What happened when the art teacher was away

Yesterday’s drawing class was hard. All the drawing classes have been hard so that’s a redundant statement. But this one was hard for a new reason: our teacher was away, so we had a different teacher. This different teacher hadn’t been briefed on my status as Least Talented Person ever to enter art school, so I had to spend the whole lesson living with the low-level anxiety of slowly being revealed as the Least Talented Person ever to enter art school.

I hadn’t realised how comfortable I’d grown with my teacher, knowing that she knows I’m hopeless, but she also knows what I will be able to achieve, and kind of just gets me to do the best I can within the limits of what I’ll be able to do. The relief teacher didn’t know this and was pushing me to make things bigger, to finish way more than I’d be able to finish, to try way more than I would have time to try. This is important in a teacher, but not when the student is me.

It took me all the way back to my first few weeks. The sense of floundering at my easel. The physical sensations of flustering, heart racing, skin prickling, overheating. The single question turning over and over in my mind: What the fk am I doing enrolled in a visual arts course? No, but really, what the fk. I think I actually am the only person who has ever enrolled not because I have always enjoyed drawing, but because I’ve always not enjoyed it.

I’m trying to understand what it is about my brain that keeps making me start on things for which I have no natural talent instead of taking the things I am good at and focusing on getting better at them.

At the end of the day I had something that looked like an apple, a pomegranate and a pear. The colours weren’t anything like they had been on the originals, but they were lovely colours nonetheless. I had a teapot that looked like it could be finished into a teapot. And I had a background that looked like a big scribbled mess.

It did crystallise my thinking around what I’m going to do next semester. I’ll have to take time off. Apart from anything else, I won’t be able to keep up with the drawing while I’ve got fringe shows going on. But more than that, I need a bit of time to consolidate everything I’ve learned. The main thing I’ve learned is how to go about getting the things that I see onto the page. How to draw the lines and the angles and the distances between things. This is, in fact, amazing to me. Every week, the homework has made more and more sense and been more and more successful. I have, in that sense, learnt to draw. However, it still takes me a very, very long time to work out exactly what it is that I am seeing in order to get it onto the page, and this has a huge impact on how things go in class. I can’t really spend another semester being quite this hopeless.

That means I’ve got just one more class to go, and fingers crossed my regular teacher will be there and I will only have to cope with the knowledge that I’m hopeless not the added stress of having this fact discovered by a new teacher.

Before the doing is always the sorting

The drawing subject I’ve been studying has naturally resulted in the accumulation of a whole bunch of new things. It has also meant that I’ve finally found a use for some things that I’ve bought in the pass without having any idea how to use them (about three different tins of graphite pencils for example). Because they were new things (or old things but finally being used), they didn’t really have a proper home and hadn’t been integrated into my little study. This meant that they were spread either all around the living room or piled up on the floor in my study–both of these things being counterproductive if you’re trying to create a calm working environment.

It was also growing super inefficient, and I was spending way too much time looking for things. I don’t enjoy looking for things, and I find it extremely frustrating, and this leads me to get twitchy, then annoyed, then grumpy.

I spent all of yesterday doing (yet another) sort and organise of my working space. It’s got a bit of a different purpose this time as I try to get all of my sewing and embroidery stuff into the little space that we made by getting an extra wall put in. Which has meant that what is left in this space is only the writing things, the folders and the notebooks. (It was kind of revealing as I put all of the notebooks into one square of the kallax). I made a few archive boxes for things like catalogues and postcards and other kinds of categories that make complete sense to me but would be laughable to anyone else. And for now I’ve got a place for everything, which means that I can put anything I pick up in a place where I will find it quickly and easily.

Today I have done (yet another) big push on sorting out my admin to-do list, including getting on top of some glitchy email thing. One of my email addresses isn’t working properly–well I guess it’s working, I haven’t set it up properly but it amounts to the same thing. So today I sat at my desk determined to work through everything and find all of the lost emails.

