River Studios, 2021
In 2021 I’ve moved studios and am now based at River Studios in West Melbourne. I’ve got a ton more space here and a quiet environment, alongside the Maribyrnong River and close to central Footscray. As well as working on a queer speculative fiction project called Schimmervoyage, I’ve spent many hours here working on community projects like A Thousand Threads: Stories of Us (with Alex Lee). Here’s a few fragments of the things on the walls and the things that have come into being at River this year…
Finally receiving copies of my first story to be translated to another language – Deutsch!
World-building – until now I never took much notice of genre fiction, but after a friend gave me NK Jemisin’s The City We Became I got curious. I’ve been working my way through NK Jemisin, Octavia Butler and Samuel R Delaney, with a bit of Jy Yang, Akwaeke Emezi and Chi Ta-Wei and am now deep in world-building and storyspinning. I’m building a world where the sun never rises or sets, where people are hatched, not born, and where ‘male’ and ‘female’ only exist in the skies – sort of.
Making spaces for queer, trans* and non-binary writers – the studio space has been an amazing catalyst for a bunch of projects, in collaboration with and/or catalysed by Alex Lee. My queer and trans* writing group, Queer Across Generations, is finally off the ground. I’ve been collaborating with Alex to put together A Thousand Threads: Stories of Us, a collaborative storytelling project for trans* and gender-diverse (TGD) folk, funded by a Transgender Victoria SPARK grant and supported by Queerspace and Thorne Harbour Health. We’re halfway through delivering the first iteration at the time of writing. Over summer, with Alex I’ll also be co-editing a new anthology for Spilling the T Collective, another project that came out of the Transgender Victoria SPARK grants.
Consulting and mentoring for Harehole Melbourne, a renewed queer community space and performance hub in Fitzroy, coming back to life post-lockdowns and expanding into a standalone space with Hares and Hyenas bookshop moving to Pride Centre. The space at Fitzroy has long been a connection point for queer arts and culture. I’m helping develop performance commissions as part of the Directors’ Table, mentoring staff and volunteers, and consulting with owner Crusader Hillis to revitalise LGBTIQ+ arts – after the devastation wrought by COVID on our minority community’s capacity to connect, make and participate in our culture.
Looking forward to another year at River, building on these projects and making some more. Alex and I are already talking to regional groups about running another Thousand Threads workshop series, exploring how to package the workshop materials for use by interstate groups, and dreaming up other possiblities for community development in the realm of queer and trans* culture.
