Tag Archives: creativity

New centre for literacy in Melbourne: 100 Story Building

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Lachlann Carter, Jess Tran & Jenna Williams

I was excited to learn that a new centre for literacy will soon be launched in Melbourne, called 100 Story Building. The centre and its programs are the brainchild of Jenna Williams, Lachlann Carter and Jess Tran. Williams and Carter previously formed the publishing project for young writers, Pigeon Letters, in which Tran was also heavily involved.

100 Story Building works with marginalised students, and collaborates with members of Melbourne’s literary community, and other organisations. It has the backing of high-profile authors and illustrators like Alice Pung, Andy Griffiths, Shaun Tan, Sally Rippin and more. Publishers Penguin, Hardie Grant Egmont and Text are also supporters. The opening date will be March 2013.

I got in touch with Jenna Williams to ask her all about this worthy new venture…

Literacy is obviously incredibly important, but 100 Story Building is the first centre of its kind in Melbourne. Were you inspired by similar projects around the world? And will you collaborate with existing programs in schools, libraries and through existing organisations?

100 Story Building may be the first writing centre and social enterprise for children and young people in Melbourne, but it is able to exist because of the incredible creative culture of this city. We are inspired every day by the writers, artists and organisations here and have been very fortunate to be able to collaborate with them along the way. The culture fostered by organisations such as Express Media, The Wheeler Centre, Emerging Writers Festival and Melbourne Writers Festival, as well as authors and publishers, continually inspires us and we love finding ways to share this culture with the children and young people we work with.

Since founding Pigeons in 2009, we have collaborated closely with teachers, schools and organisations to deliver our programs to students and we will continue to do this. The wonderful thing about collaborating on a project, particularly with schools, is that inevitably it takes on additional dimensions you didn’t expect.

Around the world, there are a number of organisations that have inspired 100 Story Building. 826 Valencia has of course been a great inspiration and support, and much of what we learned while working there has informed our plans for 100 Story Building. We also draw inspiration from Hygge Factory in Denmark, Spark + Mettle in the UK, who while they don’t have a writing focus, do some amazing mentoring projects for young people, Fighting Words in Ireland, Writers Corps in San Francisco and our friends in Sydney, the Sydney Story Factory.

A ridiculously simple question that readers of this blog will probably know the answer to, but why is literacy so important? Why are projects like yours that enhance access to literacy, to stories, to creativity, so important?

Literacy is an essential skill that everybody needs in order to prosper in life. It isn’t just about reading and writing—it encompasses expression in all its forms, including the ability to reflect and think critically about how we communicate. Having good literacy skills mean we are more likely to be able to confidently engage in broader society and participate in our community in a meaningful way.

There’s significant research, such as the 2009 OECD PISA study, that demonstrates a direct connection between disadvantage, literacy levels and an individual’s ability to engage in society. Unfortunately, this means that the reading proficiency between a student from socio-economically disadvantaged background and one from a socio-economically advantaged society can be as wide as three years.

So our programs are aimed at giving these students the opportunity to explore their creative voice, working alongside professional wordsmiths on projects that have a real-life outcome. Arts-based learning opportunities such as these are understood to not only achieve higher levels of literacy, but also lead individuals to be more intrinsically motivated to engage with their community.

By providing opportunities for children and young people to foster their creative voice and share their ideas and stories, we hope to support these students’ literacy development and their confidence in themselves.

An amazing list of writers and publishers will be involved with the centre. Can you tell us a bit more about their role/s? How will it actually run, day to day? 

AMAZING is right! For the past four years we have been extremely fortunate to be supported by authors, artists and publishing professionals who have contributed not only their time but also skills and knowledge with the kids in our programs. One of my favourite workshops involved an editor from Hardie Grant Egmont teaching a group of 10-12 year olds the ‘secret code’ of proofreaders marks. The kids loved it and from that workshop on were using carets to insert text and stetting corrections in their own writing. So good.

But I digress!

The core of our operations is dedicated to our free programs for 6-17 year olds. Day to day, this means running two hour creative writing workshops with school groups at the centre as well as after-school programs, some of which may be offered as one-off workshops, while others will run for a number of weeks. Early Harvest, a publishing program we developed with Davina Bell and Emma Hewitt, will continue to be run and involves a number of editors, authors, artists and publishers mentoring the students through the process of creating their own literary magazine.

