Lardil and Yangkaal emerging writer and curator, Maya Hodge has pieced together this year’s opening night panel.
The Melbourne Emerging Writers’ Festival opening night will feature some of Naarm’s most staunch storytellers, writers, community workers and change-makers. Taking place at the Science Gallery, on Wednesday June 14 the event is sold-out but the festival itself is just getting started.
With the likes of Sofii Belling-Harding, Yaraan Bundle, Lay Maloney, Patrick Mercer and Elijah Money offering up their stories and truths the night is shaped around the notion of truth-telling. However, Hodge articulates that telling truths isn’t just a buzzword, rather it carries significant weight and meaning.
Emerging Writers’ Festival must-see events
- Xoxo | 15 June, 6pm at Meat Market: An evening of literary gossip and juicy author scandals – all imagined, of course.
- Scream Scenes | 19 June, 8pm at Thornbury Picture House: An evening of spooky and silly stories backdropped by matching cinema projections. Dress up in your scariest horror garb, mingle with fellow ghouls, and listen to a lineup of readings sure to make your hair stand on end.
- EWF X AMWP: Spillways | 21 June, 7pm at Immigration Museum: EWF and the Australian Multilingual Writing Project at the Immigration Museum for a curated line-up of more languages than there are artists. In this fluid display of literature, writers will perform in Urdu, Hindi, French, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, English and Spanish to promise an evening of waterworks.
- Closing Night: Celestial Bodies | 24 June, 8pm at Immigration Museum: See the festival off with us in true extravagance, gala-style, and witness a dreamy line-up of well-loved writers, artists and inter-galactic DJS. Come for your last literary fix, this time, dedicated to constellations and planets. Then, stay for the drinks, and an ablaze dance floor to farewell EWF for 2023.
Explore Melbourne’s latest arts and stage news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
“I think that it’s important to emphasise that, as Tony Birch writes, truth telling is not a buzzword,” says Hodge. “It’s not something without meaning. It in fact has a really important meaning for community, it’s been happening for a long, long time. It would be remiss of me, not to mention the work of the Yoorrook Justice Commission as the first formal Indigenous truth telling process, the first of its kind in Victoria where Aboriginal people are able to have their stories recorded of the injustices that they have experienced in their family and in their own lives.
“It is my intention and responsibility for this opening night to honour that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and wider Australia are in a critical time of truth-telling.”
For Maya, upon considering who to include in the panel for this year’s opening night, she considered what a writer meant to her. For her, it transcends the notion of an author, and is more about telling stories.
“People get hung up on writers festivals being centred around authors,” she says. “But it’s more than that. When I think of a writer, I think of a storyteller. I don’t think of someone sitting there and writing down on a sheet of paper. It’s also about the stories that live within you, the stories that you carry in your DNA and your bloodlines, your songlines and your family legacies. That all contributes to a story.
“The people that I wanted to get up on that stage are people that are highly respected in the way that they always walk with truth, integrity and strength. There are mix of different people from different walks of life or incredible Aboriginal tradition living in Victoria. They are all writers, storytellers, cultural knowledge holders, or have worked in education. I think that was important. That these people represented lots of different sections of our community and the Indigenous community around Australia too.”
Maya isn’t talking at the event, rather hoping to facilitate a safe and supportive environment for the storytellers.
“I didn’t want to take up that space. I wanted to give that time to all the writers. I’ll just be doing introductions and making the storytellers feel warm and cosy and ensuring their safety on the night too. I think that’s an important thing – especially with writers festivals – that the people I invite feel comfortable and safe in order to get up there and tell their truths, because telling truth is sometimes very hard.
“But I know that all these people are really strong. I really admire them for their strengths and I know that they’re going to do an amazing job however they want to share that truth.”
Maya is exploring her own form of storytelling through a range of different mediums.
“I find it quite healing and reflective to sit and be able to write my stories,” she says. “To make sense of the intersections between curating art and the things that I’ve learned in university. It also extends to what I’ve learned watching my mum make art, as well as watching my aunties and uncles create and how that has also been really informative for my own practice.
“Recording those stories has revealed the interconnectedness of all the experiences I’ve had in curating, and that has all fed into the way that I express myself through my stories and storytelling.”
As the 2021 runner-up of the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, Maya’s storytelling has assumed the shape of poetry, prose, but carries over into her violin playing and the recent pursuit of building soundscapes.
“I’m working on a soundscape at Melbourne Museum,” she says. “It’s a score inspired by tree markings. I started doing soundscapes in lockdown when I did a digital residency exchange with Footscray Community Arts Centre. There are parts in the soundscape where I whisper words. But a lot of it is nonverbal. It’s important to have the nonverbal element in that idea as not all knowledge needs to be verbally shared. Some knowledge we must keep for ourselves as Aboriginal people and protect that.”
Within Maya’s practice resides her conviction to tell stories, but what also remains vital to that process is the hope that through telling her stories, she’s able to empower others to tell theirs too – an approach that is embodied in the opening night of this year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival.
“I hope that sharing my stories will empower other young people to pick up the pen or sit at the laptop and start writing their stories down and understanding that just because you are young is irrelevant. What you have to share should be respected and uplifted by others around you.”
Find all the information for the Emerging Writers’ Festival here.
This article was made in partnership with Emerging Writers’ Festival.
