Palestine – LARSEN

Writers festival reflections

Any day I get paid be a writer is a good day. So I was delighted to book four writers festival events for the 2025 season – which I am now half-way through.

Why we cancelled our Bendigo Writers Festival panel

I was so looking forward to this weekend’s Bendigo Writers Festival, where I was meant to join Madison Griffiths and Cher Tan as part of the Cities of Literature Book Club to discuss Looking at Women Looking at War by the late Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina.

However, following the decisions and actions of Festival and Presenting Partner La Trobe University this week, and in solidarity with fellow participating writers, we no longer feel able to take part.

Contextually fine

Just over a year ago, I was in holiday in Tasmania with my beloved and besties, and pretty bloody happy about it.

It was early September 2023 and I was hanging and chatting with one of my pals in an outdoor hot-tub another had coaxed into warmth with a smokey wood fire. I felt safe and peaceful and surrounded by love. There may have been wine.

We were talking about my poetry book, which had been out in the world a few months. My spa buddy asked, given my creative practice had taken place almost exclusively online for over a decade, how I had fared with the more dangerous sides of digital space – trolling, censorship or other forms of abuse.

And another thing: SLV as the example you don’t want to be

As a critical friend to the arts and cultural sector, I try not to ‘out’ organisations who haven’t already made headlines. Unfortunately, after a year of record fumbles and fails in response to Palestine, that still leaves a lot from which to learn from (with new ones seemingly added every day).

So it’s been deeply disappointing to witness an organisation so many have held in high esteem become the high-profile poster child for poor practice. I look at the example of the State Library of Victoria in the latest edition of my ‘and another thing’ vlog.

And another thing: on cultural safety

Arts boards and organisations, stop using cultural safety as an excuse to make your programs, spaces and business practices less culturally safe.

Palestine governance resources in The Commons

The rushed and fumbled public statements made by Australian arts and cultural organisations in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine have made failure the status quo on matters of risk and crisis management, financial sustainability and duty of care – including the statements many have made with their silence.

A collection of my provocations on Palestine as a governance issue have been collated and republished The Commons Social Change Library.

The power of digital poetry

At last month’s Perth Festival Writers Week in Boorloo/Perth, I began my Tiny Little Digital Poetry workshop with the following:

Given Perth Festival Writers Weekend brings writers and readers together in a colonial city built on unceded Noongar Boodja, it’s impossible as a guest writer not to acknowledge that our writing colleagues here and overseas are currently being killed, threatened and censored at unprecedented rates.
Continue reading “The power of digital poetry”

Board members, we need to talk about Palestine

Like everyone else at the moment, Australian arts and cultural organisations have been making headlines for what they are or are not saying or doing about the daily and devastating breaches of international law and human rights happening in Palestine and Israel right now.

And another thing: on profiles and platforms

Preparing to teach a recent workshop on building an artist or author brand made me realise how much my approach to my own brand and online profile has changed over the last several years.

That feeling has been exacerbated over this last awful month, in which the social media spaces I have held in such esteem have become sites for both community making and lonely making, action and distraction, truth-telling and shadow-banning, finding and losing of trust.

It’s been a timely reminder that our online profiles are political – regardless of whether we using them to share political content or politicise our silence.

Ally is a verb

Yesterday in Tarntanya/Adelaide, a blood test took me over the road from Pirltawardli (Possum Park). In need of some nature, I attempted to walk the edge of one of three golf courses in that part of the city. Ten minutes later, I left in tears. The glaring normalcy of the scene, of exclusively white golfers in a privileged place of safety and leisure, felt surreal and gross in a week that the world is in literal and metaphorical flames.