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Filming (mis)adventures

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Before The Invisible Thread series I had never interviewed anyone on camera. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of interesting people for print but my voice, my words have only ever appeared on the page, and my image has remained hidden. Seeing yourself played back is an excruciating experience (how do actors cope with their overblown reflection at movie premiers?) and it revealed an irritating quirk.

Whenever I start talking I experience an uncontrollable urge to wave my hands about. After I saw the first few interviews played back I gave myself a good talking to. Note to self: Keep your hands down. At all times. My hands would not listen. In subsequent interviews the second I started speaking up they would jump. Waving, waving, always waving. During one interview I tried to unobtrusively sit on my hands but I quickly released them. When I wasn’t waving them around I was unable to think. However it seems many authors are similarly inclined, so I’m in good company. Here’s Omar Musa and me waving at each other.

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My hand-waving was not the only challenge we faced. There were also a few technical misadventures. The ACT Writers Centre — where we filmed the majority of these interviews — was a logistical nightmare. Never has any room had so many plug sockets and light switches and poles, all highly unappealing features onscreen. We did our best to avoid them but early on one caught out my indefatigable cameraman, Dylan. During set-up my head was covering it, but as I began speaking and waving and moving around, the nasty little offender began playing hide and seek. When viewing the footage it was distracting in the extreme. I did show it to a couple of ‘test cases’ who didn’t notice it until well into the interview, but I knew we had to reshoot my noddies*. A right pain, but you can be sure we didn’t make that mistake again.

Then there was the issue of the second mic. We had a reliable and professional lapel mic for the author but tried a series of different mics for me. So in a couple of interviews you’ll see me holding up a lovely gold number (disco queens eat your heart out). There was no issue with the sound quality but when the interviewer holds a mic it changes the dynamic, making it difficult to set the interview on an equal footing. So we swapped that for another lapel mic which, as it turned out, would have been perfect if we were working as spies but wasn’t so great for interviewing authors. It picked up everything in the room, and I do mean everything. On the playback I swear you could even hear the air moving. So finally we returned to disco gold but with me holding it between my thighs out of shot (as you can see here while filming Roger McDonald). Rather odd but somewhat less intrusive.

But perhaps the crowning failure came courtesy of an author who shall remain nameless who deadbolted one of the doors after entering the room. The interview went beautifully, said author exited out of the second door and shortly afterwards, taking a break before the last author arrived, we did too, carefully closing it behind us to ensure that all Dylan’s camera equipment remained safe.

When we returned, reflecting on how well the interviews had gone so far that day, we discovered that my key wouldn’t open door 1 (now deadbolted) or door 2 (which opened with a different key). While waiting for the security company, Dylan paced from door 1 to door 2 and back again, vainly trying them both at least 30 times each. ‘Stop, Dylan!’ I cried eventually, and he then attempted to convince me that I would be able to climb up through a high glass window above the door and drop ninja-style into the room. Needless to say I was somewhat reluctant, and thankfully we were unable to prise the window open. There was talk of breaking the door down; we weren’t ruling it out. Eventually the security man arrived and popped it open easily with a master key (I may have fist pumped, I can’t be sure). ‘The whole thing sounds Chaplinesque,’ a friend commented. Indeed.

Now I’ve confessed all our misadventures you might be pleasantly surprised to discover that this week’s interview actually looks pretty decent. A writer and glass artist of Arrente, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent, Jennifer Martiniello has plenty of insightful things to say. Make yourself a cuppa, put your feet up, and click that little triangle.

* For those as ignorant as I was, noddies don’t have anything to do with Big Ears or Enid Blyton. A ‘noddy’ is the technical term for when an interviewer’s questions are filmed after the interview has been recorded. We used two cameras for the majority of the series, but for the first few interviews we only had one camera and so after the author left I became adept at pretending they were still sitting in the chair across from me.

The Invisible Thread series: Omar Musa

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Chatting with poet, rapper and Invisible Thread author Omar Musa was ridiculously enjoyable. Omar is passionate, sometimes controversial, and always candid. During the interview he had his say on everything from artists leaving Canberra and then disowning their hometown to why (and how) he wants to dispel the myth that poetry is boring and irrelevant.

At the time of filming, Omar was about to head off to the Melbourne Writers’ Festival to sit on a panel that included four women — most notably Germaine Greer — reading from their favourite poets. Surprisingly, Omar was the only panellist to choose a female writer. Chatting after the cameras were switched off, he worried that it would appear deliberate, when in fact the poet he had chosen, Anne Sexton, is one of his all-time favourites.

