The Suburban Review commissioned HOUSING SIMULATOR 2023, a piece of digital lit the editors described as: ‘a hilarious interactive work with a keen sense of tragedy.’ (Thanks, eds!) It has just popped out into the world at the start of 2024:
‘Apply for your nightmare rental or save for the distant dream of a deposit — just don’t have a pet, or an insistence on functional plumbing.’
HOUSING SIM 2023 built on work begun with the support of The Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowships, an initiative of Brisbane City Council, which also enabled me to spend a week in Katoomba writing/reading/walking (down and, worse, UP some Very Giant Stairs), and — most wonderfully — to engage Felicity Plunkett’s expert editing (and mentoring) eyes on some new work. ♡
With the generous support of the Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Arts Fellowship, I was able to travel to Canberra for Poetry on the Move (Centre for Creative and Cultural Research in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra) in September. So many warm, curious and bold conversations between poets from Japan, the UK and all around Australia — not to mention the rosellas, tulips and bus stops of Canberra are top-notch!
The Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowships are an initiative of Brisbane City Council.
ALSO…
Wonderful poets Rebecca Cheers and Mitch Cave published their debut collections with Rabbit Poetry: No Camellias and How to Eat Fire and Why (respectively).
I EARNED MY DRIVER’S LICENCE after many, many attempts … and also GOT ENGAGED. 🥰
This was, we can all agree, something of a concertina year, in which time contracted and expanded with surreal inconsistency. When are we now? What is yesterday? Did I do anything this year except hand-wash masks? How many more times can we hear the phrase ‘strange and uncertain times’ before it is just meaningless sounds?
Wherever you are, I hope you and yours are safe, and feeling as secure as one can during, well, ‘strange and uncertain times’.
Art Starts Here: 40 Years of Metro Arts
I was extremely fortunate this year to be able to mine the archives of Metro Arts (definitely a COVID-safe zone), and to spend many weeks making art-affirming phone and Zoom calls to artists, performers, producers and arts administrators whose work has impacted Brisbane any time between about 1974 and now. The end result, beautifully designed by Sean Dowling and Ashleigh Jacobsen, is Art Starts Here: 40 Years of Metro Arts. If you’re interested in Brisbane, or artists’ communities, or architecture, or anecdotes about terrifying lifts — this book is for you. I’m very proud of it and very grateful to Metro for letting me steer it as editor.
‘Ghost Light’ (Red Room) Find the ghost light in a closed-for-good arts centre. (This piece, unsurprisingly, emerges out of my time in the old Metro Arts building and archives.) This psychogeographic poem/piece of interactive literature is best enjoyed in full-screen with headphones. Thank you to Red Room for publishing this poem, made in Twine, as part of their 2020 Fellowship shortlistee commission series.
Griffith Review kindly included my little poem ‘Quince Season’ in their Generosities of Spiritissue. Backslash Lit included an interactive Twine version of my poem ‘Blueprint: Bramble Terrace‘ in their first issue. Earlier in the year, Scum Mag printed two iso poems, Blue Bottle Journal let me wax lyrical about the moon in ‘Eight Phases’, and just recently Overland kindly printed a prose poem called ‘sandwiches‘.
Sourdough starter
All things considered, it’s been a huge year. (It just doesn’t feel like it, because the year feels like one, long, never-ending day.) My book, After the Demolition, turned one in September, and this year I received the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for an excerpt from it. Like everyone else this year, I had plans scuttled—I didn’t get to visit the USA for poetry adventures. (One. Day. I’ll. Get. To. The. Dang. Frost. Place. Seminars!) But I’m grateful that I’m able to start over in plotting out 2021: thank you to the Brisbane City Council for allowing an extra year to fulfil Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship plans.
I also got to spend this year working with absolute legends at the Queensland Poetry Festival: Michael, Anna, Angela, and Amanda. It may not have been the year we originally planned! But we delivered nearly 100 online performances and workshops, and got to hang out with lots of amazing poets from our community—and further afield. Poetry workshops are really the best use of Zoom!
I didn’t learn to make sourdough. I did learn enough basic coding (thank you, Yarra Libraries, for amazing free workshops with Tegan Webb!) to spend every bit of spare time this year making poetry toys/text adventures in Twine, and also this poetry oracle Twitter bot (to represent Bec Jessen’s Ask Me About the Future online):
Alongside the talented Yen-Rong Wong, I’ve won a 2020 Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. I’m immensely grateful to the Queensland Literary Awards, Arts Queensland, State Library of Queensland, and of course the judges. Thank you to the family, friends and colleagues who support me – in particular my partner Bec, my mum Kathy, my publisher Kent at Cordite, and treasured friends (especially Justin & Tam, Tim & Anna, Rebecca, Caitie, and the Poet Pals).