100 Story Building will also operate as a social enterprise, with fee-based programs being run to support our free programs. These include 100 Story Studios, our writing for children masterclasses, which will provide opportunities for writers to workshop their work with authors such as Alice Pung or Michael Pryor. Hardie Grant Egmont are also running a selection of special publishing workshops which will include the opportunity for students to seek feedback on their writing.

100 Story Building has the support of publishers including Text, Penguin and Hardie Grant Egmont and we’re delighted to have Sally Rippin and Alice Pung as ambassadors for the centre.

Can you tell us a bit about engaging with children/students? How will that work? 

Students Danny & Hung

Setting up 100 Story Building, we spent a long time talking to schools in Melbourne’s west as well as many of the community groups in the area, not only to determine if there was a need for the centre, but also how we can work together and engage children and young people. Collaborating with teachers to make sure our workshops are relevant to their curriculum is important.

We work very closely with teachers, principals and welfare officers to ensure that we engage the students who will benefit the most from our programs, and to also help us in our program design so that what we are doing is connected to what is happening in the classroom, and the teachers are able to use the experiences the children have in our programs to enrich their own curriculum.

It’s also pretty hard for a kid to not be engaged when they know their work may be published in an anthology or shown to an audience at a public event. Sharing their work, celebrating it and holding it up alongside the work of adult writers is a pretty powerful tool of engagement.

Of course, you are looking for enthusiastic and energetic volunteers. What will be their roles and how can they find out more?

Oh yes! We want to hear from volunteers! Enthusiastic and energetic volunteers will be what makes 100 Story Building special and there are a myriad of ways to get involved.

Our daily creative writing workshops and after-school programs are great fun and will be supported by volunteers who may either be working one-on-one with students or taking on a role facilitating the workshops. 100 Story Building will also regularly publish anthologies of student writing. As we are dedicated to professionally producing and distributing these books to bookstores around Australia, the assistance of talented editors, designers and proofreaders will be essential. And of course, as we aim to open our doors in March, we’ll need lots of helpful people to paint, polish and bring their imaginations to the space.

But we really encourage and support volunteers to contribute to 100 Story Building in a way that is meaningful to them and draws on their interests.

Anyone interested in getting involved should swing by our website www.100storybuilding.org.au or better yet, come along to our launch at 7:30pm at The Wheeler Centre on October 30.

Guest review: Matthia Dempsey on Patti Smith’s Just Kids

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Bloomsbury/Allen & Unwin
February 2010
9780747548409 (Aus, US/Kindle)
Reviewed by Matthia Dempsey

Emerging from their teens, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe first encounter each other in 1960s New York, a recognition as much as a meeting. Smith has fled the aftermath of an unplanned pregnancy and adoption, and the factory future that faces her in New Jersey. Mapplethorpe has broken from a Catholic upbringing – the restraints of it, and of his family, never quite loosed.

In the New York of 1967 they fall together easily, inhabiting a love and friendship that recognises and provokes the creative expression of each (Mapplethorpe wants her to sing, Smith urges him to take his own photographs; ‘one cannot imagine the mutual happiness we felt when we sat and drew together’). A banister up a staircase, a rope through dark water, a guiding blue star: their friendship sees them through odd jobs, early sketches, illness, hunger, fame, and the sad fates that wait for many around them.

Though this is a memoir that takes us through the iconic days of the late sixties and the corridors of the Chelsea Hotel – telling of encounters with Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix , the Andy Warhol set, William Burroughs and Bob Dylan, among others – it is alive in ways that belie the cliché of that setting. Smith’s magic is to perform a kind of time travel for us, scraping away any nostalgic varnish. Hendrix stops to talk in a stairwell and becomes just a shy musician, Joplin is passed over for ‘one of the prettier hangers-on’ and we are heartbroken with her. We are grateful for the immediacy of these encounters, but even more for how close they come to being incidental – instead of starring, these other famous figures shift and fit around the true story (so that, watching Jim Morrison, we stay with Patti as she guiltily thinks ‘I could do that’).

A poet and musician, Smith knows something about telling moments and well-wrought phrases. Thinking of this book a few weeks after finishing it, I picture some thing of pure clarity – the element left when impurities have been burned away, or the lucid thankfulness that comes after a fever has passed. Smith selects her remembered moments carefully, trusting that we will trace the patterns.

