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Dionissia Tsirigos

OK. So I'm just going to start with an acknowledgment of country. So this afternoon, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal Wangal people from the Eora nation, which are the traditional custodians of the land in which we or I am from and are meeting virtually from here today. And I'd like to pay my respects to the elders past, present, and emerging as part of our respects to ancestors and elders, for they hold the culture, dreams, relationships to land, waters, and seas of all Aboriginal and Australian people. To this point, I also want to extend that respect to any First Nations people here today, and especially to our wonderful authors who are here having a chat with us.

And before I begin, I'd actually like to give a little bit of context to the image that you see on the screen. So this was commissioned by the Department of ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø Curriculum Secondary Learners, which is part of the team that we're from. And it's called 'Our Country,' by Gary Purchase. And this painting is a depiction of the diverse landscape and wildlife of Australia.

We live in a beautiful country with the oceans, cliffs, and beaches, the rivers that are home to the platypus, the Bush, the mountains, and the red earth of the desert, with the kangaroo tracks bounding across it. It also shows both day and night, with the left being a sunny day with a wedge-tailed eagle soaring above and the land and the transitioning to the right into the night, with a clear and starry night, with the Southern Cross and Emu in the Sky constellation, which is important to Aboriginal culture. So welcome, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Ellen van Neerven

I'm Ellen van Neerven. I'm Mununjali from the Yugambeh language group of South East Queensland, and I want to acknowledge that I'm on Yuggera and Ugarapul land today. Hey, everyone.

Dionissia

Hi, Ellen. And I want to start by actually giving us a little bit of a spiel. We like to embarrass our authors a little bit by actually acknowledging how amazing they all are. So Ellen is an award-winning author, editor, and educator of Mununjali and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, and non-fiction on unceded Ugarapul and Yuggera land. And then Neerven's first book, which is Heat and Light, a novel in stories, which is spectacular. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend. It was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award, the New South Wales Literary Awards Indigenous Writer's Prize.

Then Neerven's poetry collection Comfort Food, which is where I was initially introduced to her work as well, won the Tina Kane Emergent Award and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and Kenneth Slessor Prize. Throat, van Neerven's latest poetry collection and recipient of the inaugural Quentin Bryce Award, is also available.

And they are also editors of three collections, including the recent Homeland Calling – Words for a New Generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voices and co-editing an upcoming collection of Black and Black visionary speculative fiction, Unlimited Futures, which sounds really cool, with Sudanese multilingual writer Rafeif Afif Islam. So that is a mouthful, Ellen, but thank you so much for joining us.

Jacquie McWilliam

And also joining us today is Jazz Money. And she's a Wiradjuri poet, filmmaker, and artist, and she's currently based on the sovereign Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. In 2020, she was awarded the David Unaipon Award for the State Library of Queensland and a First Nations Emerging Career Award from the Australian Council for the Arts. Her anthology How to Make a Basket has just recently been released, and I'm sure, like many of Ellen's works as well, this one will be taught in many schools across New South Wales.

And it's already amassing quite the collection of awards. In 2021, she has been the winner of the First Nations Emerging Career Award for the Australian Council for the Arts, winner of the Rising Star Award for Young Alumni for the University of Melbourne, a shortlist for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and that's just this year for her poetry. In 2020, she was a winner of the Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert Poetry Prize, a runner-up for the Nakata Brophy Award, a shortlist for the Valace Award, and the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize, and in 2019, she was a fellow for the Copyright Agency First Nations Fellowship. And the list just goes on.

And that's just her poetry. She is a trained filmmaker and educator who specialises in storytelling, community collaboration, and digital production, working with First Nations artists and communities to realise digital products. And for us as a team, it has been such a joy exploring and diving into both of your works. The conversations we've been having have been so passionate, and we really just thank you both for joining us today and bringing such clever and rich works to us as readers. So thank you again. Welcome, Jazz and Ellen.