Combine all this with the fact that last week I caught up on my oustanding art homework, and I have that sense of righteous calm. Which is a good foundation for the large amount of creative work that I want to get finished over the next couple of months. At the same time, of course now that I’ve started on another round of sorting and organising I’m a bit seduced by other opportunities for sorting, of which there are still (always) many. But I am reminding myself that ultimately creative work is more rewarding than sorting, especially if that creative work is built on the back of a bunch of sorting.

Talk tomorrow (or the day after or maybe even next week).

Night one of two

My name shifted up the waitlist and I got a seat at the Dog Eared Readings last night. With Shannon Burns in conversation with J.M. Coetzee it was never going to be anything except extraordinary. Naturally, it left me with that strange dissonance I always experience after such events. On the on hand, exhilaration from being witness to such depth of thought and thinking. On the other, despair. What’s the point of living a writing life when you know you are never going to achieve that level not only of perception but of connection with your readers and audience.

It also reminded me how entrenched I am on the fringes of everything, a result partly of my level of (okay, but not outstanding) talent, partly of being a little bit in a lot of things but not fully immersed in any, partly of being a little bit lazy and not doing enough work, partly of being too shy etceterarrgghhh. Most of the time I’m not only reconciled to my life on the fringes of our arts scenes, but leaning into it. Every now and then, however, I can’t help wishing I were slightly more successful.

No time for self-pity though, because I’m reading an extract of my new show at the SA Playwrights Theatre staged readings this evening and the deadline is, as always, an excellent distraction. I know telling you that I’m reading seems to contradict my previously discussed status of being on the fringe, but the rest of the lineup is a solid range of talent invited to be in curated programs and a list of prizes and none of them will know my work at all.

I do know this all sounds angsty and self-pitying, but it honestly isn’t. Like I say, I’m mostly at peace with who I am and where I’ve ended up. But it’s useful to leave myself little reminders when this feeling sneaks in, so that next time I feel it, I can look back over things, think, ‘oh, that’s right, this again,’ and move on.

What I especially loved about last night was the discussion of class. My own notions of class are ridiculously outdated I know. My sense of connection to my working class background is, by now, highly romanticised. My children would have absolutely no sense of what it means to feel working class. I’m not sure what to do with that knowledge, especially in the context of the referendum result.

I’m going to have leave this here as a placeholder because it’s 2.30 which is the time I promised myself I’d get back to work. But it’s something I’d like to explore in more depth, if I can work out where to start.

Confirmation bias

After writing about him only two days ago and his influence on my return to my blogging space, I am–at this very minute–listening to Cory Doctorrow talking about his new book on Radio National. Not surprisingly, he sounds exactly like the kind of person you want to listen to. Calm and smart and a little bit funny.

I spent all of yesterday at my desk, moving between this blog, my substack page, my new website, and of course the script that I’m reading from tomorrow night. I also had a bunch of notebooks and journals open in front of me. It sounds like distraction hell, but actually it’s helping me to get all of my many thoughts out of my head and down on the page in a reasonably orderly way. Kind of like when you’re doing a clean-out or moving house or organising the cupboards and you have a bunch of tubs or buckets or boxes and you go through everything one-by-one and throw each thing into whichever bucket they fit and at the end of the day you’ve got a bunch of tubs or buckets or boxes with a group of more-or-less cohesive things.

It was a really rewarding day. Messy, but not overwhelming. And I can see a way forward to getting a bunch of things finished over the next year or so. It’s frustrating of course because its nothing I didn’t already know, and what have I been doing with my time, and I should have finished much more than I have over the years. But here we are and I’m feeling surprising hopeful about how things are going to go over the next little while. (Future me is going to have a good laugh about this one, eh?).

Back to work.

Getting it done. Early or late?

I’m not sure of the best time to write if I want to get a blog post written every day. Doing it in the morning feels like it’s not a good use of the good writing energy that a morning brings (I should be doing the real writing), but if I wait until the evening then I’m all out of writing energy and wanting to do something like my knitting or embroidery.

So it’s the morning. I’ve done a quick bit of morning pages, focused on the script of Stitches, because I’ve got the staged readings on Thursday night and it would be good to have something that makes a bit more sense than what I currently have. And now I’m at my desk, with half an hour to go before my day gets swamped by a bunch of work things that need doing.