This memoir will send you to your record collection, to the bookstore, to the cinema, the gallery, the internet: Rimbaud, Blake and Joan of Arc are early heroes, Picasso transformative; Smith goes to see the Velvet Underground and we want to hear Lou Reed, she writes a Rolling Stone piece about Lotte Lenya and you want to find out more and listen to Dylan’s ‘Bringing it All Back Home’ again; who is this Vali Myers? I must watch Midnight Cowboy… the notes pile up, the dog-eared pages outnumber the unblemished.

If the vitality of the book stems from Smith’s faithfulness to the central relationship with Mapplethorpe – a story arc for the meetings and memories – it also flows from the central assumption, so breathtakingly, beautifully pervasive, that life is lived for artistic expression.

‘Did art get us?’ wonders Mapplethorpe, as he nears death. ‘Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that,’ writes Smith.

At sixty-three, she is still producing music and words. The creative impulse that urged her and Mapplethorpe to forgo meals to buy art supplies is the live wire running through their story. It threads through incidents both beautiful and ugly, like the strings the pair would decorate with beads and broken fishing lures to wear and sell. It is the simple heart of their sometimes complicated relationship and it runs through Smith’s life still.

As a result, her stories have not tipped from the real to the rehashed, made empty with wearied retelling. We are there with these kids as they take photos, draw pictures, write poems. This is a portrait of youth and somehow of the way creation can keep us young – playful and awed. Writes Mapplethorpe: ‘I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together.’

Just Kids is a beautiful song in the pages of a beautiful book, a tale pared back to the thread that ties two souls together and a talisman for anyone drawn to create, or drawn to those who are.

Matthia Dempsey is a writer, reviewer and editor of Bookseller+Publisher Online and the book blog Fancy Goods.

Response to A.S. Patric’s ‘Questionnaire’

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I was thinking about A.S. Patric’s recent post on the Overland blog all of yesterday afternoon. I thought I’d have a go at responding to his piece, just off-the-cuff. Note: the words in bold are Alec’s.

Are we more disconnected?

I know how late my crush goes to bed.

Are we more superficial?

Skin is a surface.

Does the internet cripple the creative life?

There’s a book in that.

Are we more distracted?

I was thinking about the present, and then someone hyperlinked the past.

Debased and disillusioned?

Our placards have dimension.

Do we abandon a spiritual centre for a cyber stratosphere?

Did you ask for God on the telephone?

Or is it merely two centimetres of distraction?

I have been distracted by many paintings, less than a centimetre thick.

Are we ourselves filtered through the thoughts of others?

And through the thoughts of ourselves, given to others.

Are we distillations of the failures and successes of our parents, or perhaps, just our social networks?

He wanted his too too solid flesh to melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew because of his parents (and his social networks then helped him).

How much of myself is originated solely from the private recesses of the singularity that is my ego?

Just the affection.

How much of me is already historical, global, communal, whether I want it or not?

How much of me is Bart Simpson?

Where is all this going?

 

 

 

Where is all this happening?

In the Matrix.

Is there some point of culmination where consciousness experiences itself as a collective phenomenon?

Why don’t you crowdsource the answer to that one?

Do we understand where we have been?

I was once a twinkle in my Dad’s eye.

Do we understand where we will be?

‘From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity’ – Edvard Munch

Have we seen all the tools we have made, and all the tools we will build, for the machines that are our past and future?

DOS.

Has an everlasting moment always slipped through our fingers?

I decided to look time in the face but it ran away from me.

Do we stand alone below the stars?

Each star is surrounded by space.

Have we always wondered how to see them properly?

It’s difficult to look into someone’s eyes if they’re focused on the sky.

Have we always wondered how to see you properly?

It’s hard for me to look into someone’s eyes.

Are there really nothing but questions?

42.

Nothing more than a code of 0s and 1s?

As above.

Combinations of such broken figures?

Broken things are more interesting.

Just so many broken fingers?

Fingers are older than numbers.

Do you think in such fractured circles –> wear such incomplete rings?

The beginning and the ending don’t meet.

Have we been little things?

Almost all of the time.

Have we been voiceless?

You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a towel.

