…after last festival month!

Brisbane has been fairly wild for the last couple of months. We’ve had festivals crawling out of our ears, blowing out our noses, oozing out of our eye sockets, and generally affecting us bodily. But in pleasant ways.

Queensland Poetry Festival

QPF was particularly splendid this year. My picks:

• Andy Jackson and Rachael Guy performing a poetry-puppetry collaboration that moved us all to tears (and caused Andy’s books to sell out in about two seconds);
• Superduo Emily XYZ (poet-in-residence) and Myers Bartlett performing sound poems for two voices (if they don’t get it, if they don’t get it, it’s all right, it’s all right…);
• Ross Donlon, who runs the monthly Castlemaine Poetry Cup and writes warm, often subtly hilarious poems;
• Luke Beesley, maker of edible images, from Melbourne;
• Pam Schlinder’s launch of her long-awaited debut collection, A Sky You Could Fall Into; and
• Madrigal Maladies first full-length performance (okay, that ones’ a blatant self-plug…). Poet Nerissa Rowan and I teamed up to experiment with two-voice spoken word madness–reintrepting the lyrics of well-known songs (about illness!). We sang in public and it was terrifying and rad!

Brisbane Festival

And then we’ve had Brisbane Writers Festival, and Brisbane Festival (with its glorious fireworks–and all of us gathering on the hills in the old suburbs to watch the city burn), and Valley Fiesta is coming up this weekend. But for Brissie Fest picks:

• Cantina are turning the gorgeous Spiegeltent into a den of sin and vice–can’t wait to see it tonight.
• Deep Blue Orchestra will cram their roving & dancing orchestral adventures into the Spiegeltent on the 13th and 14th.
• Wunderkammer, Circa’s newest production, will tumble into QUT Festival Theatre next week.

Non-Festival Stuff

Unless we call it the Festival of Zen. I was fortunate to be included in Overland Magazine as part of the 200th issue’s 200-line collaborative poem. And I gained infamy in QWeekend Magazine a couple of weeks ago, along with Graham Nunn and John Tranter and co.–thank you to everyone who has sent photocopies, actual copies, or mentioned it. I felt like Harry Potter for about a day. It was bizarre.

So yes, not quite the Festival of Zen this month, but it’s busy enough to look like it from inside my mindtank. As a final note, I’ve been procrastinating by playing point-and-click hidden object games, and I’m presently in love with Mishap: An Accidental Haunting. If anyone has any favourites, please recommend them.

You know, it’d be cool to get involved in writing for games, because I’ve played a lot of mediocre games in the last few weeks that could have been wild with a dedicated creative writer or an editor on team. What we need is a poetry text adventure. How awesome would that be? Maybe I could pitch that to The Edge or something; they’re groovy folks.

*wishes for more time and funding*

Anyhoo,

A generally cheerful and typically hopeful Zen signing out.

~ Zenobia