Congratulations to shortlistees, Ellen Wengert and Sara El Sayed – and congrats especially to Sara, Anna Jacobson and Amanda Niehaus who won Queensland Writers Fellowships. These awards change lives – and get books written (as proven by the wonderful Mirandi Riwoe winning the UQ Fiction Book Award for Stone Sky Gold Mountain, written during her Fellowship).
The 2020 QLAs winners, as drawn by Kathleen Jennings.
I’m also very lucky and grateful to have received a Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship this year to travel to the Frost Place Poetry Seminars and New York Poetry Festival, among other adventures. Unsurprisingly, those activities have been postponed for this year – and I’m grateful to Brisbane City Council for extending the fellowship timeframe into 2021. I cannot wait to revisit these travel plans next year!
Katy O’Brian joined Z Nation in its final season as George, a soft-spoken, soft-butch badass who leads post-zombie America towards social unity.The dystopian vibes of the current pandemic seemed like the perfect time to ask: What Would George Do? 🧟♂️ 💪 🌈
What better reminder to vote, USA pals.
Z Nation was such a fantastic series – a real genre standout as a zomcom with a diverse cast, centred around friendship, compassion and mercy. I’m a big fan of the whole cast – what a kind bunch! – but the introduction of George gave me the courage to finally get into boxing/growing biceps. Katy is a lot of fun on instagram, as are fellow cast members Kellita Smith, Anastasia Baranova, Keith Allan, Russell Hodgkinson, DJ Qualls and Ramona Young.
I’m also all about letting people know that you don’t have to be a stacked powerhouse to be able to defend yourself and that women can be strong without bulging muscles or, conversely, appearing fit at all. I think it’s important to show a variety of bodies manifesting strength on the screen. A great character hopes to inspire through resilience and perseverance, and not physique.
Katy O’Brian(Z Nation, Black Lightning) in Archer Magazine
Explore an abandoned house in Red Hill, Brisbane before it is demolished. Created in Twine, this interactive poem was recently featured in Backslash Lit (and originally commissioned for Red Room Poetry).🤖🏚
Art Starts Here: 40 Years of Metro Arts
Now that Metro Arts has moved into its new West Village home, I’m thrilled to say that the history book I was privileged to research and edit (and which Sean Dowling and Ash Jacobsen designed) will be available from 11 September. Featuring the voices of over 40 Metro community members, Art Starts Here: 40 Years of Metro Arts charts the living history of Metro Arts, from its gutsy DIY beginnings to its bright future. As a teaser, here’s a photo I took at 109 Edward Street just as Metro moved out, capturing the light and warmth of those studios:
I hope all you poets, filmmakers and filmmaker-poets will send a video poem or two into Queensland Poetry Festival’s new* Film+Poetry Challenge. There’s a total prize pool of $2800 and we’ll screen ’em and have the best time. (*Technically this prize is a reimagining of Francis Boyle’s wonderful video poem prize of QPFs past – and I’m glad it’s back!) Entries close 10 October.
It’s only a matter of time until someone releases an anthology called In Strange and Uncertain Times. Still, in these, uh, strange and also uncertain times we’re somehow all busier than ever — this is keeping my brain Very Active (for better or worse). Here’s some news:
Recent publications
Yesterday Scum Mag kindly included two new poems, one about iso and a fun one about queer joy. I also have a little poem about grief included in Writ‘s new issue. Thank you to the editors. 💗
Red Room Poetry have created a wonderful thing in In Your Hands, an anthology of work by writers whose 2020 gigs and book tours have been affected by COVID-19. It’s free to download, share and enjoy. (My poem ‘Conversations at the Mojave Phone Booth’ is included.)
After the Demolition was recently shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. This blew my mind — to be shortlisted alongside Peter Boyle, Lisa Gorton, Joanne Burns, Natalie Harkin and David Malouf was a dream! Congratulations to winner Peter Boyle.
Each poem in this collection demonstrates cerebral questionings of what it means to occupy, and destroy, space. Frost is unafraid of gaps and the poems often find their strength in what is left unsaid.
After The Demolition is a collection that opens with an ode and closes with love: the centre of the opening poem ‘before/ now’ being ‘\\oh//‘ and the ending a rejoicing ‘/sing//‘; and the closing poem, ‘Peripheral Drift’, telling us ‘you can still pash in a graveyard / at 28’. This is a breaking down, a demolition, of the daily grind, and a rejoicing in relationships, past and present. As Bachelard says: (When the peaks of our sky come together/ My house will have a roof).
In a flurry of iso-nervous energy, I collaborated with geniuses Shastra Deo and Bec Jessen to code a bot to represent Bec’s new book, Ask Me About the Future (UQP) on twitter. The AskMe_Oracle generates tiny poetic fortunes from words and themes in Bec’s book, and will reply with either a personalised fortune or straight-up lesbian flirting if you @ it. Thank you to Cheap Bots Done Quick for the infrastructure and to Shastra for making the Magic 8-Ball logo (as well as a fortune-dispensing Instagram filter!).
