‘In Conversation With Mahogany L. Browne’ by Sista Zai Zanda

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Photo by Shell Daruwala. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

We at The Lifted Brow are presenting this conversation in support of Footscray Community Arts Centre’s phenomenal West Writers Forum 2016 program. If you like what you’ve read/heard in this conversation, come along to the One Night Stanza event at FCAC on Sunday July 22nd, 6pm–7pm, where both Mahogany L. Browne and Sista Zai Zanda will be performing alongside Candy Bowers, Bigoa, and DJ Wahe.

Introduction: I Stand as One But I Come as Ten Thousand

I first met Mahogany L. Browne when she came to Australia in 2011 as one of three poets on the Global Poetics Tour. We all need role models; and when she came to town and spread her poetry over us like the fairy dust that is #Blkgirlmagic, we all fell in love.


When I first met Mahogany, I was tongue-tied but I knew in my bones that there was something about her and her poetry that allowed me to see myself as a performance artist. As a young Black woman who had just started out on the local scene, I needed to hear a voice that spoke bravely about experiences and themes I had tucked away in my heart and only shared within the secure confines of my storytelling collective, Stillwaters.

As a Black artist I live in a time when there is an urgent need to speak out about the silently-acknowledged-and-yet-still-unspoken. Collectively unleashed, our tongues could expose systematic oppression and alter the status quo; they do say that the personal is political. Even so, I definitely still battle an inexplicable urge to self-censor and to tell ‘pretty’ and ‘uncomplicated’ stories that do not rock the white supremacist boat. We all need to stand in the physical presence of: the writer and performer who looks like us and dares break free, willfully lives liberated outside of pre-determined boxes. Mahogany taught me to honour poetry as a place to speak up, take up space and tell my truth.

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‘The Relingos of Beijing: An Interview with Valeria Luiselli’, by Emily Laidlaw

A relingo—an emptiness, an absence—is a sort of depository for possibilities, a place that can be seized by the imagination and inhabited by our phantom follies. Cities need those vacant lots, those silent gaps where the mind can wander freely.

— Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks


Sidewalks

It’s my first time in Beijing and I find myself reading Valeria Luiselli. We’ve come separately to Beijing to attend the Bookworm Literary Festival; Luiselli is promoting her new novel The Story of My Teeth, whereas I’ve come to sit in the audience and learn about literature in translation.

Luiselli is a writer of empty spaces, or ‘relingos’, an architectural term she adopts as a motif in her 2013 essay collection, Sidewalks. Her book maps out the landscapes of Mexico City, Venice, New York and elsewhere, with a focus on areas, real and imaginary, left to abandon. It feels appropriate to read Luiselli in Beijing. It’s a city so geographically large, so densely populated, yet to the keen eye, filled with absences.

Beijing has been knocked down and rebuilt many times. When the Communists took control in the middle of last century they wanted to destroy all vestiges of feudalism and their solution was to smash any reminders to the ground. So how do you read a city like Beijing? How do you look past the gaps, physical and political? How do you look through the smog, thick as concrete?

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book, so concludes Luiselli’s essay ‘Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces’. But she goes on: The metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead end streets; fragments will be bridges; words will be like scaffolding which protect fragile constructions.

Luiselli shows a deep love for cities in her books. I feel drawn to her writing, in the same way I feel drawn to large cities far from the Australian one I call home. Her essays make me want to slide on my boots and explore unknown pavements. I’m never alone when I’m part of the crowd.

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An Interview with Amiel Courtin-Wilson

Amiel Courtin-Wilson is an Australian artist and filmmaker. He is the director of five features, and over twenty shorts.

His first film, Chasing Buddha (2000), a documentary portrait of his Buddhist nun aunt, was produced at the age of 19 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Since then, he has made Bastardy (2008), a documentary about troubled indigenous actor Jack Charles, and Hail (2011), a fictional feature inspired by the life of its star, Daniel P. Jones, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

Courtin-Wilson’s work—in both documentary and fiction forms—is characterised by its combination of realist drama with trance-like poetical interludes, as well as a clear-eyed and empathetic authorial interest in lives lived on the edge. Hail begins as a kind of straightforward narrative about the difficulties of post-prison life, but it eventually dissolves into a violent swirl of impressionistic imagery and harsh soundscapes. Its centerpiece image is a mordantly beautiful shot of a dead horse hurtling through the atmosphere toward the earth’s surface.

His latest film, Ruin (2013), co-directed with Michael Cody, is a fictional narrative about two lovers on the run, set and filmed in Cambodia.

The interview took place in the wine bar Tasmanian Quartermasters in Hobart, with the assistance of the Dark Mofo festival.

– James Robert Douglas

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A Conversation with Playwright Aden Rolfe in Which Radiomaker Jessie Borrelle Still Doesn’t Find Out Why a Raven is Like a Writing Desk

 

Aden Rolfe’s essay in The Lifted Brow #15, ‘Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk’, was recently adapted into a radio play by RN.

Radiomaker Jessie Borrelle sat down with Aden to discuss the play. Their conversation covered the following topics, among others:

  • Radio play as an effective guise for parody
  • Stereotyping bird species – are crows unfairly typecast
  • How many times can we say interpretation
  • Do genres like mockumentary work across all mediums
  • What is a reasonable listening experience for creative audio

Hook yourself up with a cuppa and enjoy this insightful look into the world of ravens and radio plays.

 

‘Like a Writing Desk’: A Conversation with Aden Rolfe and Jessie Borrelle by The Lifted Brow on Mixcloud

 

Like a Writing Desk was written by Aden Rolfe, produced by Jane Ulman and Russell Stapleton, and directed by Jane Ulman, Aden Rolfe and Russell Stapleton, with sound and original composition by Russell Stapleton. The program was commissioned for radio broadcast by ABC RN’s Creative Audio Unit (CAU).

The Lifted Brow thanks the CAU for permission to feature these extracts from Like a Writing Desk, which was first broadcast on RN’s Radiotonic and can be heard in its entirety here.

Dive into our archives and read ‘Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk’, the original story on which the radio play was based.

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Jessie Borrelle is the founder and executive producer of Paper Radio.

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