no. yes. maybe? it depends, does 30 journal articles count? i write this blog thing and my friends seem to enjoy it. i edited a book recently, in the hopes that NBA coaches read it, but that’s not what you meant right? ive been writing poetry and song lyrics since i was a kid but im sure that doesnt register. i keep a journal, surely you dont mean that…
a lovely person caught my attention as i was leaving an event for the Brisbane Writers Festival. the panel we’d just witnessed was brilliant for so many reasons: profound commentaries on global events to localised experiences captured in the pages of each of their books – individual works of art all resonating with the same note. unlike many people in the room, i had not heard of the majority of these authors beforehand. i was there to be lost in the wonder of them, like seeing a band you love but not listening to the album they are touring so the memories of hearing it first live will endure. now, as i (eventually get to) read their books, i will know what their voices sound like, the stories that inspired these books, the things that make them monologue on stage and in some instances, how they gracefully respond to my quirky questions haha!
these kinda events will invariably bring similar people together, and every stranger i spoke to was so interesting. the question that haunted me into writing this was asked so casually, so genuinely, almost an assumption that someone attending a writers festival is a writer, duh. i say this with people who see my notebooks and immediately say “oh i cant draw”: respectfully, thats bullshit. you may be unpracticed or uninspired, swamped with the responsibilities that pile up to the point where pen to page feels ‘inefficient’ – good, its supposed to be. its amazing how quickly i will defend others craft and not my own!
so yes, i am a writer. but not just any writer: i imagine myself to be the crossroads between poet, essayist and scientist. the art of the essay was one of my favourite sessions for the way each author contrasted how that art holds space, how it delves deeply into topics and can diffract the deeply political through-with the deeply personal. i feel like throughout each iteration of this blog newsletter thing, that has been at the core of my writing. to take the obscure and theoretical, the ontological and epistemological, and bring it back to the people. to talk about journal articles in the way i hear them: read aloud in the voices of the authors/friends that wrote them. the everyday people, doing their best to make sense of the world. and in doing so, who i am in-becoming is now a tapestry of those ideas, those thoughts and feelings trapped in a typeset on a website that will live on beyond me, until the internet probably blows itself up hahahaha
there was a really wholesome moment where i finally worked up the courage to attend one of the author signings empty-handed. i felt guilty for not having a copy of their book to sign, taking up the limited space and time to just be there instead of exchange or transact something, but one of the many things ive learned in the last year is that i am allowed to take up space, so i did. i met Matt Bevan and chatted about whose stories we get to tell, which stories we are maybe avoiding or more accurately, not funding so they never get told. i pestered Tyree Barnette about the writing process, how he puts such personal experiences on the page in relatable ways and he told me to never write alone. but i was most nervous to meet Marc Fennell, the quick-witted, authentic voice that i could listen to for a lifetime, with the capacity to articulate the things we dont want to look at directly in a way that you cannot look away. did i fumble my question? absolutely. i think it landed somewhere around “how do you do it, articulate complex ideas with such clarity”. his answer to my question was,
“be able to clearly define what it is and what it isn’t“.
anything you speak about, remember the core ideas that define it and set it apart. i remember doing this for my PhD, where we are told to have an elevator pitch at all times for when people inevitably ask “what’s your PhD on”, and the unsaid question: why should i give a shit? he referenced two different people along these lines – the showrunner of New Girl describing her role as also making that distinction (every episode is an opportunity to tell people what it is and what it isnt), and during his time at Triple J, Richard Kingsmill mentioned that “if you’ve got enough for a pitch, then it’s worth doing”.
so maybe i am a writer given we are 850 words into explaining my reservation with the title haha! i filled 6 pages worth of notes, quotes and stories that captivated me the most at that festival. while i cannot share them all with you in writing, i will upload them as images for you to explore if you like. i’ve selected a handful of statements that i will briefly elaborate, and a reading list for your future travels through these concepts.
monoculture is a mindset, embodied through ingestion and internalised silence.
plant seeds of hope in our bodies. remember them. let the bloom.
Durkhanai Ayubi (She Who Tastes, Knows) said many profound things from the heart, but this one still reverberates beyond the page for me. it was said in the middle of an excellent monologue that began with a brief description of the premise of her book. using food to connect back to country and ancestors and language and stories, all connections that were severed when her family fled Afghanistan, (re)discovered in the hopes of moving beyond the war and conquest stories that dominate the region now. i was reminded of how monoculture was discussed in Braiding Sweetgrass, that the risk is not just a lack of diversity for diversity’s sake but the protective and complementary effects that growing different things together has on the broader ecology, like disease resistance. the thread here is that this monoculture mindset makes us just as vulnerable as (over)cultivated fields: more prone to disease, more maintenance required, and disconnected from the world. that seed of thought carried through so many stories, a taste on the tongue that felt bittersweet at the time.
