I’ve moved within a bunch of literary ‘scenes’ and my writing is fairly broad from novels and short fiction, to non-fiction, personal essay and cultural commentary to poetry and spoken word, although the later seems quite separate from the other forms of writing and the people that inhabit that world.

Anyway, I move within the ‘spoken word scene’ a lot, it’s a close knit community in Melbourne, almost their own world of publishing and norms. It’s very inclusive (which led me to start Melbourne Spoken Word). Anyway, my path toward ‘publication’ seems to be a bit different or more accepted within this scene. I sometimes submit to journals and magazines, but most of my poetry is consumed by me performing in live shows. I put out a spoken word album with Santo Cazzati last year and get up on a lot of open mics.

I’ve noticed that self-publishing is much more of a done thing within this world and poetry in general. Poetry publishers tend to be smaller, and most people end up just putting out their own collections and albums, and it’s less seen as a second class of publication. I also love the culture of poets releasing ‘chapbooks’ or zines with a small bunch of poems, to sell or hand out at gigs.

One day I’m going to release my own book or collection, with an album, but for now, I’m working on a small chapbook, made by myself, collating all of my poetry themed around refugees and asylum seekers.

A couple of years ago, I was burned by the self-publishing experience. I put together a collection of my early writings as an eBook and sold a total of 5 copies. There were a number of reasons for this, but one of them was mainly that it wasn’t the quality of writing to release out into the world, and I believe my reputation was damaged by that experience.

But this time, I believe my writing has improved, many of the pieces have been tested in the live performance environment and I’m receiving editorial assistance. One of the great things about the spoken word scene is the range of skill sets that we can share with each other and I think we’re quite capable of being self-sustaining, running things ourselves like we do. The other reason I believe it to be different, is as I said before, the different perception around self-publishing but the scene also makes self-publishing better in terms of distribution.

Some have been quite successful at getting collections into local bookstores, but most people sell their books and CDs at gigs in person. I like that there’s more of a connection between the writer and audience. You get their reactions to your work and there’s something less alienating and satisfying about someone buying something off you in person.

The chapbook will be out in a month or so. Not decided on whether I’ll have a ‘launch’ or not but I think there might be an accompanying visual art piece. I’m still decided on trying to get my other writing published the traditional way, but I believe this is the right decision for this area of my writing.

What have I been up to? Over the past year or so, this blog has become less and less central to my work as a writer, but nonetheless remains important for occasional updates about where my writing is appearing and progress with projects not yet out in the world. I’ve mostly been busy with spoken word gigs and university assignments, and I’m looking forward to semester break, with overly optimistic plans once again for reading and out of uni projects.

I’ve come to realise recently, a lot of the kinds of writing I’d used to blog has now gone on to better things, such as guest blog posts for Overland. That began when I was encouraged by the Overland editors to pitch my ideas to them instead of pitching ideas on Twitter that people might like to read on my blog.

As well as that, my work editing MelbourneSpokenWord.com has been going really well, and the website has been growing in recognition and traffic. We have some terrific reviewers, our gig guide is growing quite long, we hosted our first spoken word gig a few weeks ago, printed stickers, and hit our daily pageview record yesterday after I reviewed Anis Mojgani’s gig at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. In the future, more commentary about the spoken word scene in Melbourne will take place there, and hopefully by a wide range of poets and performers.

It’s also surprising how many gigs I’ve been offered all at once. I went a little while without performing and then found myself performing at a bunch, including doing a feature for the second time at the Dan Poets on a Saturday afternoon. And I’m hosting the relaunch of Keep Left on June 22 with our feature being Maxine Beneba Clarke, which is quite exciting, especially since she won the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript on Thursday night, at the launch of the Emerging Writers’ Festival.

With uni, the main thing I’ve been working on is my novel, or that’s where my head’s been most of the time. The other assignments and work takes up a lot of time and I’ve been busy with that, but the novel writing is the most exciting and I want to dedicate more time to it. This is the novel I finished the first draft of in 2010, as part of NaNoWriMo. It was originally called Robbin’ Toorak but I’ve recently changed it to Screwjob. It’s coming together now in the third draft and if I can push forward to finish this draft, I feel like eventually this is one I will reach the stage of submitting for publication, which I’ve never felt about any other novel attempt.

All in all, this means I’ve been incredibly busy over the last few months and one of the sad things is I’ve missed more of the Emerging Writers’ Festival than I usually do. This has also been in part due to social anxiety I admit, so I’ve ran from the opportunity to network and catch up with other writers in Melbourne this time but I hope to get to a couple of events at least before it finishes on Sunday.