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Ellen van Neerven

Evelyn Araluen did a really beautiful write-up about ‘Comfort Food’ recently on the ABC website. And what she said about the book is that readers can consume the book cover to cover or in bit-sized pieces, like you said. So I'm never upset if somebody decides to just flick through my book, instead of reading it cover to cover. Because that's also how I read poetry as well. The right poem comes to you at the right time.

So there's the experience of reading individual poems, like you said, and there's the experience of reading the whole thing, like a journey, as well. Because, often, a poetry collection will be written over a number of years. I think, because we're such story-based people, it'll naturally, and I'm really interested to hear what Jazz is going to say about, perhaps, reading How to Make a Basket.

But I feel like there's definitely, whether it's deliberate or not, the reader goes, with the writer, on a journey in a poetry collection, where they experience all these different things. And then when they reach the end, they're like, yeah, I experienced all of these different stories. And as the writer's job is to make sure that there's a natural conclusion, as much as endings are, you don't want to tie everything up neatly, but you feel like the reader is ready to leave that little world that you've created, I think. So that's all the things I was thinking about when I was writing it as well.

Dionissia Tsirigos

I love that. Jazz, do you want to add to that?

Jazz Money

Full credit to Ellen, who was the editor of my book and very much helped the way that I thought about what the experience is like for a reader. The collection was written across a really big time frame. And I definitely wasn't thinking about a journey, [Jazz laughs] in any way, particularly when I started. Because I never really intended any of this stuff I was writing five years ago to be read by anyone. And then to put in a book was quite a weird thing to do years later.

So I was really thinking of each poem as an individual unit. And it was only in the editing process with Ellen that it, recognition that, like a book, can be read cover to cover, and there is a journey, and that the invitation for people to jump in and out of poetry is always there. But how you leave someone and how you welcome them in was so important for the way that I then understood the collection and, I think, really helped me open up.

I read poetry differently now because of that process. I used to, very much, just flick through a book. And now I'm a lot more deliberate about a start-to-finish reading and understanding that emotional journey, not that I think everyone needs to do it. But it's really changed my reading experience.

Ellen

Yeah, and if I just jump in and just say, well, firstly, that everyone should buy Jazz's book. It was such an honour to work with you on it, Jazz. And I learned a lot, working with you on that book.

Dionissia

But as you know, teachers like to look into the deep. And I think, as you said, with Sweet Smoke, there was, and I connected it as through the love, and the relationships, and the childhood. Because that was my connection to your work. And I would also say Moreton Bay Fig had a similar process for me because we have these beautiful Moreton Bay figs up the road. And so that automatically created that interconnection. As we talked about audience, audience is something that comes in. And as you said, when it's forward facing, when it's inner, you don't think so much about audience. But when it's outer, you think about it slightly differently.

What would you recommend, then, for our teachers that are here, when it comes to that idea of audience? And we tell our kids, always, know your audience. Know who you're writing for. But audience can be so fluid, depending on what's been designed.

Jazz

When I teach writing workshops, I definitely, particularly when it's with young people, try to have the writers thinking about themselves first and writing very much from a personal, private place and not with the expectation of having to share, or be judged, or be graded. I know that's very different for an English teacher.

The way that I was taught writing at school was very much in a traditional English classroom setting. And it was very much about getting graded, right? And I found that that added a lot of pressure to me internally. And I lost a relationship to loving writing. It felt scary. [Jazz laughs] And so when I'm teaching, I always really try to get people to write for themselves and write from a place of pureness. And if they then discover that they're loving the process, they're probably going to end up writing something that they want to share, you know?

But I think when you write with your audience in mind from the outset, maybe before you are ready, it can be really intimidating. I don't know if that totally flies in the face of what I should be saying to you guys.

Dionissia

Not at all. It doesn't fly in the face at all because most teachers here want that joy, the love and the connection for our kids, you know? And that's what we want to try and keep. So yeah, Ellen, please join.

