Calissa

Photo by Chris Fitzgerald. Used with permission.

Brewing Community is a series of guest posts in which readers, writers, artists and fans are invited to share their experiences of community. Whether online or in person, these groups bring a great deal of support and sometimes stress to their members. The aim of this series is to share the joy and find ways to brew stronger communities. If you have some experiences you’d like to share, please let me know.

Today’s guest is Maureen Flynn: poet, author and fan. I had the great pleasure of catching up with Maureen at Conflux in October, where she spoke movingly on David McDonald’s Paying for Our Passion panel. Being a Doctor Who fan, she spent part of the convention cosplaying Missie and I always keep my eye out for her commentary on the latest episodes. Like me, she’s a candidate for the NAFF race this year (so if you enjoy her post here, please consider voting for her).

Why building community matters

When Elizabeth kindly asked me to guest post for this series, my head reeled. There are so many different places I could go with talking about my journey in being both separate and part of community. It started from my days as a young carer feeling like a fish out of water amongst other children, but there is also teenage days experimenting in online fandom and fan fiction during 2007-2011 as a form of escape and self-discovery. There is also discovering safe places to participate in community through blogging, involvement in local clubs and societies in the geek fandom space and, recently, cons and the speculative fiction community in Australia. Even, I now realise, organisations like my brother’s disability support provider, who I don’t need to justify myself to or explain myself to because they live and breathe not just disability every day, but also local relationships and the values that matter an awful lot to me. The truth is I can’t separate these disparate communities because they all provide me with the same thing. They keep me connected to people that I love and value and care about, and keep me connected to the people who love and value and care about me.

For me, sense of community starts with my carer role, with my experiences of isolation and difference because of that role, and my participation on the Helena Bonham Carter forum as a way to escape feeling different. I can tell you this without any shade of embarrassment: Helena Bonham Carter probably saved my life, helped me realise who I was at my heart’s core and helped me to be the writer I am now. Her fandom gave me permission to be weird and wonderful and to write like my life depended on it, no one judging my words. She was, and is, a wonderful role model: funny, smart, down to earth, and always honest about being herself. Her fans were creative, fierce, different, daring, pushing boundaries. They also told me I should never give up on my writing or apologise for who I or my family was. When I was part of that fandom, I made myself a promise: I would never be judgemental or unkind if I could help it, never exclude people because they are different, never worry about how others saw me or judged me, or do what people expected of me again. It set the tone for the range of communities I chose to be part of in later years.

Why does participation in my communities matter? There is an interesting discussion happening in the community care space as federal reform rocks the sector. That discussion is around two things that link back to community: inclusion and the concept of “the good life.” What does meaningful inclusion look like for Australian citizens and what does a good life look like? Is it the same for all? And how do people, especially marginalised and/or disadvantaged people, achieve it? These discussions are complex and there are no easy answers, but there is basic consensus on some of it.

1. People who are connected to community are less isolated and less vulnerable
2. People who are connected to community have greater social opportunities
3. People who are connected to multiple communities are more likely to feel good about themselves and have greater resilience

It should be evident from both this post and my post for David McDonald that these statements hold true for me. Without the multiple communities I identify with I wouldn’t be the strong, resilient carer I am today. People in the speculative fiction community are sometimes surprised that I put so much effort into attending book launches, bringing along friends to events and participating in things like the Aurealis Awards, but for me it is a no-brainer because community works both ways. Let me give you two examples. In Melbourne, I met a bunch of Helena fans for the Tim Burton exhibition. One girl I met lived in the same LGA as me and we’d never known despite chatting on a forum. She didn’t have a big friendship network. I recognised that she’d fit right into mine. I invited her to a bunch of events and she’s now firmly ensconced in my friendship group. She paid it back by becoming my brother’s volunteer through his disability provider, enthusiastically supporting my brother to finish university and expand his social networks. Without Elise in my family’s life, I doubt my brother would be where he is today. I doubt I would have had half as much fun as I have had in the past few years at countless dress-up parties, movie nights, and this year, at a memorable “alternative valentine’s day” and a charity ball.

I almost didn’t attend this year’s Aurealis. I was feeling down for a number of reasons, largely relating to the carer role. I felt like no one in the writer community could really understand what I felt. The effort of even thinking about going all the way to Canberra was exhausting. At the last minute, I went. I was shocked by the amount of people who came to speak with me, to ask me how I was doing, to offer writing advice and titbits of knowledge. I had been an idiot to try to shut myself away from community. The more I did, the less I wrote and the less resilient I felt, the more isolated I became.

It’s interesting to me that the values about community I learnt from my HBC years still hold true today. It’s interesting that again and again different communities I am involved with have halted hard falls, offered new horizons, supported me, offered friendship and advice. I am often asked to speak with carers about reform and about caring for themselves. I give them this advice: find your own passions, don’t be subsumed by the caring role. Get out there and find community, because it will be your opportunity and your salvation, and because if you never try to put yourself out there, you will never know what might have been. I am beginning to see more and more that this advice applies beyond carers because here’s the thing: if people put into the community, the community puts back into you. Building community matters because community connects us together, unites us, reminds us of human relationships and why they matter. Without them the daily grind wears us down, plunges us into tunnel vision, reduces opportunity, and decimates social capital, leads us to despair and isolation and danger as we fall off cliffs we never needed to fall from. That’s why I’ll fight hard to support my communities. All of them. Because belonging to them matters to me and to countless others. Because as long as I’m part of communities I’ve chosen, I don’t have to be the isolated and frightened and timid person I was all of those years ago.

