Blog Hop!

So I've been invited to blog hop by Beau Hillier who blog hopped last week. Thanks Beau! You can read Beau's post here. In turn, I have invited two wonderful writers, Demet Divaroren and Andy Jackson to join the hop. So go visit their blog pages in the next week or two and see how they Hop To It.

My answers to the 4 Blog Hop questions are below:

What are you working on at the moment?

The main thing at the moment is a new play for Melbourne Fringe Festival called Once Were Pirates. It's a dark comedy about two men who used to be pirates but are stuck in the real world now and have to figure out how to live. One way to describe it would be a cross between Samuel Beckett and Pirates of the Caribbean. Other than that I am currently in the midst of a novel called The Looking Glass Spy which is about an ordinary woman who falls into a spy novel and finds she is the main character.

How do you think your work differs from that of other writers in your genre?

Well you can see a theme in those two works - crossing genres and mixing fantasy with reality. Nearly all of my work has a speculative bent and I like to blend, mix or twist genres. For example I like playing with pop culture genres when writing theatre (in 2013 I wrote a sci-fi play called The Good Girl). I explore existential questions via my short stories, plays and novels. I dig deep and try to stretch myself and the reader to question how we look at the world and why. I think genre is a great way to do this. It gives me a framework to start with that I can then push the boundaries of. It's also a lot of fun to find new ways to create worlds and bend rules. 

Why do you write what you write?

I write from a place of asking questions. Often these start with: What If ... and that's where the speculative element comes in. Some of my writing comes from a deeply personal place of questioning my own life or things that I've experienced. But I also respond to the world around me, moral and ethical questions, social trends and mores. I want to connect with people. I want to ask questions that I don't know the answers to. I want to create imagined worlds where characters and readers can play.

What's your writing process, and how does it work?

I am usually working on several pieces at once, either in different forms and / or at different phases. I write pretty quickly and try to complete whole drafts of things then I go back and re-draft and re-draft. In that re-drafting phase I may also plan a little more carefully - especially for longer form works like plays or novels. It takes me a draft (at least) to work out what it is I am exploring in a piece, where the heart is and what the shape of it should be. I'm interested in shifting how I work and experimenting with more planning up front to see how this might affect my work. I try and write every day but not in a regimented way, more to ensure I am keeping my skills honed and also that I am staying connected to the pieces I am working on.

Thanks for reading! And remember to check out Demet and Andy's posts in the coming few weeks ...

Demet Divaroren was born in Adana, Turkey and migrated to Australia with her family when she was six months old. She writes fiction and non-fiction and is the co-editor of the anthology, Coming of Age: Growing up Muslim in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 2014). Demet’s writing has appeared in Island magazine, Scribe’s New Australian Stories, The Age Epicure, The Big Issue, and was commended in the Ada Cambridge Biographical Prose Prize 2013. Her first novel, Orayt?, was shortlisted for the Australian Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

Demet is the recipient of an Australia Council Artstart Grant, a Rosebank Residential Writing Fellowship, a Varuna Fellowship for a Writing Retreat and a Glenfern Grace Marion Wilson Fellowship. She is the Artist in Residence at Deer Park Art Spaces and has appeared as a panelist, guest speaker and workshop leader at literary festivals, universities, and schools across Melbourne. Demet is currently writing her memoir, aided by an Australia Council Jump Mentoring Grant. She is represented by Curtis Brown Literary Agents.

Andy Jackson has performed at dozens of events and festivals (including The Age Melbourne Writers Festival, Prakriti Poetry Festival [in Chennai, India], Goa Literary & Arts Festival, Australian Poetry Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Clifden Arts Festival [Ireland], Newcastle Young Writers Festival and Overload Poetry Festival), had poems published in a variety of print and on-line journals, been awarded grants from the Australia Council and Arts Victoria, been the recipient of an Australian Society of Authors mentorship, and self-published two collections of poetry.  He has been awarded residencies from Victorian Writers Centre, Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre (Perth) and Asialink.  He is also an infrequent collaborator with musicians, sound artists and other writers.

His first full-length collection of poems, Among the Regulars,was published by papertiger media in 2010 – this book was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry (the Kenneth Slessor Prize) and Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award.  A collaborative puppetry-poetry performance with Rachael Wenona Guy entitled Ambiguous Mirrors won the City of Yarra Award for Most Innovative Work at the Overload Poetry Festival in 2009.  He won the 2008 Arts ACT Rosemary Dobson Award for Best Unpublished Poem for Secessionist. In 2013, he won the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize.  The resulting collection of poems – the thin bridge - has just recently been released. Another collection – Immune systems: Poems and Ghazals on India & Medical Tourism – is forthcoming in 2015 from Transit Lounge.

Andy has the genetic condition Marfan Syndrome.  He is currently based in Melbourne.