I'm cheating here by offering an updated report from the 7-ON website where the seven of us (or as many as can get to it at a given moment!) make a report of our last six months. Things have been busy in my life as in most people's so I'm going around again with my own exceprt from the 7-ON site. I can refer you to that space to catch up on news of my fellow 7-ON-ers: Hilary Bell, Ned Manning, Cath Zimdahl, Noëlle Janaczewska,Vanessa Bates and Donna Abela. Here's mine:
I think many are feeling as if we are riding a rollercoaster as we advance towards the predicted convulsions of the Anthopocene. Me, too. It’s hard to focus on things like writing when robber barons stalk the earth and in so many places it feels like Orcs Ascendant. Still. We are here now, as the saying goes, so this has been my year so far.
I’ve been coming and going a bit from drafts of my adaptation of Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words.We had a workshop in at the STCSA in late July to test what I thought was the final draft. Nope. You finish scripts when you finish them, that is to say I sent the rehearsal draft to my creative peers on the gig, Jess Arthur (director) and Ruth Little (dramaturg) from Aix-en-Provence two weeks ago as I looked wearily out at the summer sunshine from my flu-ridden bed.
We start rehearsals on the 21st, and will open in Adelaide on the 27th September, before transferring to Sydney in October where we’ll open on the 28th October and play through to early December. I’m so looking forward to the process.
Next cab off the ranks is a South Australian Film Corporation-funded development of film, Flatlands, on which I’m working with director Matthew Thorne. In smaller notes, this year I’ve published a review of Kath Kenny’s terrific book, Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram in the Australasian Drama Studies Journal; a poem of mine, Home, won the Silver Tree Poetry Prize; and my YA Fantasy novel, Una and the Many Worlds of Dream was short-listed for the Text YA Unpublished Manuscript Prize.