Ellen

Jazz, I think that's a great answer. I think, yeah, writing for yourself, cultivating that space is so precious and can generate some really specific, and honest, and brave work. So that's really good. Because we live in a surveillance culture. We always have eyes on us. So sometimes that can be really hard, when you're sitting down and writing and you're thinking about all these different layers of what people are going to be thinking about your words. And you can't please everyone.

And so I'd actually just started thinking about trying to remember the details of a workshop. I think there's definitely different approaches. Know your audience. Write for an audience. Write for yourself, yes. But I'm just thinking about a workshop that I did with some kids in Lismore. And I think we were writing a letter to somebody, but it could be to anyone. I think there's also value in writing directly to someone else, like write a letter to a grandparent, or write a poem to your friend, or something like that.

That really produced some really incredible writing. And I think one of the students might have written a poem to their mum. They were imagining their mum at their age, which I thought was just really a beautiful-- such a gesture of empathy and connection. I thought it was really cool. And then others wrote about a figure in history. They wrote to a figure in history. And everyone really interpreted it really differently. And that's what I really love about those open-ended prompts, I guess.

Jazz

If I can just extend it a little bit, is I've been really stunned when you give, talking about specificity and talking about writing for yourself, I remember having a workshop once where someone was like, I just want to write about Instagram and TikTok. And I was like, please. And just being able to represent self and the tangible reality and not trying to pretend to be some Miltonesque poet who's waxing lyrical about things that aren't lived.

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Ellen van Neerven

But Comfort Food, that came out in 2016 it has that image of the bunya nut tree, the bunya nut, sorry, on the cover. It was designed by a non-Indigenous designer, Josh Durham, who's done all three of my book covers. And the bunya nut itself. I'm really glad he chose that for the image of the front of the book, because it comes up a couple of times in Comfort Food, and it's symbolic because the region that my mob are from and that I grew up in, which is Southeast Queensland: the bunya nut really holds a really big significance for this region.

And in particular, I think about how the destruction of the bunya nut trees largely mirrors the erasure of people from, particularly, Sunshine Coast area and other areas surrounding my country. And then pre-colonisation, and continuing today, the Bunya Nut Festival, which is in the Bunya Mountains, is a big gathering of diverse communities within Southeast Queensland, I think some even coming from Northern New South Wales. And that was, like, so my mom would have travelled there, about 400 kilometres, to attend that annual gathering, which was the opportunity for mobs to work.

That's what's really special about this place, so-called Australia, is how mobs collectively work together to look after country and there's no warfare over resources. It's sharing knowledge and helping each other. And so mob would come together to talk about looking after country and to perform ceremony and rituals, which are all interconnected, like how we see storytelling as part of looking after country. And so yeah, the bunya nut being this really amazing, you know, you have to cook it right. Otherwise it's kind of a bit bland.

But this amazing food source, and the bunya tree being an amazing tree, and the Bunya Mountains annual ceremony being about looking after country, kind of like a conference in the way that we would think about it now. Like, groups gathering together and talking about their knowledge of country. So that, for me, that's a really important symbolic thing about Comfort Food. And I know, Jazz, you probably maybe want to talk about baskets and weaving in your work, and how that's kind of like the glue to your work.

Jazz Money

I'm so inspired by writers like you, Ellen, who can have a vision of what they're going to set out to write and then write a book that kind of ties into that. How to Make a Basket definitely wasn't formed in that way. But I had a piece in the collection called How to Make a Basket, and it really, this is an awful pun, but it tied together all the different elements of what I thought the collection was, which is about care and love, but it's also about protest, and remembering history, and speaking to the contemporary moment and all its complexities in the way that it's formed in this crazy colony that we live in.

