Just under a year ago I had the pleasure of reading my work out to a crowd of strangers.
If this doesn’t sound like a pleasure to you, then you clearly have no understanding of the warped psyche of a writer. This downright terrifying exhilarating experience was (thankfully?) immortalised on tape. (It’s probably not tape, it’s probably something much more hi-tech than that.) Anyway, it was immortalised. In the chaotic, nerve-wracking lead-up to the first public speaking engagement I’ve ever volunteered for, I somehow managed to miss out on the information that I was being recorded. Finding out later freaked me out momentarily – it’s like finding out someone can see straight into your bedroom, thanks to a combination of high-powered binoculars and your lack of blinds. (That happens to everyone, right?) In the end I was grateful that I went into the performance in a state of blissful ignorance.
My story, Under-Wired, was performed as part of Scissor Paper Pen’s inaugural Something Else event. They hold these story telling events semi-regularly, and they are always a delightfully bizarre mix. They give the writers a theme – ours was Wires Crossed – which is basically a rather vague nudge in the direction of your writing desk, and then they just sit back and watch the madness unfold. On the same night as me, my friend Zoe Anderson enlightened us on the weird and wonderful world of beekeeping with The Bee Story, and local poetry slam champ CJ Bowerbird unsettled and impressed everyone with his piece You Never Quite Reach the Drums in the Distance.
Me, well, I brought down the tone a little. Under-Wired is about high school politics, “self-acceptance”*, and the sheer awkwardness that is a young girl’s relationship with her breasts. When in doubt, mine your angst-ridden adolescence for material.
In much the same way as I feel about my boobs now, I hope you guys like my little story.
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* So my much-more-articulate editors at SPP have dubbed it, anyway.