Anthology Launch – Ghost Cities
Anthology Launch – Twice as Many Stars
Twice as Many Stars, the second print anthology from The Writing Zone (TWZ), was launched on Wednesday 8th November at PHIVE in Parramatta. Like previous launches the event included readings from 11 of the 12 writers featured in the anthology, and guest family and friends, as well as Western Sydney University staff, shared drinks and snacks as they celebrated the incredible creativity and hard work of the writers. The anthology was launched by one of the 2022 mentors, Sheila Ngoc Pham, and one of the writers, Sarah Carroll, MC’d the night.
Twice as Many Stars balances radiant hope with grief and shadow, wicked humour with gravity. As the world began to wake in 2022 from pandemic slumbers and strange isolations, the twelve artists who joined ventured out into cities lying dormant under taller skies. They seeded new conversations and deepened their craft. Galaxy-sized spaces between them became more like the Milky Way: a neighbourhood with room for them all.
Twice as Many Stars brings together stories, poems, essays and scripts about love, loss and family. It dives into diasporic futurism and builds fantastical worlds, sometimes showing us more about ourselves than might feel comfortable. Its writers share intimate and treasured accounts of big and small survivals and sorrows, mending a torn universal fabric with threads of unapologetic laughter. Together, the authors of this third anthology by The Writing Zone traverse spectral states and transcultural realities, while making us look twice at things.
Finding and building community can be complicated, even complex, but is another way of creating some kind of order in a chaotic world. There is great comfort to be found in literary friendships, and I hope that being involved with TWZ has opened your eyes to this.
Sheila Ngoc Pham, 2023
Shelia’s full speech is included here.
Launch of Twice as Many Stars, 8 November 2023
We are all gathered here tonight to launch ‘Twice as Many Stars’, the third volume of The Writing Zone anthologies. Contained inside this small but mighty collection are words by Sarah Carroll, Georgia Chapman, Robert Hoang, Michelle Huynh, J. Marahuyo, Moontana Mohsin, H. May Oxley, Dania Roumieh, Mary Stanley, Rebecca Ward, Danny Yazdani and Victor Guan Yi Zhou.
First of all, congratulations to each and every one of you on your dedication and courage. The countless hours of care you have put into these pages is self-evident, as is the editorial skill of Ellen O’Brien, Melinda Jewell and Kate Fagan.
As one of the mentors, alongside George Haddad, Fiona Kelly McGregor and Suneeta Peres da Costa, it is an honour for me to be here, and have the opportunity to say a few words.
Being here makes me recall that one of the first launches I ever attended was at Gleebooks in 2001 for an anthology of young writers – which also included me. Back then, I did not think of myself as a writer, just someone who liked to write. But that anthology was an important early milestone for me in my writing journey, just as this anthology will be for all of you.
As I read your collective words, what struck me most was the sense of longing throughout. The longing for someone’s kiss; the longing to hear a certain word; the longing to taste Tayta’s maamoul; the longing for a kitten to love as one’s own; the longing for a homeland that no longer exists; the longing to inhabit the past, present and future simultaneously. It’s this longing which is what will sustain you as writers. Even though it can feel painful at times, a burden, this longing is also a gift. As is the ability to be able to process the world through words.
To quote James Baldwin: “one writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
Finding and building community can be complicated, even complex, but is another way of creating some kind of order in a chaotic world. There is great comfort to be found in literary friendships, and I hope that being involved with TWZ has opened your eyes to this. The anthology itself also reflects the power of coming together, the connections and resonances that emerge. That’s the beauty of being part of an artistic community.
A few final thoughts about ‘Twice as Many Stars’: it was wonderful to luxuriate in evocative phrases, such as ‘the sky above is gold like umeshu, plum wine’ from Victor’s piece or ‘If you glimpse her, you’ll see iridescent hair, lavender blushes and glimmers’ in Jasmyne’s poem. I laughed at Sarah’s TikTok feed and felt particular recognition at this sentence from Robert’s piece: ‘in reality my Vietnamese is utter shit, but in the dream I understood every word.’ There are many such moments in the anthology, too many to read out here, and I wanted to end with a passage from Georgia’s piece, a stanza which I felt contained important wisdom –
“I have my own garden now.
It is a sanctuary for snakes.
There are no rules. Except that
oranges will always grow in my garden.”
May oranges always grow in your gardens – and that you learn to care for snakes.
Anthology Launch – Ghost Cities
Ghost Cities, the second print anthology from The Writing Zone (TWZ), was launched on Wednesday 28 September 2022 at Pari Gallery in Parramatta. The event features a terrific line-up of readers, and guests shared drinks and snacks as they celebrated the creativity and hard work of TWZ’s stellar writers. The launch was MC’d by Chris Donoghue and Geneva Valek, and Ilhan Abdi DJ’d two special sets on the night.
Ghost Cities is titled partly for the often-eerie experiences of living through a pandemic. As the streets of Western Sydney shut down in wave after wave, a small band of local writers came together and began to navigate the times. Across 2021 as our screens delivered new variants of fear directly into our homes, the twelve writers who joined TWZ met via video calls, group chats, email and phone. In a period of intense stress and intermittent isolation, they became each other’s first readers, editors and friends.
Ghost Cities is a testimony to the solidarity and literary flair of its writers. These stellar essayists, poets, dramatists and fiction writers share a sharpened interest in the uncanny, in grief and loss, and in energies that come directly from the earth, binding us to place.
Ghost Cities, in my mind, is a book about alternative worlds … This alternative world is ours of course, it’s western Sydney, or at least the one that’s inside of all of us, but these stories extend and move beyond the psychological and geographic boundaries of this place in order to really get at who we are and why we belong here.