‘Embodied through ingestion’ also floored me, like turning a kaleidoscope and seeing all the same crystals completely change shape. it makes so much sense to discuss the ideas we internalise through/with the food we make and consume because those two things are not separate, they cannot be. where do you grocery shop? can you afford it? what meals do you cook and where/how/when/who helped? do you know where that food comes from, what it is treated with, when it thrives or struggles to grow? we are so disconnected from these stories, and at times these stories are silenced, so we have learned to accept them, dismiss them, stop considering what they mean. what would happen if we did? if we genuinely boycott the surveillance state that coles supermarkets have become through palantir, if we didn’t give our data away so freely by scanning everyday rewards cards. if we knew the name of our local butcher, baker, farmers markets? its all well and good to say these things as if they are easy to change, but we live in a world where these things are more difficult (more expensive) by design. and some day, that design will come back to haunt us.
i did find some hope recently, an incredible documentary called How to Live on Earth. a timely reminder that we are global gardeners, planetary stewards. that mars is not a get out of jail free card, that we have time to make different choices. to quote one of the brilliant people interviewed:
we need to come home. we need to be better stewards. we left home without the wisdom. we have to come home much more humble and much wiser.
what if the first word was not human at all?
we, like our words, never come alone.
Debra Dank (Ankami, Terraglosssia) gave the keynote address to open up the festival, a talk that was titled ‘the first word’. now, if you know me or have ever heard me speak before, i usually start my workshops with the dictionary definition of a word. it’s a habit i picked up in childhood, language being such a complex thing to grasp and an acute realisation that sometimes the words we say are not what we mean. for instance, ‘errors’ are integral in my line of work (you know, human learning and such). the word originates from the root ‘to err’ or ‘to wander’ from where we wanted to go. i use that definition daily now, to help relate to athletes, to soften the blow of getting things wrong (which is inevitable for learning) and maybe, at some point, enjoy the wander. i also love to quote movies and tv shows, so you know i am contractually obliged to say,
not all who wander are lost.
coming back to the title question, i was delighted to hear a similar reading on the name of the keynote – what was the first word? Dr Dank offered up the sound of falling leaves, water dripping, the sigh of the wind, rocks rolling and animal sounds from our ‘humble hosts’. not the language we are perhaps familiar with, or first comes to mind with the word ‘language’, but this highlighted one of the (many) risks of the anthropocene, where we believe ourselves (as human beings) to be the centre of the universe. a fundamental mistake. one that, if we had stopped to listen to our non-human kin and the custodians of the lands we live on today, we could have maybe stopped making.
our place is still trying to speak and we are yet to truly listen yet.
there are root words across languages and thousands of years: mother, black, man. our shared tethers, the things that matter enough to echo across the ether in many versions of the spoken word. isn’t it interesting that it comes back to these three words, if they are even the first words at all. the premise behind Dr Dank’s latest book Ankami speaks directly to this ‘first word’ quest, one that means ‘to give life to’. do these words matter when we have almost lost 250 languages and 800 dialects on this continent alone? that one of the oldest living civilisations is barely holding on because we’ve done our best to render them voiceless, to stop listening? yes, i think it does matter, because we still have time to listen, for now.
stupidity and evil become indistinguishable.
an offhand comment made by Andrew O’Hagan during a panel discussion about the art of the essay as he recounted some of his finest work – taking down a ‘royal’. there is something poetic about it, this way to phrase weaponised incompetence. it is a reminder of how difficult it is to ever discern intention from action, and resurfaces the age-old philosophical debate of whether something is ‘bad’ because of intention or action. in a later session titled ‘new perspectives on old assumptions’, this line of thinking returned while Marc Fennell discussed Stuff the British Stole and our uncritical education of history. of walking through a univeristy campus with human skulls decorating the walls, a ‘monument’ that could not possibly be removed because it symbolised such a turning point in the history of science and psychology: the classical research on the size of human skulls that reeks of racism.
“no no no, don’t think too deeply about this topic on a broader scale, let’s analyse it on a sentence level.”
“great, well on a sentence level, this work is racist.”
it is not that ‘evil is on the rise’ but rather, it is much, much easier to be stupid. and not even intentionally, but through distraction. through apathy. through the absence of hope. we create systems of education that tout your ability to recite, not know. we reward those in the workforce who unthinkingly, unflinchingly uphold the status quo, who do not stop to question people or power or process. we have even set up our economies to ensure that it is unsustainable to exist in the world unless you are willing to abide by these rules, these rhetorics.
it is the subtlety of evil that most terrifies me. the ‘harmless’ use of large language models (or more stupidly named ‘artificial intelligence’), that reproduce the racist and extractive systems we have been trying to reduce, all for the sake of ‘productivity’. not to mention the effects on the environment, which we perpetuate in many ways, but seem to be most negligible since we believed that we do not have the time to make our own fucking slide decks or read a paper yourself. if you are that strapped for time, there are more important things to be worried about, like how the hell did we get to this point in the first place.
so tell your stories. read other people’s stories. dwell in the words and then step outside to listen to the language of the world that is beyond letters and punctuation. i am writing this as the rain falls on my roof, a pitter-patter that i find comforting. it is probably telling me many things that i am yet to hear, but i will do my best to listen.
if we do not know and tell our stories, then we will be written over.
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