Adelaide Fringe: This is What Happened (Part One)

Massive Adelaide Fringe season this year. This was the year I decided that I would do a retrospective. That is, put on all six of my current shows. Why did I want to put on all six shows in the same season? I had creative goals and I had business (producing) goals. In both domains, there’s a lot to reflect on and remember for future work, so updates over the next few days incoming. First up: the business side of things, producing.

At certain stages of bringing a creative work to an audience, I really enjoy the producing aspects. They are the perfect mix of admin to-do list and creativity. But working on an annual cycle as I have been for some years, there is a moment where I have to let the producing work go, trust that people will find the show and focus on writing, rehearsals and refining.

Without a new show going on, it all felt extremely manageable in January when I wasn’t using the month to push through and finalise a new work. For the last eight years, and with growing intensity over the last few, January has mostly been about me reassuring myself that ‘you can do a lot in a two months, six weeks, a month …’.

This year I had the ‘luxury’ of being able to do all of the things that I’ve known I should do but never had the headspace for like setting up a social media schedule; sending out press releases to fish for feature articles, interviews and reviews; getting in touch with producers and others I wanted to invite to see the work.

Social media I did more or less stick to my social media schedule, but it became increasingly less than more. I remain overall unconvinced about its effectiveness vs previous years of ad hoc posting. And like everyone, I’m increasingly uncertain about the current social media landscape anyway and looking for alternatives.

Interviews and reviews
– I had a few ‘we’ll definitely be in touch’ responses from various radio hosts and podcasters that didn’t eventuate, but two extremely generous radio interviews, so that’s an all round win.
– For online and printed media I did have some nice little mentions in media wrap-ups, but no feature pieces.
– As for reviews, none of the shows are new so I had low expectations, but even those low expectations weren’t met! I did have one reviewer come along right at the very end of the season (and a most lovely review it was too). But for the most part, the only response to my emails to publications inviting reviewers was a return email asking if I wanted to buy advertising space. Sigh.

Venues, producers and other invitees There was a bit of action with some venues and producers, and this was certainly more substantial than in previous years. Many weren’t actually at the fringe, so couldn’t come to the shows, but there’s a few possibilities ongoing there. I was also able to invite other industry people along, and that has been extremely rewarding with some potential opportunities unfolding.

So overall, in terms of producing it was situation normal in many respects, but with a lovely boost at the beginning that made me feel much more in control of things than I ever have been before.

Coming up: the big breakthrough!

On the Radio

The Adelaide Fringe has kind of started, but not officially, I’m not exactly sure what this preview week is about. But the city has definitely started talking about it. Lovely Deb Tribe invited me on to her show this morning to talk about my season. I really love her show, she has the same kind of warmth that makes me enjoy listening to Zan Rowe so much. Like they really do want you to have a good day.

I was all primed to go and sitting with my phone ready to make sure I could answer as soon as the producer rang. I had the radio on, but I was all ready to turn it off as soon as the phone rang. But as the time approached, I could tell it wasn’t me coming up next. Gah! I didn’t read the confirmation text properly, and I just assumed it said 6.45 because the show is filled up with so many regular segments like gardening. But it actually said 7.45. So I was up way ahead of time.

It wasn’t actually all that hard to wake up. I mean, I’d been awake most of the night anyway, worrying about my superannuation. Which is obviously an excellent use of sleeping time. But I did feel bad because I asked Adrian to set an alarm as insurance.

Anyway, the interview went really well, Deb is always super prepared and asks interesting questions. And at the end, there was a truly beautiful moment when someone texted in to say that I had helped her with her husband’s funeral and how well the funeral went. Sometimes, I just love living in this big-town city.

Then, because I was up, I made it to a gym class and now I will spend the rest of the day worrying about which show I should be working on. I might write more about that tomorrow.

Talk soon!

What is Happening?

Throwback to when I was teaching myself free motion stitching so that I could stitch the text of Pearls onto my unstitched wedding dress.

“What is happening?”

I say this about one thousand times every day. Adrian says it’s like living with a toddler 🤣. Actually it’s my way of getting myself to stop for a minute and possibly calm the chatter in my brain and reorient myself. (Also, I do like to know what people are up to, and it’s not my fault that my hearing is better than anyone else’s in this house and that I can usually hear most, but not all, of their conversations and if I have missed a crucial part then why wouldn’t I come into the room and ask, ‘What’s happening?’).