Felicity Castagna, 2022
Felicity’s full speech is included here
Launch of Ghost Cities, 28 September 2022
Ghost Cities, in my mind, is a book about alternative worlds: This alternative world is populated by the startling voice and style of Laneikka Denne’s darkly comic world of apartment blocks and loneliness where the cats who you thought loved you, leave you for the next best thing up the road and kids in Natasha-Pontoh-Supit’s stories escape the boredom of high school through the fanatical world of K-Pop fandom. In these alternative worlds we walk an intensely beautiful Europe with Grace Roodenry, where the streets are graced with the shit of a thousand birds and Bria McCarthy’s land of many hidden things and colours the eyes cannot see.
This alternative world is ours of course, it’s western Sydney or at least the one that’s inside of all of us, but these stories extend and move beyond the psychological and geographic boundaries of this place in order to really get at who we are and why we belong here.
So much about being here is about actually not being here as James W. Goh explores so eloquently in his essay where he reflects on learning as young person, with a far too-long commute to school, that our world in the west is shaped by the complexities of distance and proximity to the city and the alternative life it comes to represent. Lucia Tuong Vy Nguyen, in a similar way is both here and everywhere else. ‘The essay crawls out and waits at the foot of my bed. It asks to be fed.’ Nguyen writes as she explores both the ghosts that live in her house and the ghosts of a post-colonial Vietnam.
Other stories take us right to our streets and trap us there amongst the relentless, exploding detail of our everyday extraordinary lives. I’m pretty sure I live on the same street as Geneva Valek’s hoonbags, where the subtle complexities of class in a slowly gentrifying part of town plunge us into this startling place her characters describe as ‘Parramatta. Twinkling. Alive. Peace in the chaos. As if on cue, a car zipped past. Roaring.’
Harvey Liu’s exploration of architecture and the city is one where every building is a memory. There are so many memories that it gives the main character a headache as he mines a ridiculous and nostalgic Westfield and a hole in the ground where a library resembling an alien spaceship has just landed in Parramatta Square. These are stories about characters who cannot seem to escape, perhaps, even, they don’t want to as the persona of Benjamin Muir’s story hints at – he is perhaps cursed by something that makes the women in his life disappear and fills the world with ghosts.
In ‘Date Night’ Anith Mukherjee gives us a dinner date that becomes an existential crisis where two people talk about sex and drugs and stuff on the astral plain with a kind of dark comic timing that would be difficult for a less skilled author to achieve.
Thank you for your stories. For bringing me to your streets and mine and the ones that exist only in our heads.
Anthology Launch – The Wayward Sky
Thursday 24th March 2021 saw the launch of the first print anthology for the 2020 cohort of The Writing Zone (TWZ). TWZ is run by Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre in collaboration with the Sydney Review of Books.
The Wayward Sky is a collection of diverse cultural pieces, written in the homes of the contributors at the height of lockdown and highlights unique perspectives of families, relationships, kin networks and communities.
The night saw a gathering of the 2020 cohort of TWZ participants many of whom were physically in the same space with each other for the first time. Indispersed silence and uncontrolled laughter could be heard vibrating around the room and terrace of the Peter Shergold building as the writers took what was printed on the pages and filled it with sound.
Revered poet and mentor to TWZ, Eileen Chong, braved the semi-masked world to officially launch the book. Sharing both her own words and a poem by Li-Young Lee, it was a perfect launch to a warm and inspiring event.
To live in words and ideas in a world where the rewards for such endeavours are few and far between is an act of disobedience, and therefore, powerful. To come together as a group to make this choice together in support and camaraderie is a sustained leap of faith.
Eileen Chong, 2022
Eileen’s full speech is included here.
Launch of The Wayward Sky, 24 March 2022
This evening, we have come together to celebrate The Wayward Sky, a project borne out of The Writing Zone under the auspices of Western Sydney University’s Writing and Research Centre and the Sydney Review of Books. This anthology collects the essays, short stories, scripts and poetry of twelve writers, namely:
Yasmin Ali, Ryan Bautista, Duy Quang Mai, Yasir Elgamil, Christine Lai, Nadia Maunsell, Tina Nyfakos, Kim Pham, Martyn Reyes, Viniana Rokobili, Sophiya Sharma, and Huyen Hac Helen Tran.
These twelve writers, along with their mentors Eda Gunaydin, George Haddad, Mireille Juchau, and myself, under the care of Ilhan Abdi, Kate Fagan, Melinda Jewell, and Catriona Menzies-Pike, came together, despite the global pandemic, despite prolonged isolation due to factors beyond our individual control, to achieve something utterly radical—to give time to words, to think, to speak, and to write in collaboration, and to collect these words in an anthology.
To live in words and ideas in a world where the rewards for such endeavours are few and far between is an act of disobedience, and therefore, powerful. To come together as a group to make this choice together in support and camaraderie is a sustained leap of faith. In order to write, we must necessarily look inwards, we must hold up mirrors to our lives, and make deep space for the stories we all hold within.
I’d like to read a poem here by one of my touchstones, the poet Li-Young Lee. It is from his collection Book of My Nights (2001, BOA Editions).
You have all dug deep to create, craft and polish these transformed and transformative works, and they now share a home in this volume. These works of yours are a marker at the beginning of your writing journey. There will be many more milestones to come.
It is a long road we have all chosen to walk, and at times, it can be solitary, and seem unrelentingly uphill. But if we can lift our eyes from our individual paths, we might see that we are not the first or last in this multifaceted tale, and we do not walk our paths alone under this wide, overarching sky.
My hope is that this book will be an anchor and a refuge for you, now and in the future. This evening we celebrate you, your stories, and all the words that belong to you, and to all of us, in the unknown, as yet unwritten days, months, and years to come. My deep and heartfelt congratulations on The Wayward Sky.
Eileen Chong
24 March 2022