Interviews

There is something about weaving, creative nonfiction writing, and, I will say this last – coding – that overlap with each other. Sometimes when I’m coding, the way I pay attention to some of these lines of code, it really reminds me of sitting at the loom and trying to figure things out. Like, I see something in my head, and I’m just trying to make it happen on my screen.

There’s this thing people do when they talk about translation that I find very frustrating – they focus on what is lost in the process, and I really think that is putting the emphasis on the wrong thing. Because just look at all that is gained. You get a whole new work. People in a new language are reading it a different way, and they’re not reading it in its original language, which some people believe automatically makes it inferior. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it adds a lot. I think it contributes to the literary culture of the language it’s translated into.

‘What is most important to me is to write a strong text. My intentions are aesthetic, not therapeutic. The work of research, composition, revision, structuring, is what absorbs me utterly and what brings me repeatedly to the page.’

Most emerging and mid-career Asian-Australian performance artists call Annette Shun Wah their ‘Asian Fairy Godmother.’ Dig deep into the origins of any Asian-Australian theatre work over the past ten years and her influence will make itself felt:

Drama is about writing other people’s points of view of the world … Through craft you can hopefully speak to other people, and the more you do, the more you learn about what works, what doesn’t, how to connect to an audience, the ways you can structure a story to have a particular kind of impact.

‘I’ve always wanted to change and do something different than just Scott McClanahan stories.’

A key motif in Ali’s work is the dev, or demon, which is used to reflect critically on the experience of marginalisation.

The original meaning of the word novel meant to bring news, and I cling to the old-fashioned, realist, meaning of the novel: bring news.

It fascinates me how young Edison was able to develop a love of books. Picturing the world he described, I can’t see how he could grow to become such an avid reader. He tells me, ‘the only thing I could see in my village was a radio…but then not everybody owned one…’

This interview is from Diversity Arts Australia’s Pacesetters Creative Archives project, a chronicle of the histories of creative practice of migrant, refugee and culturally diverse communities in Australia.