When I was doing the test stitching, I thought I would use some of these dodgy test pieces as gifts for my family. I thought they would be great in frames and be a cool family joke. However, when I showed it to my youngest son he said, ‘That looks like something the swot team would find on the wall when they broke into the main suspect’s house.’

So I just left the test pieces in my box of test pieces.

But geez.

What actually is happening? For my own context, when I’m looking back over these posts and re-reading them, today is the day after POTUS told the world that it would be okay if he built a golf course in Gaza. That’s not exactly what he said, but what he actually said is so hideous I can’t bring myself to type it out.

What is happening? And how long until we get to swipe right and tell ourselves, ‘All good.’? I know that we have to push back, but it is almost impossible to know what to do and how to act.

At the moment, I’m rehearsing ready for my upcoming Adelaide Fringe season, and I must admit that whenever I am rehearsing or going over lines I’m very often overcome by the questions: ‘What’s the point? There’s urgent work to be done. How is this helping?’

Something has been keeping me going. Partly the fear of being on stage and not knowing my lines, that’s definitely a motivating factor. But last night it kind of clicked to me. There is purpose in rehearsing.

One thing I think we need more of, and urgently, is less combative conversation. To talk to and with each other. To sit quietly, to listen, to let people explain themselves to us, and to explain ourselves to them.

And I guess this one way I can be part of that. By creating one more place for gentle conversations and connections. I mean, in the scheme of things it isn’t much and it isn’t enough. But it’s better than the alternative which is scrolling the news trying to understand what is happening. I can’t understand it, but I won’t accept it either.

A Little More Thinking on Going Small

I have another draft on the go for what I wanted to write about today, but I want to get this down before I forget it. It’s some nascent thoughts about what I mean by going small in my creative work. Two recent generative writing exercises led me to two disjointed but somehow connected thinking:

  • writing is about leaving messages about the place, ready to be stumbled on by someone;
  • at the beginning of a show, there are all sorts of things I hope that people feel–a sense of expectation, of excitement perhaps–but what I most want them to feel is a sense of trust.

What I mean by the first is this: sometimes people need to find things, to uncover things, and we never know when the right time to find those things might be. So we write them as a kind of gift to the future. And I think maybe my reason for writing things at the moment is so that they are there for me to find at some point in the future. As I’m gathering momentum for my next story or work all of these things that I write right now are for me to look back on and to think, ‘Oh, that’s right, I remember when I was feeling this or thinking that.’

Here’s a thought I’ve uncovered while I was writing that: further confirmation that those six shows exist as their own complete set and it’s time to move on to something new, is that I know I’ve mined every piece of work I’ve previously written. All those scraps of ideas are used now, and it’s time to create some more.

Another thought I uncovered while I was writing that: while I’ve been working out what I mean by this, I have helped myself to understand another, but related aspect of going small. And it is this: rather than going on to bluesky and shouting out for everyone to hear, going small with my work means bringing it closer so that I can speak more softly and if I’m speaking more softly that means I can also hear.

All of these small fragments are part of the emerging whole.

What I mean by the second is this:

I remember once, someone I really respect who said to me that at the beginning of my shows they always feel a sense of calm, like they’re in safe hands. This felt like such an enormous sense of endorsement because it came at a time when I still felt very uncertain about being on stage and about being a performer. Like, if it looked like I knew what I was doing, then maybe I do know what I’m doing?

I don’t just want the audience to trust me, I need them to trust me. To trust that I am going to share a story that is worth their time and their energy. To trust that I am going to help them to explore stories and memories and feelings and sensations.

At the same time, I am trusting the audience to help me to create the space to share the story. I am telling the story, but they are also helping to create and to shape that story.

It seems to me that this trust is perhaps the most intimate of all our connections. There is hardly a smaller space between two people.

I’m loving this commitment to going small! And I’m so glad to still have this beautiful, blogiful space. Back tomorrow with the rest of the post that I started working on. It’s about London on a summer’s day.

Looking Back

Here is a photo of me at a time when I was still pretty unhappy, but not entirely unhappy in this moment.

I can’t remember the exact name of the place where we were staying, but it was a kind of desert glamping which I think would have been somewhere between Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.

I had taken along a bienenstich cake, or as we call them ‘bee sting’ cakes. I hadn’t realised that it was yeast cake, nor had I realised just how many components it had. But I was extremely proud of the result. Haven’t made one since.

Some expats who live in Abu Dhabi really get into the desert camping, but I never did. I mean, I spent my whole childhood camping and I was mostly in the car reading and willing the time to pass. But I did love the desert sunsets. They were so gentle and peaceful and created such evocative colours.