And so the process of actually having the title and then the cover, which is about baskets, sort of, I think, gave an indication to the reader of what they're entering into. Like, a basket has so much cultural significance to Wiradjuri, but to all First Nations people globally. There's basket practices across the globe, and it is not always, but very often a matriarchal act or an act of the gatherers in a society, in a way of collecting the things that are important to us, the treasured things, which could be foods, but it could also be bubs, and it can also be a vessel for carrying story, right? Like, every weave is embedded with ancestral knowledges that's passed down.

And so this is my little basket for now, and all the different elements that are sort of gathered within it. Yeah. I really love what Jenna Lee, who's a beautiful Larrakeyah artist, did with the cover, because it was such a generative process in thinking about what the book is and how it is meant to be held by a reader. And I'm really grateful for that process. Yeah.

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Dionissia Tsirigos

I'm just going to dive into this, because I think this is something that, probably, our teachers want to know as well, which is, you know, you've talked a lot, and it's been beautiful, the conversation, but it's that process in writing, research, working on your poetry, working on your short stories. As you said, you handed in a dog's breakfast. And yet, what are the differences in that work and that process that you've had to take, and how has that experimentation really guided the way that you research as well?

Ellen van Neerven

Even when we're not writing, we're always writing in our heads or processing things. And definitely, I read a lot leading up to Heat and Light. I read a lot of short story collections. And I guess that was my research into thinking about the short stories that I wanted to write. So as I mentioned, I really love the writer Louise Erdrich. I really like Uncle Tony Birch. He's taught me a lot about writing short stories and writing fiction.

I love the simplicity, like, the false simplicity of his work. You know, you read it and you just devour it, and time goes by, and you haven't lifted your head. And all these, you know, if you read the opening chapters of The White Girl, you're introduced to the grandmother and the granddaughter, and you're just totally, totally in love with them and bonded to them immediately. And you have to know what's going to happen.

I used to really study the writers that I liked and how they wrote, how they wrote description. For me, and I just sometimes can be a bit of a perfectionist, where I want to start the story at the exact best moment to start the story. I don't want any fluff. I don't want to be, like, she woke up and had breakfast, or, you know? I just want to get straight into, OK, what is the drama? What's the stakes? What is that like? You only have that certain amount of words, so you got to make them count.

So I think beginnings are really important. And also, I knew I was really bad at ending short stories, so I really tried to practise with my endings as well. It's really interesting, because I've been writing short stories since I was a kid, like, I would write in my notebooks at school as a way of escaping from whatever what was going on. But I never really had any kind of formal education with poetry, and I never really thought that I would become a poet.

And now I have 2 books of poetry. So I'm, like, well, I guess I'm a poet. So then I had to kind of really do a deep dive into poetry, is what I'm saying, to give myself permission to publish poetry and put myself out there like. But poetry really came to me through the orality of being around family and being around oral storytelling, and going to rallies, going to marches, and what you hear on the streets. And you know, like, we all have our favourite people that we see at the rallies that, they just know how to cut through with words, and so inspired by those people.

So I was really obsessed with how things sounded. And probably my second book moved more to becoming a bit more obsessed with how things looked on the page, as well as how they sounded. But I often will just get lines of poems in my head and just have to write them down and kind of hear it, a bit like music, or something. And I guess, sometimes, I get commissions. So I got a commission from 40 years of Mardi Gras. OK. Now I'm going to sit down and do a deep dive and research the 40 years of Mardi Gras.

But not just 40 years, but respecting Gadigal country and respecting what's happened prior to those 40 years, and really do a deep dive into those absences as well and the potential whitewashing of certain aspects of Mardi Gras, but also just the incredible different weavings of protest. And so, yeah, I did a lot of research, but then it's only one poem. So then you have to strip it back and try and create throughout the just one year of Mardi Gras, but multiple years. You can have pages and pages, and then the poem might just end up being just one page, but you've done all of this extra sort of stuff. And then you kind of drill it down.

