focussing

This is a post to myself, trying to figure out where to focus my energy. I have been trying to get up a project called "Silence" through AVYM, an all Vietnamese women's production. We are looking for a woman director and this is taking up time. I am currently engaged most regularly on my thesis project "Digging up the bones" which I think in the end will be a good finished novel. And I have all these other ideas that result in half finished work, or the first four pages, fragments of work. I went to an MJ Hyland reading and she was in my 1996 RMIT writing class. She was determined to become a published writer here and overseas and has succeeded through discipline and will power. I do not have that much discipline, my mind is all over the place. If I wanted to focus purely on publishing, I could do young adult work- there seems to be a demand for it. I'm driven by stories about refugees and schizophrenia right now, and I guess that could fit it- but they are mostly adult in conception. Hmmm.

Freedom

Just had a good supervision session with Kathleen Fallon today. She encouraged me to use my imagination when it came to one of my characters going mad- or experiencing a psychotic breakdown. I'm wary of misrepresenting this state, my best friend's mother has schizophrenia and so does my grandmother. But Kathleen has told me to let go a little and go crazy with it (no pun intended) to loosen up my writing. She says there's a great deal of careful craft in my writing but it needs some wildness in it.
Think about what you want to read, she has advised me. What will hold you to the page. Extremes do hold you and a kind of voyeurism when it comes to madness. I attended a living poetry session that was themed madness, and they talked about the preconceptions of what "mad" writing looks like. I think I can do this writing on paper but perhaps not type it straight away. Typing requires a form of concentration in my mind, and pre formation rather than automatic or wild like writing.

Silence

My AVYM project for the moment is titled "Silence- giving voice to Vietnamese-Australian women". We are putting in for an arts and innovation grant using Tony's contacts with the Australian Vietnamese Women's Welfare Association to do a partnership with them. I'm happy about the way this is shaping up- it will be developed in 2007, gives me something to look forward to when I come back from Vietnam. AVYM had its second board meeting yesterday and soon we will be incorporated, get an ABN and all of that. Tony will be doing a lot of work I think and hopefully it will all pay off.

AVYM stuff and Merlinda Bobis

Somehow I became the president of Australian Vietnamese Youth Media the other day. We had our first board meeting at the Dancing Dog Cafe and I was elected! Tony Le Nguyen has all these ideas for AVYM- to have our own space and to become as big as some of the community theatre groups overseas. It's a great dream and I'm thrilled to be part of it- but also wary of taking on too many commitments. Huu Tran one of the "elders" of AVYM pops by my work office every so often to say hi. Today we had a conversation about why we do our art. Huu says it is to tell a story. He is concerned about breaking into the mainstream. Someone else said, I've forgotten whom, that we need to create our own art the way we want the mainstream to do it, and the mainstream can follow us. I think it was at the AVYM meeting actually. I write because I need to, to make sense of what is around me. When it comes to publication and public work I'd like to tell a story well, and I'd like to bring to light stories that aren't heard very much.
I saw Merlinda Bobis today and she was inspirational! She talked about how you have to hear and listen to stories of war and terror and do the research. That your very voice in your story will change after you've heard it. How can you remain unchanged I wonder? Her story the "Fish haired woman" has been transformed into a prose and music piece and into a novel. It took her ten years- which makes me feel better about not publishing anything for six years.