I remember being not unhappy because I had a friend who had invited me to go away; because I’d made a beienstich cake; and because the sunset reminded me that even the harshest of days have gentle moments.

As for the present day, I spent this morning working my way through some admin tasks, then the mid-morning until the afternoon running two shows. It’s only three weeks now until I open with Pearls and Stitches so I’ll be running shows every day from now until the end of March.

After I’d finished rehearsing I spent ages tidying up after myself. I feel like I’m a tidy person, but the evidence suggests otherwise. There are always piles of clothes in my bedroom just for starters. At this stage of your life, do you try to change yourself, or do you just accept this is what you’ve got to work with and go from there?

Edinburgh Fringe Festival (16 years later)

I was scrolling through photographs earlier today and I came across this:

If I went through the archives there’s possibly a copy of it back at the time it was taken. Although there’s every chance the image has long been gobbled up by the domain transfers and the pixabucket or whatever it was I was using to host photos (it wasn’t flickr because for some reason that was blocked in the UAE at the time, along with skype).

It is taken outside the venue where I performed my show when I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2009. My first solo show, had never even done more than a ten-minute spot before, and I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with it.

WHAT WAS I THINKING.

Well, 2009 was the year after the year when a decade of experiences happened to me in the space of eighteen months and then we moved to Abu Dhabi. It’s no exaggeration to say that I was barely clinging on. So I guess I wasn’t thinking, eh?

In many ways, this show did my head in and when we left I was pretty convinced I’d never be performing again.

I had one reviewer who came, fell asleep, then gave it two and half stars, or maybe it was two stars and I’m just talking myself up 🤣. But mostly, it did my head in, because I left utterly and completely consumed by a belief that I didn’t belong in that world. I knew stand-up wasn’t for me. By then I’d been on enough line-ups and backstage with enough people who said they were nervous, who said they had no self-confidence and yet … out they went and looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. I had no theatre training so it didn’t occur to me that there was any kind of performance that would work for me.

At this stage the only person I’d seen who was doing what I could see myself doing was TJ Dawe. But he was a trained actor, and I was really wary of stepping into that world.

I still couldn’t see anyone doing the kind of performance that I wanted to do, which wasn’t standup and wasn’t acting. Edinburgh also made me think that the fringe circuit isn’t just brutal…it’s a blood sport. I just couldn’t see how someone who was quiet and wrote quiet shows could possibly find their way through it all.

Looking at that show now from the distance of sixteen years, I can, however, see that I was working my way towards the work I would be able to do. This show in Edinburgh was was on the way to where I wanted to be. A draft. A draft that probably shouldn’t have been shared publicly, but that’s what you get at an open access festival I guess. So this show is full of my early stand-up work, but is also clearly the foundation script for what would become An Evening With the Vegetarian Librarian.

It has taken me a long, long time to find my way through to the writing I want to write and the performing I want to perform. I mean, so many of my friends are talking about their plans for retirement (not immediately but coming up), where I’m thinking, ‘But I’ve only just worked out what I’m supposed to be doing!’

But Edinburgh wasn’t only about the performing and the show and what it taught me about being an artist. It was hard and it did my head in, but as part of my parenting life, this moment here is one of the absolute favourite times of my life. It was magic.

Saturday Late Afternoon

I went for a walk on the beach yesterday evening. It was a baking hot day and I had thought that it be one of those beautiful calm evenings where you just want to somehow breathe it all in.

By 6pm, I had run three of my shows, and I was drawn to take a walk to help with the solidifying and memorising of it all. Usually at this time of the year, I’m refining a script and evening walks along the beach are an essential part of the process.

It was, however, quite blustery, although it doesn’t look like that in the photo. But you can tell it was a little blustery because there aren’t many people on the beach.

And I didn’t get the photo of the sunset I was thinking about.

But I’ve seen some of the photos from this evening, and the sky is red, because of the smoke from the bushfires in Victoria.

I was surprised to see a group of three young people getting themselves packed back into their car after their swim, and one of them had a large packet of burger rings that he was sharing with his friends. My assumption would be that he has inherited a love of Burger Rings from one of his parents, because would a young person spontaneously select Burger Rings from the whole range of chips and chips-adjacent choices?