Look, your partner will deconstruct the moon.
— Ask Me About the Future (@AskMe_Oracle) April 26, 2020
Panacea Poets
Queensland Poetry Festival has, like many arts orgs, taken the show online during iso. I’ve had the pleasure of curating Panacea Poets, a YouTube series of short readings (twice a week), and Couplet Poetry Online (monthly). Panacea Poets drops a new video on Mondays and Thursdays and features poets from Australia and beyond:
It’s been a hectic little time both for spooks and for poetry. I’m currently drowning in a pile of Trolli Halloween candy courtesy of my housemate and a lack of trick-or-treaters. Is it any coincidence that my cat (Sable) looks exactly like Salem, but more Australian – i.e. more goofy than gothic? I think not.
She is, indeed, chilling.
Anyhow! Today (Nov 1) the Digital Writers Festival begins, with so many amazing online (and telephonic!) activities to read, click, listen to, play with, and learn from. I took part in Poem Phone, a dial-a-poem phone number you can call for the duration of DWF. I can’t wait to get my claws into my favourite kind of festival (one I don’t have to leave bed for) over the weekend.
You can call 07 3184 4332 (or +61 7 3184 4332 from outside Australia) to hear poems by Claire Albrecht, Alex Creece, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, me, Harry Josephine Giles, Leyla Josephine, Karen Rigby, Nhã Thuyên, and Rae White. My poem is about the Mojave Phone Booth – something I’ve been wanting to write about ever since I listened to the 99% Invisible episode of the same name.
In poetry news, I recently had a poem published in Meanjin for the first time, called “The Tophouse”. You can read it in the Spring 2018 edition. As well, Overland recently printed a love poem of mine called “Peripheral Drift”. Thanks so much to the editors for including this work.
I have a collage poem called “Chivalry’s Not Dead (It’s Just Been Criminalised)” in Cordite’s TRANSQUEER issue (out today!), using text from a Miranda Devine column of the same name. This issue has an overwhelming list of amazing poets included, from Eileen Myles to the late Candy Royale. Congratulations to the guest editors Stuart Barnes and Quinn Eades. I started reading as the issue launched at midnight and now, at the time of writing, it’s well past my bedtime. I started with Broede Carmody’s poem for Kat Muscat (“Blue“) and couldn’t just stop there; I felt too many big feelings.
This Friday’s Couplet is a special queer edition to celebrate this month’s anniversary of marriage equality in Australia. This event features Kate Mackie, Lucinda Shaw (Silver Sircus), Torrey Atkin, and a special excerpt from The Bachelorette: A Song Cycle from Bec Jessen and I. (While we’re here, shout-out to Bec for being nominated by Impossible Archetype for a heckin’ Pushcart Prize!)
I just nearly signed off “kind regards”, so it’s clearly time to finish up here. Belated happy Halloween!
I’m thrilled to say that at opening night last night I won the Val Vallis Award! Thank you so much to judges Alison Whittaker and Angela Gardner, and extra thanks to the Auslan interpreter who had to sign the puns/filthy bits. I’m so excited for Anna Jacobson, very deserving winner of the Thomas Shapcott Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript.
This QPF I’m really looking forward to hearing more from poets in residence Yona Harvey and Alison Whittaker, the return of Ray Briggs to Brisbane to read Kinky Sevenlings, the Radical Imagination panel on queer utopias, and the launch of Rae White‘s Milk Teeth.
I’ll be on at The Big Read on Saturday (Alison Whittaker, Tricia Dearborn, Fury The Poet, Laniyuk Garcon-Mills, Stuart Barnes, Zenobia Frost and Rae White). Then, Bec Jessen and I debut The Bachelorette: A Song Cycle on Sunday at Bloodhound Bar. Are you ready to fall in love?
It’s finally chilly enough to cart a jacket around on hot busses all day in readiness to look cool in the evenings, so you’ll see a lot more of me out and about. There’s been so much great poetry on in Brisbane recently, with folks like Rae White, Ella Jeffery and Shastra Deo at Saturdays; Pascalle Burton and Mindy Gill at Riverbend Books; and, just last week, Bec Jessen and Jarad Bruinstroop (below) at Couplet:
I also loved hearing Claire Keegan talk hypnotically about short stories at Avid Reader — on “the elegance of knowing when you have enough”.
I have a poem out this month in Rabbit‘s new LGBTQIA+ issue, in extremely good company. This is a really worthwhile issue to have, with work by many of the poets mentioned above (Rae, Bec, Jarad), as well as Stuart Barnes, Pam Brown, Quinn Eades, Toby Fitch, Mitch Tomas Cave and Rory Green (my ol’ Toolkits pals), Angela Gardner, Jessica Wilkinson, and many more.
