a writer covering topics including feminism, motherhood, pop culture and technology. You’d be hard pressed to have missed her work if feminism and families are your thing. We’re so pleased she can join us for the inaugural salon.

Here’s one of Amy’s recent articles which is a great taste of why we’re looking forward to hearing her thoughts on June 3.

Joyce Watts is the author of the wildly popular TOT: HOT OR NOT site, an invaluable resource for families looking to find welcoming places and events around Melbourne and beyond. Joyce also owns online bike store CycleStyle, produces site-specific creative play events for kids and is a former lawyer.

You can check out TOT: HOT OR NOT to see what Joyce has been up to lately.

City of Literature ILS Trip

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I had exciting news this week. I’ve been accepted as a delegate to the International Literature Showcase in Norwich, England. The event takes place in June 2017, with a focus on creating opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration between writers from the UK and the rest of the world. Norwich is a sister UNESCO City of Literature to Melbourne, so visiting has been on my wish list for some time.

In a year when work is on the backburner thanks to baby Linus joining our family it is heartening to receive a professional development opportunity like this one. There are so many exceptional people taking part and the outline for what we will be doing while there is exciting. I’ll be plotting what other literary joy I can fit in on the trip too. I feel a tour of libraries and literary magazines coming on…

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I’ve been published in Junkee today, talking about what the recent incident with Lawrence Mooney says about sexism in Australian comedy.

For men in comedy it’s an uncomfortable truth that even those who don’t sexually harass or intimidate women are complicit in a system that privileges them and their work. For men prepared to see this privilege, it is now incumbent upon them to be allies to the women in their industry and in audiences.

I have spent many years promoting, producing, publishing and reviewing comedy. I absoloutely love the artform at its best and loathe the reality of our local industry. Too many cis-straight-white dudes dominating and making it hard for others to learn the craft and find audiences. One of the things I only really came to grips with after I moved away from the bulk of my comedy work was the sexism and misogyny.

For women in the industry it is incredibly difficult to speak up about this because the punishment for doing so is harsh and real: you’re ostracised and your access to work is restricted. It’s not a deliberate campaign against you, it’s just that criticising those in power means they retract any support they may have offered.

I hope this resonates for other women who are (or have been) in the local comedy community, and above all I hope this makes a few of the men in the industry think about their complicity in the system.

2015

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This year has been one of the toughest of my life, professionally and personally. It has been a year where the highest of highs have been reached, but the lowest of lows have seemed to dominate. I’ve written less than I wanted to, but done amazing projects such as the Independent Publishing Conference. I’ve met wonderful people I haven’t had the opportunity to work with before, and said goodbye to a friend and co-worker I admired and loved dearly. I’ve read more books than I have in a long time, been published for the first time in publications I have wanted to see my work in, challenged myself to try new things. I founded an organisation for women writers, reviewed books on Triple RRR, facilitated sessions at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

At this stage of the year I’m feeling exhausted. There is a lot to process and a lot to consider as I head towards 2016. What do I want to achieve next year? What opportunities do I need to chase? What do I need to say no to? December and January will be my opportunity to think about these things, and to spend time focusing on my family and my health. Our writing community lost too many people this year, had our arts funding slashed, spent a huge amount of time in suspended animation trying to see where the chips would fall with government bodies and oversight. Here’s hoping 2016 is kinder to us all.

Independent Publishing Conference 2015

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After an epic three days, the Independent Publishing Conference is finished for the year. I’m exhausted, but very happy with how the event went. I hadn’t planned to run an event of this size in 2015, but when the Small Press Network asked I couldn’t say no. The organisation is such an important part of our literary ecosystem, and I felt like this would be the perfect opportunity to learn more about the publishing/publishers aspects of our industry. Mostly when programming I work with artists, so this was a chance to expand my knowledge and use my programming skills in a different way.

So far feedback from the conference has been great, and while there were some challenges with logistics and the usual event hiccups, it seemed to go well. It was a pleasure to meet so many interesting people, and hear from such a wide range of speakers. I learned a great deal, and hope to have the opportunity to work with some of the people involved again.

For now I focus on all of the post-event logistics; reports, budgets, thank you’s, invoices. If I owe you an email please bear with me as I work through the overflowing inbox I’m facing.

WILAA Steering Committee Announcement

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background

Seeing Women in Literary Arts Australia come to life has been one of the proudest moments of my professional life. We launched back in June, and since then my co-conspirators Lisa Dempster and Kate Callingham and I have been quietly working behind the scenes pushing things along. The most important part of this was forming a steering committee to shape what WILAA will become.

Our aim is deceptively simple — to foster community and promote women in the literary arts — but cannot be authentic unless it engages with a broad range of women, many of whom identify as having other intersecting identities which inform their experiences as writers. It is vital that our steering committee reflects the diverse communities we endeavour to work with and for. Out of the individuals we approached only one was unable to join us. We have literally assembled our dream team. The people we felt would take this concept and give it a heart and soul. Some I have worked with before, most I have not. I can’t wait to see where they take WILAA.

So here they are, our steering committee.