Adrian booked us a bunch of things for the Adelaide Film Festival over the weekend. It felt invigorating getting to the Capri early on a Thursday and Friday evening, be in a crowd of people all enjoying what they’re watching, then skip over to Good Gilbert for a glass of wine and a bit of food. I don’t know whether it felt good because there’s still a bit of post-covid release; or whether it’s my renewed commitment to creative and enriching life; or maybe the sense of moving into a new stage of life with certain freedoms now that children are living their own autonomous and independent lives. Maybe it’s some combination of them all. Or maybe it was just a lovely weekend. We saw Poor Things on Thursday night, and Emma Stone was extraordinary. Friday was The Persian Version which was less cinematic than Poor Things, and perhaps not as joyous as promised in the blurbs, but nonetheless excellent (I should be a movie reviewer with such insightful commentary).

Had a performance of An Evening with the Vegetarian Librarian down at the Victor Harbor library on Saturday afternoon, and it was excellent fun. I do love that script. Most of it is very silly indeed, but of all my scripts it’s the most fun to perform. And it’s weird that even though I wrote it, the more I perform it the more that I find things in there I never knew were there, and the more I think, ‘okay, that’s an amazing line’ (if I do say so myself).

Then went to see the 80s synth and strings show by Follow That Car. Enormous, joyous fun, wearing my sparkly boots and a little bit of dancing. Would go again, ten out of ten for a night of pure escapism. Adrian was sitting next to the father of the lead singer who said, ‘I don’t know why he’s the one with a band, his sister’s the best singer in the family, and I’m the second best.’ But he said it with the kind of quiet pride that makes you hope your own kids know how quietly proud you are of them.

Sunday we went to Speedway which was over at the Piccadilly. It was around 3pm when we came out and there weren’t too many post-film food options, so we ended up at the bakery. That’s only our second visit and I was doing a terrible job of making a decision and ended up with a pasty and a sausage roll intending to take the sausage roll home, but ate most of it there. It made me think that I might need to include some more about (in)decisiveness in my show.

Home then and knitting on the couch until it was time to go and collect children from a music festival in McLaren Vale. Then went to bed knowing that when I woke up it would be Monday.

Back to work now.

Sunday morning

Home again

Even after my solemn vow to never neglect it again, I have this weekend rediscovered my blog after apparently forgetting it for ten months. Time after time it is this simple format that proves itself to be the most constant companion of my online life. After a facebook thread the other–a rare wave of discussion in a sea of nothing much–I was reminded of this article in Wired by Corey Doctorrow (my god, that man’s brain) on the enshitiffaction of tiktok (and encompassing pretty much every social media platform). At the same time, I’ve been back on the new writing trail. This always leads to me trawling through the scraps of every word I’ve committed to every space over the last year. A desperate search for the spark of something which might lead to something more substantial which might, eventually, add up to a fully-formed piece. With the enshitiffaction of facebook and insta, and the general patchiness of my substack newsletter there is less to trawl through than ever before. (And of course the fact that after five shows, I have already mined many of the seams–but this makes the scraps and sparks even more valuable).

I had thought that getting a bit more regular with my newsletter might help. But newsletters are only superficially like blogs. Newsletters aren’t the place for the meandering whimsy of nothing in particular that blogs have always allowed. As I started on my newsletter on Friday morning, filling it with this and that of nothing much including (but not limited to a visit to the chemist to buy a replacement cleanser), I was forced to ask, ‘Who wants this landing in their inbox really?’

The chemist story was the kind of thing that would once have been okay on facebook. A fleeting laugh for passers-by. But it’s so cluttered in there now, so few opportunities to chat. So it was back here.

Of course, when I got here, I had an idea to move it to a different domain so that it could be linked still to my substack newsletter and so that I could finally use this domain name that I’ve been renewing for years without knowing what I was going to do with it. And of course that led to all sorts of malarkey, including around 24 hours where I could see that everything was still there hiding, I just couldn’t get to it.