I think, yeah, that grassroots kind of stuff, which is why I just felt really intimidated by the poetry establishment or whatever, because it was the grassroots-- the poems that were read at, performed at rallies. It was reading poems in the Koori Mail. You know, the Koori Mail was kind of the most underrated publication of poetry in the country, because there's some incredible works of poetry there that are really under-read, I think. And just place it, whew. Yes.

Jazz Money

Just arrived.

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Ellen

Yeah. Just for me, I just started off writing poetry, like, yeah, just really grassroots, just wanting to say what I thought, like, being angry about stuff, and also feeling love for things, and yeah. I remember attending my first poetry workshop by a poet called Jennifer Compton and just thinking, oh, yeah, maybe I'll just check this out, because I've been writing poetry.

I felt so intimidated. I don't know why I felt so intimidated to be in that space. I was already a published author already published a book, you know? I don't know. I just felt like, and then having to read a poem that I'd written, which is in Comfort Food, called 'Pinions.' And it was only something like 10 lines long. We all went around and had to read our poem. I was just, like, seriously? I was just about to run out of the room, because this was a group of, I should mention that this was a group where I was the only non-white person in the room as well, and felt very, yeah, just was, like, well, what they're doing is not what I'm doing.

And I think I've sort come to terms with that a little bit, I don't know, feeling like my work does have value. And I can enter different modes, as well. Like, some works are really-- yeah, they'll kind of just be the way that I talk, like now. And some of the works are kind of more, I hate to use the word 'elevated,' but they're maybe using other, different research techniques. And maybe some poems are for particular audiences, and I can enter different modes and different ways of speaking. It's quite eclectic, but it's all me, if that makes sense.

Dionissia

Yeah.

Jazz

I do think that you would, you're one of the most celebrated writers of the continent. Of course your writing has value, and of course it's resonating. It's such a wig-out to hear, like, I don't know. I imagine that if this teacher who you did your first poetry workshop with heard that you were their student in your first poetry workshop, can you imagine what a wig-out that would be for them now?

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Ellen

No, I did want to say something else about, I just didn't want to come across as a total nerd. But I tell you what I used to do when I used to write a lot of short stories. I used to listen to The New Yorker podcast. I think Jazz and I were we talking about that the other day? Where it's, like...

Jazz

Yeah.

Ellen

... you know, it's very American. I think all the writers on there are American writers. And yeah, a writer will read out loud another writer's work. And it's a short story, so it often takes about half an hour to read that short story. And then they'll have a discussion about it afterwards, or they break it down. But I would be, like, walking home from work, or yeah, usually walking and listening with my headphones on.

And some stories are more, you like more than others, for just personal taste. But I'll make sure that I listen to all of them, and there'll always be, no matter how engaged I think I'm going to be with the story from the get-go, there'll always be a moment in the story where you go from half-listening, maybe looking around, like, going to press the traffic light, someone's going past, looking around you, to suddenly being completely absorbed in the story. And then I will remember that moment in the story where I was captivated, and then I'll go back and read the story in the text and find that moment.

And I think with a successful short story, it's often probably about three pages in. And so you'll look at that journey that that author has created in those first three pages to suddenly make you totally absorbed. And yeah, so that's what I used to do, listen and kind of feel, because all the short stories were so different in style, but there always has to be an activation there.

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Dionissia Tsirigos

What I'd like to really mould that a little bit around is the inspiration of this type of, really, vignette of work and the emotional, raw human experiences that are represented in your piece. So we'd love to hear about that idea of the human experience and the representation of that in your work.

Jazz Money

The book is in quarters, approximately. And I found it really hard to break those sections up initially. Because I couldn't quite tell what the book was about when I first put it together. There is a whole section that is just about stories that are from other places or about longings for other places. The title of the section is Away From Here, which, in Wiradjuri, is Guwiiny-ngali-gin-dyi.