Summer tomatoes eaten at room temperature please

Every morning, I take a tomato out of the fridge and put it either on the kitchen bench or the table on the deck. I do this because one of the real joys of a summer garden is the tomatoes. And one of the real joys of a tomato harvest is tomato on toast for breakfast. And everyone knows that tomatoes are at their most flavourful when eaten at room temperature. So I take my tomato out of the fridge and put it in the morning sun to warm it.

Invariably someone will pick up the tomato and put it back in the fridge, or into a shaded part of the kitchen bench. I’m not sure why this happens–we aren’t an especially tidy kind of people in this house and you could easily go back to a coffee cup you put down somewhere and come back three days later to find it there. I guess that isn’t strictly true. I’m not an especially tidy person, but there are tidy people in this house, and they’re the people who move my tomato.

Anyway, I’ve made my feelings known and no one will be moving my tomato again.

(Of course on the other hand, one of the real disappointments of summer is when the tomatoes don’t flourish and all summer you look at the spindly plants that are refusing to give you anything more than the odd speckly fruit).

The tomatoes are growing so well because we put in some raised garden wicking beds that are filled with all the good stuff. However raised garden wicking beds that are filled with all the good stuff do have limitations for some things. Such as the cosmos. Watching the cosmos grow, I have really been looking forward to their flowering. But all they are is enormous foliage with very few blooms. The lettuce bolted almost as soon as it had leaves. And one of the spinach plants has grown so enormous that the leaves look like the ears of elephants and are overshadowing everything else.

But the tomatoes. The tomatoes are amazing.

The cosmos we do have are gorgeous. I thought I’d planted white, so these were a bit of a surprise, but a lovely one.

Like Winnie-the-Pooh says about eating honey*

There’s a little moment in writing that falls in the space between the gathering of ideas (and the subsequent brain dump of those ideas), and the start of the actual writing. In that space, I always feel like I’m in complete control of both the process and the project. It’s like the say in the classics

I know exactly what I want to say … all I have to do is write it.

I think it’s lucky that I do have this little space where I believe all this. If I truly remembered how hard that next stage is–the stage where I have to start forming the thoughts and ideas into coherent sentences–then nothing would ever get started.

*“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”

Blackwork Embroidery

I’m enrolled in the Royal School of Needlework certificate of embroidery, mostly because I wanted to get more into their teachings on blackwork embroidery. I started with the self-paced course, which I finished during my long, slow recovery from my first bout of covid in 2022. I stitched the puffin.

I loved the intricacy and detail of it, but also its order and symmetry (that’s what I love about knitting too). For someone who doesn’t excel at maths, I have a deep love for counting (here’s a whole lot more maths than I could ever make sense of). But I was especially drawn to the shaded techniques the Royal School of Needlework have been developing and promoting. I did a bit of reading and researching, but I felt like it was something I needed to be taught rather than something I would be able to instinctively learn.

As is my way, I got a bit too drawn into the idea of mastering it, to the extent that this time last year I was enrolled in the certificate of visual arts at the Adelaide Central School of Art.

I’ve been looking around for some inspiration and ideas from previous or current students, especially the ones working on the blackwork unit. It’s brought home to me, how much richer the internet was in the days of blogging, especially now that instagram has evolved into whatever instagram is these days. There are some posts on instagram and on pinterest, but I’m finding instagram especially hard to search and filter these days (why, why, why did instagram have to take away the ‘most recent’ tab from the searches). Anyway, no use complaining about what isn’t, because instagram isn’t there to help us find beautiful things, it’s there to help people sell stuff to us.

If you’ve come to this while you were looking for blackwork embroidery, here’s some links to some of the instagram accounts and other more in-depth blog posts I’ve found.

Given that she quite literally wrote the book on it, it isn’t surprising that Jen Goodwin probably has the most to look at it in both quantity and quality. Her instagram feed is gorgeous and her shop is one of the few places to sell shaded blackwork kits.

Christina MacDonald (@stinamacdo) has many beautiful examples of blackwork on her insta feed

Alex at Elara Embroidery has so far finished the crewelwork module, and the blackwork module with good overview posts at different stages.

I can’t work out what this person’s name is, but she finished the module in 2018 and has a good number of update posts on her blog.

It’s an old blog, but here’s someone getting started on teaching themselves shaded blackwork techniques.

The String or Nothing blog has a bunch of posts and resources on blackwork all linked on this comprehensive page. It’s not dedicated to shaded blackwork which is my main fixation at the moment, but if you’re getting started on blackwork, you’ll definitely find something here.

I’ll add more as I come across them.