So here I am. Writing nothing of consequence with no consequence. Because in a beautiful way the enshitiffation of it all is beautifully freeing. I don’t need to worry about SEO because what’s the point? Google is almost worthless as a search engine now. I don’t need to worry about whether people will unsubscribe because I’m not imposing on anyone’s time (or inbox). And I’ve just got this lovely, old-school blog theme where I don’t have to worry about blocks and formats and all the blah that takes so much brain for so little reason.

Of course, I know myself well enough to know that another ten months might pass without a visit. But for now, I shall enjoy the deeply satisfying feelings of ‘I’m home’ that coming back here always bring.

Sunday evening

The keets spent their first night out of their locked coop last night, made doubly unsettling by the unexpected rain that passed over us. It rained on and off all night, sometimes quite heavily. We were surprised to find two of them up on the roof with the bigs, and the other one struggling to get up there. One of them tried to follow the bigs as they did their nightly jump from the roof over to the trees, but it wasn’t quite big enough to make it and landed on the ground. It did find its way into a nearby tree though. Meanwhile, the final keet made its way up onto the roof by way of the ladder, which was kind of comical to watch but an ingenious solution by the little. And apparently they decided that would do, because they huddled in together and spent the night there.

When we got up this morning, four of them were up on the roof and the other one was pacing back and forth underneath. They spent today wandering around as a much more cohesive flock than ever before, though of course the two bigs are still a bit bossy to the littles. And now it’s that time of night when I start worrying about them again and hoping they have put themselves to bed somewhere safe from foxes.

In other news, I’m still working away on my show, and I want to record how I’m feeling about the process of writing now which is to say, I think I should be much more worried about it than I am. But at the same time, I can see now that it’s going to work, even if I’m not exactly sure how it’s going to work.

I’m in the cycle of checking my ticket sales a billion times each day, so I’m going to try to crack that cycle by putting some space between myself and my phone. I don’t know why it’s so hard to follow through on that when I definitely know how much better I feel when I’m on limited phone time. Beginning with the simple, but seemingly impossible task of putting my phone away at 8pm and not picking it up again until later in the following morning. And that goes for my iPad too.

Clearly, I have nothing of great significance to say, so I am going to stop trying to say it.

Keets and avocados

After a series of steps, we have finally let the keets out of their cage so that now they can start to freerange. The steps were: teeny tiny keets in a little container with a brooder plate on permanently; still in a little container but with the brooder plate taken out during the day; moved into a bigger cage (the dog’s old wire crate), with the brooder put on most nights but not if it had been a hot day); brooder plate taken out altogether; crate moved up to the block but kept inside ; crate moved outside for the day brought back in at night; crate moved outside under the verandah not brought back in at night; crate moved up to be under the tree where the bigs sleep at night; one keet let out at a time then put back in at the end of the day; and now all of the keets allowed out together.

The final step is to somehow teach them to roost high up in the trees so that they are safe from the nighttime predators. The keets have probably met the nighttime predators–my guess is that foxes come and look in at them, hoping to work out how to get in. After their first day out, they put themselves back into the crate at the end of the day, so I shut the door and that was fine, but I won’t be here every night and they’ll soon be grown out of the crate.

It’s baking hot today. I keep thinking to myself, ‘It’s one of those old-fashioned summer days.’ By which I mean, it makes me think of hot high school days. But it’s not like the days stopped feeling like this, it’s just that I stopped living in the places where the summer days felt like this.

Sometime before Christmas, I ordered two avocado trees from Diggers. It was one of those purchases I sometimes make when my gardening ambition and my gardening belief in myself outstrips my gardening truth. By some miracle I’ve kept them alive (mostly by keeping them in the laundry sink where I guess they get just enough light and are just enough in plain sight that they haven’t been forgotten), and today they have been planted. They’re down in the space with caper bush and the fig tree. The place where we saw the snake. But when we (by ‘we’ I, of course, mean ‘the mister’) got the weeds down, we realised the irrigation was already all set up and there were four spaces for trees, with two of the trees still alive, and two of them not. Two trees, two holes. I’m not really convinced it’s the best conditions for avocado trees, but we don’t have any other tree-ready spaces and we have two trees that really need to go in the ground. They’ve got more chance in those holes than they have in the laundry sink.

