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Writers join WordStorm by Imran Naveed 25 May 2014
A
n award-winning Indigenous student studying the Diploma of Creative and Indigenous Writing (DCIW) at the Australian Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Education (ACIKE) and two academic staff will participate in this year’s WordStorm -Top End Writers Festival in Darwin from 29 May to 1 June 2014. The festival will be held at various locations including CDU Centre Stage Old Town Hall Ruins, Brown’s Mart, the NT Library, and Darwin Botanic Gardens. Thirty (30) writers from across the country will join forty (40) local writers from Darwin, Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and Borroloola as part of this year’s program for WordStorm 2014. The jam-packed program will feature seventy (70) writers, fourteen (14) panel sessions, eleven (11) workshops, five (5) book launches, and numerous free events including an all day special event on the unique crowd writing project from if:book called Memory Makes Us. Marie Munkara (pictured) is the Indigenous student involved in WordStorm. Ms Munkara is an ACIKE student studying the DCIW program; has already won a David Unaipon Literary Award (before she was published and became relatively well-known); and is this year launching her latest work: A Most Peculiar Act on Saturday May 31 at 6.15pm in Brown’s Mart Courtyard. A Most Peculiar Act casts a sardonic eye at the protectionist policies of the early 20th century from the perspective of an Aboriginal fringe-camp dweller by the name of Sugar. Sugar’s resistance to
assimilation turns into a protracted battle with the authorities and the chief protector Horatio Humphris (or Horrid Hump). Marie is also involved in co-facilitating the Memory Makes Us project which is an interactive writer-audience event at WordStorm. Families, dreams, and unusual experiences will weave the tales of Memory Makes Us in beautiful Darwin during Wordstorm 2014. Share your memory at: memorymakesus.org.au or come to Brown’s Mart Theatre to deliver your memory in person and watch writers Marie, Levin Diatschenko, and Kamarra Bell-Wykes create new work live. ACIKE DCIW academic staff and Darwin-based Playwright Mary Anne Butler will also attend WordStorm 2014. Ms Butler’s play, Highway of Lost Hearts will be launched, again in the Brown’s Mart Courtyard, on Friday 30 May at 6pm. This play is about a woman, a dog, a campervan, and 4,500 kilometres of wide open road. It was directed by Lee Lewis and featured Mary Anne Butler as the
character of Mot. It premiered to a sold out 2012 Darwin Festival season, had an additional 2013 Brown’s Mart season and has a three month national tour pending in 2014. This launch is Mary Anne’s first full-length publication. Mary Anne will also speak with Andrew Bovell, Christos Tsiolkas and Katherine Thomson in WordStorm’s first Adaptation Panel called Random Variation or Natural Selection? to reflect on the significant technical and aesthetic challenges faced in transforming a work from one medium to another. This panel will be held inside Brown’s Mart Theatre on Friday 30 May at 3pm. Brisbane-born multi-award winning national poet, feminist and ACIKE DCIW Course Coordinator Yvette Holt will join political activist, freelance journalist, author and blogger Antony Loewenstein in Darwin for a conversation about everything from vulture capitalism to Palestine and Putin’s Russia. The conversation will be held at CDU Centre Stage Old Town Hall
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Ruins on Friday 30 May at 7pm. Saturday 31May; Yvette will appear at the NT Off the Page BM Theatre. Sunday 1 June, join Holt as she will Chair the lively and much anticipated traditional WordStorm Comedy Debate at 7:00pm CDU Centre Stage. Holt has worked in the field of Indigenous literature research and studies for more than a decade, she is currently living and working as lecturer of creative writing in Central Australia (Alice Springs based). Holt’s poetic prowess ranges from the seductive through to the productive enamel of human fragility. She has recently completed her Masters by Research at Deakin University titled Aboriginal Humour Expressionism, Language and Comedy – laughing beyond terror-nullius. WordStorm 2014 steps it up with a line-up of literary heavyweights focused around seven (7) themes chosen to represent not only the diversity of Darwin but also to highlight some of the issues faced in the writing industry across the country. These seven themes will span across cultural issues, journalism, music, children’s literature, trans-media, and the wonderful comic book world of graphic novelists. The festival officially kicks off at the NT Library with an afternoon of awards on Thursday 29 May. The 2014 Territory Read Awards and the NT Literary Awards will award both published and unpublished NT writers respectively and offers thousands of dollars in prize
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ACIKE DCIW Course Coordinator Yvette Holt
money. These will be followed at 6.30pm by the official festival launch at CDU Centre Stage in the Old Town Hall Ruins where this year’s writers will be given a warm Territory welcome. WordStorm 2014 promises to be a vibrant, stimulating and most of all thoroughly entertaining writers festival offering writers talks, panel sessions, workshops, readings and so much more, Territory-style. With so many more authors and sessions to consider, the festival program will be your best friend, available online at wordstorm.org.au or in
hard copy from the NT Writers’ Centre, cafes and bookstores around Darwin. ACIKE is a collaborative partnership between Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education and Charles Darwin University. The aim is to provide a shared facility for the delivery of a specific range of Higher Education and Post Graduate study options which provide education pathways designed to better meet the needs of Indigenous Australia.