I think there is something really resonant about thinking about location as character, just as much as the people that are in the collection. And obviously, I know who they are [Jazz laughs] because they're all characters in my life. But I think that's one of the interesting things about, say, fiction written in a more traditional sense or writing with character versus poetry, which is obviously peopled with lots of figures, but definitely exists in a much more abstract way, which I think the little bites of poems, hopefully, without having too many tell signs, means that people can actually really see their own lived experience reflected in those moments.

I mean, I know that a lot of my favourite poets, I share very little material reality with, right? But I can see myself represented in those, just the humanness of it. And that's what I really value from poetry. [Jazz laughs] If other people can access that through my writing, that is a huge gift. But I guess, on what you were saying about the rawness and the personal, like I said before, I wrote a lot of these pieces very internally, thinking that they were just for me. And they were definitely a form of catharsis as I was trying to navigate my own lived experience.

Then, when my relationship to writing changed, when I started putting it out for other people to read and considering audience in that way, I realised that I was much more drawn to writing about critique of the society that I'm living in. And that takes lots of different forms. And sometimes it is really full of love, and other times, it's really full of frustration and protest. And it's a really interesting thing for me, when I write, where, often, I'll set out to write something that's really frustrated, and I'm like, oh, I hate this thing.

That poem, Sweet Smoke, that you referenced before, which is the opening poem in the collection, it was written about the Djab Wurrung Embassy and the fight to protect sacred trees against the Andrews government over the last few years. And I was so upset when I wrote that poem. And actually, it turned out to be a text that was all about love and parenting and care. And that's one of the things that I value so much from the surprise of writing, is setting out and thinking it will be one thing, and it usually teaches me so much more at the end than I ever thought I was going to teach the page, you know? [Jazz Laughs]

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Jacquie McWilliam

You are a filmmaker, an artist, as well as a poet. What's the differences between the creative process for you in each area?

Jazz Money

I think as time goes by, I just realised that it's all storytelling, and it takes different forms to tell certain stories. I trained as a filmmaker when I left school. I guess that came from a real drive to tell stories. [Jazz laughs] And filmmaking is obviously a really collaborative act. Being a solo filmmaker, as I kept learning throughout COVID, is quite unpleasant. It takes away a lot of the beautiful things that it is to make films and be with people. And poetry, I find the act of writing poetry very solitary or very personal and inward.

And the poetry community is super abundant, and there is so much love within it. But that actual act, I think, I only turned to it as a way of finding, I just wrote for pleasure, really, for a long time, before I ever thought of getting published, which, yeah, it has been its own sort of journey. But I think filmmaking and poetry have really interesting connections to each other, particularly in the edit because editing footage is like you take this pre-existing language and you chop it up. And you try and make people see things that come together in their messiness or in their similarity.

And they can be really disparate images, but they do really beautiful things when you put them next to each other. And I think that's what I see the relationship to film and poetry being for me, that it stays really resonant. And when I try to think of my films as poems, they're often a lot better. When I try to think of my poems with a journey that I would maybe make in a film, something different happens.

Jacquie

Ellen, setting, I'm thinking specifically of Heat and Light, and setting is, in a lot of ways, a character. Can you share with us, you talked a lot about your poetry, your crafting process. Was it similar when you were thinking about setting in the multiple narratives, multiple perspectives and settings in your narrative?

Ellen van Neerven

So Heat and Light, just for some context, it came out in 2014. And it was my first work, yeah, a work of fiction. It's a hybrid work. So it's got short stories, but also connecting: short stories that are interlinked, so reoccurring characters.

So there's three sections; Heat, Water, and Light. And so that first section, Heat, has this intergenerational journey of characters that are really connected, inspired by Louise Erdrich, who's a beautiful Ojibwe author from Minnesota, and what she does in her fiction which is really stacked with characters. Sometimes, if you go to creative writing school or if you want to write a film or whatever, you want to write a play, want to write a novel, often people will say you have too many characters. And you might have to combine characters to have less characters.

