WIW's On The Couch with Beck Lister

Planning is well under way for next month’s Words in Winter and Beck Lister will be hitting the couch on Sunday, August 27 with three guest artists.

Beck is an award-winning playwright, arts producer, MC and social worker. She is the co-artistic director of arts company Anvil Productions and the director of Education and Psychosocial Programs at Eating Disorders Victoria.

The Words in Winter event is the first of Anvil Production’s On The Couch with Beck Lister, an event happening every month from August, each show featuring two local guests and one “out of towner”. August’s guests are Adam Fawcett, Harmony Byrne and Alexandra Collier – with resident musician Douglas Lee Robertson.

“Adam Fawcett, pictured left, is a local playwright, a successful mid-career writer, living in Daylesford. He has a company, Lab Kelpie, and I am pretty excited to talk to Adam because he has a new play opening in November at Theatre Works in St Kilda. So it is a nice opportunity to chat about that.

“My second guest is local musician Harmony Byrne, centre, a beautiful young singer/songwriter who has a wonderful combination of soulful sound that is also grungy and thrashy. Harmony is a terrific woman and I saw her perform a few weeks ago at the Yandoit Cultural Centre.

“My third guest is a writer from Melbourne who has spent a lot of her working life in New York, Alexandra Collier, right. She has launched a book called Inconceivable, a memoir of her journey to have a child solo. She has worked as a playwright and writer for film and is very open and has a really great presence. Her book is beautiful and it was lovely to invite her to come up to Daylesford.”

Beck said the show was “part chat show, part therapy” with guests asked to speak about their art-making process. “There will also be the difficult questions about how do you go about making art when you feel flat or devoid of new ideas. Artists often talk about a low period and I want to know how they navigate that and start creating again, and how does their own life inform their arts practice?

“The artists have also been asked to read or sing or showcase a piece of their work and we also have music with Douglas Lee Robertson, who used to live in Daylesford and is pretty excited to be working on the show here.”

Beck, who lived in Daylesford about 15 years ago before moving to Melbourne and then north-west Queensland, and back to Daylesford a couple of years ago, said she was stoked to be a part of Words in Winter. She has two other shows in the festival including chatting about a book she co-wrote with her husband Tony Kelly, Growing Pineapples in the Outback, and a breakfast event, Future Women. Link: www.wordsinwinter.com

Words: Donna Kelly