Have we been a sum on the other side of the sun?

Is music part of your equation?

Have we dreamed and found all our answers and then forgotten such sunless places?

Smell is a sunless thing.

Have I known you and lost you?

You knew only the avatar.

Have I misplaced our misread faces?

You’ll draw another one (to you).

Printed them wrong, forgotten and gone?

The paper from the printer is warm.

Will we now drift?

Continental drift is a natural occurence.

Each from each?

Like ‘Ratso’ Rizzo from Joe Buck.

Clusters of poetry turning into rings, barely detectable, and spinning around Jupiter?

I’d prefer to be a Martian poem.

Powdering out in white dust as far away as Pluto’s underworld?

It’s where all the cool kids are. Like James Dean.

What were we when we discovered that our planet offers us an absolute answer to everything we could ever ask?

We thought ourselves no longer ridiculous. Of course, we were wankers.

Answering

1 + 1

1 + 1

1 + 1

Answering

everything

else

with

zeros

I had a question about that

but I got distracted.

Melbourne Writers Festival 2009 diary part two: Grenville, Michaels and the 'engine of curiosity'

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Stories everywhere: The guy in the ACMI cafe shares my love of David Bowie, and they make a mean ham toastie.

The title of the session Oranges are the Only Fruit alludes the the Orange Prize, which guests Anne Michaels and Kate Grenville have both won. Peter Clarke was a generous and intelligent chair, steering the conversation mainly in the relation of ‘process’, and how one gets to such a level of ‘literary art’, as he put it. For Kate Grenville, there is really ‘no such thing as a fact’, only interpretations. We are left with the ‘energy’ of history, and in that, something that asks questions about the present. When Anne Michaels is writing she may start with a collection of facts, but its the ‘meaning between the facts’ which is important. And this may take time to emerge.

Did you know? Kate Grenville has two early manuscripts in her bottom drawer. The reason they were unsuccessful was that she was trying to write to a plan, and wasn’t letting herself be taken down the roads of curiosity. Also, she did 30 drafts of The Lieutenant. And despite having written many novels, each time she feels a fear – one specifically related to being true to the imaginative potential of the material and the characters. ‘If you go honestly asking questions … something opens up in a meaningful way.’ So go forth, writers, with your ‘engine of curiosity’!

Anne Michaels spoke with sensitivity and insight about the ‘perilous’ journey of a book in formation. As human beings we naturally want to simplify or reach a conclusion about a difficult and complex issue or situation. Michaels says we should ‘respect the complexity of what we’re writing about’. Go there! Go ‘beyond what you think you can do’, she told an emerging writer in the audience.

Grenville and Michaels will be appearing at further sessions. I highly recommend seeing them – engaging and articulate speakers, who also read beautifully from their own works.

AND LiteraryMinded will feature an interview by Matthia Dempsey, with Michaels, after the festival. Stay tuned (or ‘clicked in’ as the term probably should be).

They will give me new parts

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part blog-post, part insight into current creative development

frankenstein_monster_boris_karloffI ate banana pancakes this morning. I saw an old man on a bike in matching denims and a stackhat. I looked into somebody’s eyes. There are nine paper tasks on the floor.

They will give me new parts like Frankenstein’s monster.

A producer this week told me about Roger Corman bringing his lunch in the same paper bag each day.

I saw publishers pitch their books to filmmakers. Some of them compacting story, theme and character into 90 seconds. Some of them getting it wrong. Books@MIFF: I am reporting on it for work. I will tell you more about it later.

I’m developing three poems. Images: churning and swishing in my head. I try to be open but then a touch is like a burn and I retract.

This is what the poems will be for. I’m intimidated by the company. But then… this is the best. This creative cocktail of colours unexpected in my head. Are you with me, here?

I had so many dreams this week: the man with no face in the tree, torturing me with a drill. I wouldn’t tell him where my sister was. The green interior of a haunted house with large bookshelves. Nick Cave and I finding a semi-secretive spot at a party. This one was not a nightmare…

Link-a-thon Sunday: Frank McCourt, sadly, passed away. Entries for the 2009 Davitt Awards (crime) are now open. Griffith Review is accepting submissions for a special summer fiction edition ‘Stories for Today’.

Today.

Today. Begun. Begot. Flipped upside-down. (Soon) gone.