Theatre Tuesday
October 9, 2017
So you’ve been feeling a bit past your use-by date, and a little tarnished by time. Perhaps you are terrified that you are losing your way, and becoming the type of writer who repeats themselves, not to work and rework ideas like an artisan kneading bread, but because they can’t do anything else. You meet that type, and they piss around the corners of conversations, lest new ideas insinuate and undermine their certainties.
And then someone* finds one of your poems, tucked away on this very blog, and includes it in a theatre work, and it is given a new voice and body by an actor**. And you listen to it take its place in the work, and feel glad that someone felt its energy and its humour; a humour wedged between despair and hysteria.
Because you’re a total dag, you adopt a horizontal position in a photo amongst some of the other poets, and the actors. You*** would underline how much the production meant to you in some alien form of punctuation. You really need to discover decorum, rather than dwell in a cellar of rum.
*Adele Chynoweth, who directed the work Under Sedation, currently showing at The Street Theatre, as well as selecting/arranging the poems
**Ruth Pieloor (The other actor is Ben Drysdale and you can probably spot him in the photo above.) The photo below shows Ruth adopting a Polonius stance, after the production.
***You obviously doesn’t mean you, dear reader.
Bloggers of Australia, this is for you!
January 28, 2015
A fantastic initiative to encourage quality writing on-line has been announced. The Thiel Grant for On-line Writing will give an Australian blogger $5000 to produce 50 posts in a year on his or her chosen topic.
Here is the link:
https://teacherintherye.wordpress.com/thiel-grant-for-online-writing/
Why not put in an application? It will provide a disciplined framework to develop your on-line writing to a higher standard. I sometimes think that any type of good writing is a result of inherent ability, drawn out by the exigencies of routine. Producing a weekly blog post has helped me to become a better writer, but that is an exercise that never stops.
For some reason I am now thinking of Raphael Nadal. Mind you, that happens from time to time to almost everyone, doesn’t it?
And here is a totally inappropriate image for the type of writing they are looking to fund.
I have had a good look at the application form and it requires an ability to express oneself concisely, rather than provide pages and pages of documents. All very appropriate for a blogger, methinks.
It would be churlish not to share this information. I now consider myself not to be a churl.
I will shortly announce some more upcoming publications I have this year, including one that was just accepted today, and which is a work in prose! Rewriting this work meant no poem for this week, but next week poetry will reappear.
Routine is a friend, even of the art that takes language and shakes it into new forms.
PS Cottier 