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“Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.”

bell hooks

Hooks' quote resonates with me particularly because it mirrors my own feelings about writing, both its meaning and its purpose. Writing from life, from memory is revolutionary and otherworldly, almost debilitating in the way it removes you from your body and from the present. I chose a quote about writing as a personal action and what it can mean to an individual instead of one pertaining to the many, because writing for a writer can be a narcissistic act, often; not all the time. I think viewing and assessing the process from ones’ own perspective can be enlightening for self and the collective.

Hooks’ flesh falls away when she writes, the world is within her hands. The power of writing is that it alongside the force of imagination creates something new. This can be godly or divine position but unlike well-known deities' writers’ have a complex relationship with control especially in relation to the worlds they craft.

Writing can be an especially attractive medium for marginalised peoples, because when you are writing, it always feels like you are on the outside, and who else knows the outside better than those who are constantly relegated to it. I suspect bell hooks’ passion is partially informed by her experience as a Black woman in America.

The root of the word ecstasy to stand outside feels oddly antithetical. In hooks’ quote it evokes a sense of peace despite the act of standing outside having connotations of aloneness, separation and even exclusion. It would surely to non-writers' sound like torment; the act of standing out from the collective, purposely removing oneself from the warmth of the dominant. From hooks’ and many writers’ lenses, stepping back from reality may not be an easy task but it is liberating and even a healing one too. It allows for deep analysis, whatever the content may be, empty pages can be transformative tools to work through what weighs heavily or lightly on the mind.

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I am an Afro-Indigenous woman from Lutruwita/Tasmania and am of Palawa heritage. I moved to Melbourne for study, and it my first time living away from my land. My mother once described us as daughters of the soil, meaning that if you were to test the the very earth of this place you would find our blood; Our DNA.

On Kulin Lands, I have experienced rapidly shifting weather. The summer heat, could dissipate in a moment this is not unlike the temperment of Lutruwita's weather. Summer is the season of sand and water, return to country, it is when my spirit is most rejuvenated, I restart and reset in the waters of my ancestral home. A pseudo sense of peace.

On these lands, I am guest, but I am not stranger. I have met distant kin visiting the Ngarara Willim centre, been embraced, given tokens by elders as welcome.

To answer the Kulin greeting Wominjeka: I suppose I am here to be seen, to see others and tell stories. I am here to miss home, examine starless city skies and endure unprecedented heat. I am a guest, grateful, respectful and admiring of a land and a peoples not unlike mine.

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There can be resistance in writing practice.

One must ascertain a level of privilege and have the luck of imagination to become a master at weaving language. When one finds themself in this position, they may utilise it however they see fit as is the nature of autonomy. However, I believe that the pen is mightier than the sword, mightier than the bullet stealing breaths and mightier than disease.

It is what paints the horror of death, the terror of killing and incites the fear of looming sickness. As eyes slide over words in the newspaper, or the Instagram infographic, it informs the reader.

It maps the world that exists outside of ones line of sight, erases parts too.

Journalists are targeted in acts of genocide for this very reason. Too much truth can destabilise dominant powers.

There can be resistance in art.

There is something revolutionary in receiving affirmation from someone who does not know your name or your face or who you are. There is something masterful about the way they conduct their art and are able in only talking about their own experiences cast a wide enough net to carry you up with them; To see you in the masses.

There is power in the way my father sends me Maya Angelou poems randomly reminding me that I am Black and phenomenal. There is power in the way my mother wrote an article fifteen years ago celebrating an autoethnographic approach to research and me now using that as a guide in my work.

There is resistance in claiming a language mine given to me through colonisation. I do not think I will ever master English but I will miscontrue, transgress and deconstruct every rule I can. I will craft decolonial pictures with the coloniser's language and the grand irony of that will be fun I think.

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Speculating and Inferring:

A well-established notion of writing is that reading is one of its most essential accompaniments; not just for an author and their own self-improvement that can occur from consuming a diverse range of stories that implement a multitude of methods that a writer can analyse and apply to themselves but for peer assessment as well, having others read ones work then reread and reread again.

Considering the state one must adopt as the reader of a peer's work, non-knowing/not-knowing is an essential, active and empathetic role to assume. Communication is key in deciphering what a peer wishes to have critiqued and what faults they are already aware of. In drafts, context may be absent, the sample may be sourced from the middle of a story, or a story might only be a single vague moment, what should be prioritised is intent.

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In my attempt at utilising the method of ekphrasis with the painting Star Gossage followed shortly by an exegetical analysis of that process I discovered many interesting things. The surprisingly easier form of exegetical writing revealed to me, my numerous hesitations and how they manifested in disconnected thoughts throughout the response to the painting. It also revealed a more calculative approach to analysis I was unaware of. For example, I assessed colour first, the background second and the foreground last. It seems I was building context before addressing the main subject.

I found that I have quite a normative lens, I expect things in academia to come from certain places and certain people. nt. I felt unaccustomed to assessing art, I felt like there were protocols I should have read through, known the painter's intentions or at least more of their context so I could understand a little bit more of their perspective.