And meanwhile, I’m still tapping away at my new show, feeling it bit by bit coming together but still with a long way to go.

And just like that …

… more than a month had passed and I actually did forget that I had set myself this habit. Which is what happens with me all the time, so many plans set up, then I get distracted and then they fall away. But look at me not getting grumpy at myself, and not just throwing it all in. Look at me saying, ‘Okay, well, you’ve missed a lot of days but that’s no excuse to miss a whole lot more.’

I’m on the deck at Clare at the moment, and it’s one of my favourite weather situations, where it’s been hot–so hot–but now the clouds are closing in and there are storms around but they never quite reach here. I’ve done some old-fashioned blogging and taken an untidy picture with my phone and uploaded. Not quite old-fashioned blogging because I had to airdrop it from my phone to my laptop and I never used to that in the noughties. I rarely do it now.

What I love about this weather is the sense of both promise and expectation. This is a feeling that I live with in my chest so often. It’s a wonderful feeling, but equally it is a false friend. Because it gives me the dopamine rush of success, but without putting in the work that’s going to lead to the success. Writing this it has only just made sense to me the impact of what it means, because I have long misinterpreted the sense of anticipation to be a sense of anticipation about the work. But of course the sense of anticipation is about the result. It’s led me to believe that I am looking forward to the work, and then, when the work is hard that makes no sense to me and I stop doing the work. But what it really means is that I’m looking forward to the result.

This probably doesn’t sound like anything to you, but it is actually vaguely profound for me, because it means I immediately see the work in a different light. Something to be endured rather than enjoyed. And if I know it’s to be endured, then I can just remind myself of that while I’m going. The ‘having written’.

One of my favourite Winnie the Pooh things used to be when he was asked what his favourite thing was and he answered, ‘Honey.’ And then he added, but there’s a moment before I eat the honey and that’s possibly just as good. And I think that’s why I’ve always been confused about what my sense of anticipation is focused on. It’s not that hard for Winnie the Pooh to lift the honey to eat it. But it is hard to do the writing that results in the having written.

This is awkwardly written, and to make it a decent piece of writing I would need to go back over it and smooth out the clunkiness, but this is already yesterday’s post posted late, and I’ve got a lot of writing in my heart and my mind waiting to be done.

The End.

Yesterday, I remembered…

…and then I forgot, and then I got busy and by the time I remembered it was far too late. And I think by coming back in today I prove that the habit is not broken despite the breaks, and I think I finally understand the phrase of ‘the exception that proves the rule.’

Fringe launched yesterday. The inevitable result? I was sent into a spin of ‘what am I doing’ ‘why am I doing it’ ‘how will I get it done’. Social media was on fire, pictures of themselves at the launch, in front of their venues, their arms wrapped around each other. Everyone else is hyper noisy and I’m quiet and small. Everyone else knows everyone and I don’t know anyone. And so on and so on and etceteragh. All of it exacerbated by the break I took last year, the resultant lack of stage time, and the niggle in the back of my brain saying, ‘You’re only as good as your last show,’ and wondering whether I should have tried for something more ambitious.

Then I remind myself that my endgame isn’t fringe, the endgame is my body of work. My work is part of the fringe program but the fringe isn’t what defines the work. I think to make myself properly understand this, I need to get outside of fringe more often. I really do need to work on creating work that stands on its own terms and outside the context of a big noisy festival, otherwise I will always have this feeling that I don’t quite fit. Of course, what is stopping me doing that is a complete lack of confidence in my work. Can the work actually stand on its own without the supporting structure of the fringe? It’s exhausting having no confidence in your work, even if I know that nearly everyone feels this way.

Maybe as I move into the next phase of work (now that the trilogy is finished) I can think about making work that has broader boundaries than the fifty-minute, lo-fi borders of a fringe production.

But all of this is getting way too far ahead of myself, because before I work out how I’m going to produce work outside fringe, I need to get this show ready. It will be ready, it always is, but right now it feels like it’s a long way away.

I’m down in the loungeroom at the moment, and the sun is going down and the keets are going as wild as they always do at this time of night. It’s time for me to feed the keets then light the lights then have an early night.