You can hear him talk about Sexton’s influence on his writing in our interview, and a lot more besides. Keep watching until the end or you’ll miss Omar performing his poem (evidence of why he won the 2008 Australian Poetry Slam and how he could turn even the most reluctant reader on to poetry). Enjoy.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVchWU2p8M

Beneath the surface

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ACTThere is a myth that nothing happens in Canberra and, I must confess, sixteen years ago when I arrived here I credited that myth.

My first memory is of driving along Northbourne Ave, past Civic. ‘That’s the city,’ my brother thumbed. I looked out of the window and experienced mild panic. Where? I thought. I can’t see anything. I grew up in Melbourne but had spent the last three years in England, a cramp of a country with a leaden sky that had pressed against me for far too long. My arrival in Canberra marked a blue sky soar of a day. The sun tap danced, the woolly hills unfurled gracefully. And there was so much space; something I had been craving. Yet I wanted more from a city than what appeared to be a bunch of blank-faced office blocks, a centre that blurred past in a matter of mere seconds. I wanted vibrancy and art and boldness. This place looked bland and lifeless.

I was soon to discover that Canberra is adept at trickery. On the surface it can appear to be one way, but look a little closer, delve a little deeper, and something entirely different is revealed. Canberra is anything but boring. It is a place of ideas and imagination and experimentation. In 1999, I started working for Muse, then Canberra’s monthly arts magazine, and by 2001 I was its editor. I was out most nights of the week soaking up all the arts and cultural practice that this city had to offer and I couldn’t possibly get to every theatre show or exhibition or book launch. Canberra was, and still is, a richly creative city.

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I left Muse long ago and the magazine has since folded, but now I find myself once again inviting readers to experience the diversity of artistic practice that comes from our region, this time through The Invisible Thread, an anthology of 100 years of Canberra writing.

In 2009, both Melbourne and Brisbane produced anthologies of work from their cities. At the time I was talking with Anne-Maree Britton, then director of the ACT Writers Centre, about how Canberra really needed an anthology of its own. For its small population Canberra punches above its literary weight and yet so often our city flies under the radar. It was time we did something about it.

A few days later I happened to receive some promotional information about Canberra’s 2013 centenary celebrations. The timing couldn’t have been better; the centenary offered the perfect opportunity to make an anthology happen. An advisory committee of local authors (Marion Halligan, Alan Gould and Adrian Caesar) and literary experts was assembled. Halstead Press came on board, and we secured funding from the ACT Government and the Centenary of Canberra. Everything began to roll from there. The committee spent one year reading through the work of over 150 writers to create a shortlist from which I made final selections. The Invisible Thread, is different in both purpose

and scope to the Brisbane and Melbourne anthologies. It includes fiction, nonfiction and poetry, giving readers a taste of the diversity of work to emerge from the region during the last 100 years. Writers such as AD Hope, Roger McDonald, Bill Gammage, Judith Wright, Kevin Gilbert, David Campbell, Jackie French, Humphrey McQueen, Jack Heath, Rosemary Dobson, Clive Hamilton, Manning Clark, Omar Musa, Marion Halligan, Alex Miller, Les Murray, Kate Grenville and Garth Nix. The list goes on and on.

After years of work the anthology is now ready to emerge. As I write this the book has been typeset and the cover design is underway. The Invisible Thread will be in bookshops in October and will be launched at the National Library in November as part of the National Year of Reading’s Legacy event. It’s exciting times.

And yet we still have one hurdle to get over. We are short of funds to cover the final portion of printing costs and pay authors for appearances at our scheduled events. Last month we launched a fundraising campaign via crowd-funding site, Pozible. We’ve already raised over $4000 of our $5000 target and we have until 9 September to secure the remainder. The way Pozible works is that if the target isn’t reached by the campaign’s end none of the donations are processed and we don’t receive a cent. But the great thing about Pozible is that it’s not all one-way. There are rewards on offer for those who donate, including advance copies of The Invisible Thread and VIP invitations to Woven Words, an event featuring acclaimed authors Alex Miller, Alan Gould and Sara Dowse, alongside music from the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. So if you value literature and reading please support our Pozible campaign and help us get the word out to the nation about how fabulous Canberra really is.

This post was first published on Her Canberra.