I get that, in a film and theatre perspective because of, I guess, budget and that sort of thing. But in a fiction perspective, I think it can be quite narrow-minded to say you only can have a certain amount of characters in a novel. Because most of us have really big families and also intergenerational stories. I might really identify with the story of my great-grandmother or my great-great-grandfather. And for me, that story is really important in how I tell my story.

So that beginning section, Heat, has a lot of characters, a lot of intergenerational stories. And each story is told by a different character. And it's all set in this Southeast Queensland, northern New South Wales, which is Yugambeh Country, as country that I am related to ancestrally. And it's also a country that I've grown up in. I grew up on Turrbal and Yagera, which is connecting, and I have connections in Yagera.

And so even my urban landscapes, even when I'm writing about Meanjin as a city, I grew up knowing that place on a deeper level than what's just surface. And I grew up with people telling me the stories of that place. So that's all in that, in Heat and Light. When I write about Southeast Queensland, northern New South Wales, it's coming from a place of responsibility and representation.

It's a different mode when I choose to write about places that are away from home. And so for example, there's a story in here, in Light, in the last section, Light, called S&J. And it's a story about two young students that take a road trip to western Australia. And so you see how that character, S, who's a Murri from Queensland, is now in a foreign environment, being on the west coast. And so that was deliberate because that whole story then becomes about her being somewhere else and also her traveling companion, J, being from Western Australia.

Whenever I choose to write about a different place, it's usually how that character connects to that place or doesn't connect to that place. That informs the story and the direction of the story.

Jacquie

I love that connection between setting and the characters' personal experiences and motivations and that deep personal understanding that you're sharing with your readers about those individuals. Dionissia?

Dionissia

And I think it works really beautifully. I was just going to add, when we're thinking about our kids and our students and connecting to what they know… teachers always say this all the time, write what you know. Don't write about Mount Everest, climbing up a rock. It's cliched. Take that moment and obviously, when kids are writing, they're writing for a very short amount. They're not writing fiction. So character is probably very, there's only a few. But exactly what you're saying about the work, it's writing what you know and then feeling the foreign. And I think that that's a wonderful idea of representation.

And I put in the comments that representation is actually a really powerful thing in English, where we talk about it as a textual concept, so a concept that works within work. And both of your texts really demonstrate that.

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Jazz Money

I find that research-driven work is one of the most generative places for me to write from. I find it comes out very quickly once I've done all the research. And often, I take the same approach when I am doing stuff in a visual arts medium, which is the sort of visual art I make is usually, as a poet, it often has a very specific commission or an exhibition or something. And the place where I start is with place, and thinking about, like, whose land is this going to be on, and where am I, and what's the relationship, and how has it been remembered, and how has it been voiced?

And what are the narratives that are missing from what I can find in my research is often a place where my writing starts from. I also find, like you were saying, what you're reading and what you're being exposed to is your research right? I'll find, sometimes, when I am writing something, all these different elements of just that moment right there kind of start materialising in the work. And it might seem really flash and clever to have brought it in, but it was actually just, like, I looked at the picture on my wall, and I was, like, oh, that's the next line.

[Laughter]

And so the world around in research is, I think, very real for me.

Ellen van Neerven

Yeah. I relate to that, because-- yeah, you could be just sitting in a cafe and be, like, what's the next line? And then someone might say something while they're walking past, or a bird might kind of fly past, and then you've got your next line. You know? Yeah. There's really no science behind it.

Jazz

Yeah. I've had people say to me in the past be, like, oh, and then you time-travelled. And I was, like, oh, no. No, I didn't at all. That was just exactly what I was looking at. But if that's how it comes off in the work, then that's a really lovely thing to see manifest, right?

And I was just going to say, when you're talking about protests, and being at rallies, and stuff like that morality and that kind of egalitarian relationship to words. Like, you say what you gotta say when you gotta say it, and I find that to be such an inspiring place. And also, the way that it lends, like, it takes language out of the hands of the elite, right? And it makes it the tool of the masses. And I find that to be such a great place to start from, to think about writing.

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