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This week’s focus was on story demystifying its components through several exercises. I was particularly fascinated by the story I drew from the story spine exercise. I am a writer, who perceives aura, colour and every other nonsensical aspect of a story before I establish the foundational vehicles that will drive a story forward; plot, conflict and a resolution for example. In utilising the story spine, it forced what I tend to neglect, to the forefront, the story dwindled down to the bare fabula exposed a balanced sequence. In my story spine, I wrote of a girl with teeth of gold, of evil parentage, who runs away from home, sells her teeth to afford housing and ends up creating jewellery for living. This slightly gothic rendition of something like a fairy tale can be easily expanded on and grow into many kinds of narratives.

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This week’s focus was on voice, drawing on the different devices and means in which voice can be created and sustained. In the exercise relating to Ferrante’s work, I wrote a first-person piece from a female narrator telling a ‘thing’ as it is. In my crafted context, that 'thing' was the woman’s room which was in a state of disarray her depressive episode would not allow her to remedy but that did not dissuade her from colloquial profanity-heavy self-criticisms. The next exercise that made me consider the possible characteristics that can form or contribute to voice made me ponder my own choices as a writer. For example, whether the patterns that occur in my writing could be considered voice or whether its repetition I find myself too comfortable in and need to make an active shift away from. Voice is also an element that can belong to a character and therefore the way they are written and represented through writing might need to be particular to them.

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Discussing my methods:

I tend to in my writing, in my practice, utilise escapist concepts, my narratives range from very close to astronomically distant to our reality but regardless of the differences and similarities, fiction, which is all that I write, is layered with yearning for a non-existent world. Somewhere in my late teens I realised I didn’t have to centre, cishet white people in the stories I wrote so I didn’t, I believe my revelation coincided with my reading of the text The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, all of sudden the characters I wrote, looked like me or my family yet the space they occupied was always blurry. Setting in terms of the cultural context of the characters has always had a weak presence in my narratives because I wished to portray and interrogate cultural identities that were not at all prolific or prominent in the majorly white city and state I grew up in. So, in a way, a lot of my writing has a neutral western setting, with neighbourhoods and characters linked through shared cultural experiences despite that being a reality I do not live.

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This week's focus was on dialogue. Dialogue can occur in story in a several means, modes and mediums. It permeates through writing; In poetry, in narrative and script. Before viewing the lectures, I hadn't considered the almost ubiquitous nature of dialogue in writing. There were many things I did not consider to be as such. For instance, I viewed dialogue as something, in the context of narrative, requiring quotations to separate it from the rest of the text but dialogue included summarised speech as well. I also realised I associated the notion of dialogue with fiction not realising that it could extend and “add texture” to non-fiction writing. In my method, in fiction writing mostly, I tend to implement dialogue as meticulously as possible, I want it to always indicate more than literal meaning whether that be the character's cultural background, emotional tension or foreshadowing.

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In a reflection on my writing habits and what authors I tend to gravitate towards, names like Cassandra Clare, Sarah J Maas and Tracy Deonn only occur so frequently because of my investment in stories told over a series of books. Truthfully, I no longer favour the kind of writing these authors produce but I was attracted to the world building and female-centred narratives most especially during my teen years. Deonn as an author stands out amongst the others because I read her young adult targeted series quite recently and did not feel as disconnected as I did when I was scanning the works of the others. I think several elements contributed to me finding Deonn’s work particularly engaging. Diversity and the blending of history and fantasy. Imaginitive innovative ideas are what attract me most to a story.

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This week's focus was on culture, and I was able to witness a phenomenal discussion between Singaporean authors at the Rising Stars Event.

Interestingly, I think this panel revealed that the culture writers’ have turns their own traditional culture, ethnicity and/or race into an element of their writing, in becomes a cog in the machine contributing to an author or a poet's vision of the world, who is seen in their writing and how they speak.

For writers, the way culture manifests are notable in their methods and approaches. For example, comedy was an element of several writers’ work and as they spoke aloud it created an ease among the authors on stage, but it also eased the relationship between the authors and the audience. The culture of writers, and these writers seems to be to bear the soul in their work and revive it for discussions like these and form and reform connections with new audiences and each other.

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In crafting a story based on the object I created I did not stray far from the events that took place in the producing of the painting.

The painting I have now christened with the name Bright Eyes was mostly painted in an hour and then not finished for another week or so. So, when drawing a story from the piece, I gave its fictional creator a similar story, a woman feeling as unfinished as the painting, a sorrowful unexplainable melancholy overtook the protagonist as she could not bring herself to finish something that was supposed to be easy.

The protagonist, Diana, I imagine, was a failed actress or singer, drew herself an imagined starlet somebody with flowing glistening black hair like flooded road in the night resembles petrol, somebody successful and always beautiful always still always just right. The perfection of the woman that Diana amateurishly splatters on to the page, is only seen in Diana’s head, still she cannot bring herself to draw on her desires anymore, it makes her feel worse. Nothing is healed by the end of the story as Diana stares mindlessly forward in her art therapy session.