I also have a poem, “Civic Duty“, in Red Room Poetry‘s POEMS TO SHARE II. This educational resource features 40 poetic activity cards to spark imagination and creative writing. Inspired by original commissioned, student and educator poems from Poetry Object, this interactive resource is designed to enliven poetic learning through language, literature and literacy.
Coming up in worryingly few weeks (where did the year go?), my QUT postgrad poetry pals and I will be reading work responding to Gertrude Stein at QUT Art Museum’s Salon de Fleurus on 19 June, from 6.15pm. Salon de Fleurus is an artwork, a contemporary reconstruction of Gertrude Stein’s Parisian salon that existed at 27 rue de Fleurus from 1904–34.
It’s a month ago now, but I spent my birthday very pleased with myself at Taronga Zoo, and thence became a blushing fan of both Sydney’s Newtown and our president, Eileen Myles. Carriageworks was a sublime venue for a writers’ festival, made all the better by being visible from our AirBnB window. I also found out that Sydney green-thumbs grow some truly great pot plants, as below.
This year I have a forthcoming commission for Moving Words(a QPF/QAGOMA/Commonwealth Games Festival collaboration), called Bathers, after a Robert Bunny painting in the Aus. Collection at Queensland Art Gallery. There’ll be an Auslan-interpreted live poetry walk through the gallery in April, where an excerpt from the poem has also been installed.
(I saw a lot more Bunnys on my trip to the Gallery of South Australia, and expect I might continue writing queer revisionist poems about them.)
I also have poems printed or forthcoming in Woolf Pack #10, Rabbit and Foam:e, with a poem recently shortlisted in the Judith Wright Overland Poetry Prize. Congratulations to Evelyn Araluen and Rae White on their much-deserved wins.
I’m particularly proud of a recent review I wrote (on the plane back from Adelaide) of Dickinson’s Room. This one’s up on Daily Review, but you’ll find my scrappier, on-the-fly Adelaide Fringe Reviews here. (I was meant to be on holiday.) Please go see it, if you’re in Adelaide — and please tour everywhere, Bad Neighbour Theatre.
Emily [Dickinson] is no madwoman in the attic; Bad Neighbour Theatre realise her as a complete and complex woman. Just as Dickinson made her solitude rich and full, we experience how expansive she made her life in this tiny space.
I’ve joined the editorial team of a refurbished Stilts, with Ella Jeffreys and Emily O’Grady. The journal has a wonderful history, and we’re proud to bring it back to its Brisbane roots and refocus its attention firmly on Australian poetry. The first issue of Stilts is curated from commissioned poets (future issues will be open subs), and we have a truly fine crop of poems to share soon. All the action begins soon; keep an eye on the Stiltswebsite or facebook page for updates.
Longstanding Brisbane femmo zine Woolf Pack will launch its 10th (!!) issue in March – keep an eye out for their next event. WP #10 (founders Rebecca Cheers and Talia Enright pictured below) features poems by Rebecca Jessen, Rae White and moi, plus heaps of gorgeous art and prose.
Somewhere in all this, I’m working on my manuscript and MPhil at QUT, and watching a lot of soothing renovation shows (and finding there’s not a dry eye in the Queer Eye house). Pray 4 me.
It’s raining poems on the World Wide Web this week (and raining, well, actual rain in Brisbane). This is poor timing for me – our new unit’s NBN is glacial, so we’re struggling to read poems/load gifs while haunted by the smooth white-noise of 1997 modem sounds.
I’m so glad to have a poem out today with Red Room Company called “Bramble Terrace” – one of my blueprint poems, about a now-demolished house in Red Hill. This was commissioned following the Red Room Poetry Fellowship short-listings, and it’s something I’ve been tinkering with for some time. I seem to have lost most of the the photos I took inside the house, unfortunately, but this was the mosaic in the bathroom:
Earlier this week, the Australian Book Review published the Queensland wing of their States of Poetry anthology, now in its second year. Thank you Felicity Plunkett for your deft editing and for bringing us all – Anna Jacobson, Pascalle Burton, me, Sam Wagon Watson, David Stavanger and Liam Ferney – together.
This week, catch poets and writers from all over Australia from the comfort of your own bed at the Digital Writers Festival (if you aren’t reliving ’97 download speeds). Don’t miss Brisbabes Rae White, Rebecca Jessen, QUT Lit Salon (feat. Emily O’Grady, Rebecca Cheers, Mindy Gill, Annabelle de Paola, and more) – and download yourself a sick new zine while you’re there.
What’re you waiting for? Get On-Line!*
*It took over an hour to upload these gifs… but Neopets still loads okay. 👌
Zenobia Frost 