Maureen Flynn works with community care providers in disability and aged care as they navigate federal reform. In her spare time, she writes young adult speculative fiction novels and short stories, verse poetry and she has just ventured into writing crime. Currently, she is looking for a home for her YA fantasy manuscripts and is working on a crime novel and a verse novel about “the historical Merlin”. Maureen reviews speculative fiction novels at her WordPress blog, InkAshlings. Never one for saying no to a challenge, she also reviews genre books, films and TV shows and has interviewed authors for her blog. Her self-published verse novella, My Heart’s Choir Sings is available from Amazon and Smashwords. You can follow Maureen at her website, on Goodreads o rTwitter.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Photo by Chris Fitzgerald. Used with permission.

Brewing Community is a series of guest posts in which readers, writers, artists and fans are invited to share their experiences of community. Whether online or in person, these groups bring a great deal of support and sometimes stress to their members. The aim of this series is to share the joy and find ways to brew stronger communities. If you have some experiences you’d like to share, please let me know.

Leife Shallcross joins me today. I’ll let her tell you the tale of how we met. Being the sucker for punishment community-minded person she is, Leife is currently both the president of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild and the co-chair of Conflux, Canberra’s speculative fiction convention. Being the Secretary of the former and a keen participant in the latter, I’ve been able to witness first-hand just how hard Leife works to support the local spec-fic community.

The Best Advice Ever

You know those articles that appear now and then with advice about writing from famous authors to, well, the rest of us? (Like this one, which is a little more fun than most.) Well, if anyone ever asked me, “find your writing community” would be the first thing I’d tell them.

Back in about 2010 I decided to “take myself seriously” as a writer. I wasn’t really sure what that meant, except that I was going to stop just writing for an audience of me, and start trying to see if what I was producing was good enough to get published.

I joined my local writers centre and did a bunch of workshops, including a Year of the Novel course. This was my first experience of something approximating a writers group. We were all working on very different stuff: I was working on two fairy-tale based novels (couldn’t decide on which), others were working on romance novels, thrillers, memoirs, children’s stories, historical non-fiction. All sorts of stuff. This group offered me my very first opportunity to share the experience of writing with other aspiring authors, and to have my work critiqued by other writers. It was immensely valuable, but it also taught me another key lesson.

It’s really important to find the right writing community for you. After the workshop, a few of us did make some initial efforts to critique each other’s work outside the workshop, and I even went to a few sessions of a much smaller writer’s circle with another colleague. But I think we were all probably heading in such different directions with our work, we weren’t able to offer each other what we really needed. What did we need? Well, critiquing and encouragement is one thing. But what I needed, and what I subsequently found, was a community.

There are two communities I want to talk about.

The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild

Somewhere in that heady first year of Taking Myself Seriously, I submitted a short story to a call out for an anthology called Winds of Change being published by the strange and arcane-sounding Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. The editor was discerning enough to instantly spot the brilliance of my work (Hi, Elizabeth!!), and Voila! I had my first publication credit.

More importantly, though, this was my segue into my writing community.

When I joined CSFG, I discovered a group of people who got the stuff I wanted to write. They were actually interested in my stories, and I found their stories interesting. They were writing for the same audiences and the same markets, they were trying to hit the same beats. They were drawing on the same collective consciousness of the genre.

Critically, because of the size and makeup of the CSFG, I was also mixing with writers who were heaps more experienced than me. They knew about markets, and who was who, and plot arcs, and character archetypes and Mcguffins and all sorts of stuff I had no clue about. They taught me things like Finish What You Start, and Pick ONE Story To Focus On. I’m not sure if they see it this way, but I’ve got several good friends who I also regard as my writing mentors. They’ve provided invaluable guidance over the years. My writing has improved and I have a better understanding of how the industry works because of them.

I have writing buddies, too. These are the peeps I know I can rely on for an emergency critique to meet a deadline, and who I crit for on a regular basis. I trust their judgement because they’re all awesome writers in their own right. And they’re great friends. (And you know what? That’s the difference between a writers group and a community.)

CSFG is a great community that draws strength from both its diversity, and its commonalities. I’m so grateful that at some point in the dim dark past (maybe around the year 2000, I think) a bunch of people decided to put a bit of structure around their community at the time and build something that was going last. The CSFG now offers a raft of activities to support its members, including short story and novel critiquing, as well as a novel writing group, workshops and even the odd writers retreat.

I’ve been on the CSFG committee for a few years now (I’m currently the president), because it’s important to me to see something like the CSFG work. We’re all volunteers, so you can only take what people are willing and able to give. But the trick is to harness that, and draw on everyone’s strengths, and make it fun. The CSFG community has been so valuable to me, I want it to keep offering the same great support and opportunities to anyone who wants to write in the spec fic genre. Plus, I get to hang out and eat chocolate biscuits and drink wine with some of my favourite people.

Conflux

One of the things I’ve learned from the more experienced, more savvy members of my writing community, is that it’s not good enough to be a good writer. It’s a good start, but if you are going to be a successful artist in any art form, you need to understand the business of the industry you’re in. That means local circles aren’t enough.

This year I’ve been involved in organising Canberra’s main spec fic writing convention, Conflux. Conflux is a bit of an unusual genre convention, as it’s aimed mainly at writers, rather than fans. For this reason it attracts a large number of spec fic writers from all over Australia. It’s been great fun so far, and I’m really pleased and proud to be helping such a fantastic thing continue.

I’ve got a youngish family, so it’s not that easy for me to travel to interstate cons at the moment. So Conflux has been my main opportunity to network with writers and others in the industry from outside Canberra. I think we’re incredibly lucky in Australia. Given our relative size, we really punch above our weight when it comes to the top-shelf spec fic writers we’ve produced. And, lucky for us, that small size means that our spec fic community is also pretty small and tightknit. Even for relative novices like me, due to the two-or-three degrees of separation it comes down to, it’s possible to meet some amazing people with truly international careers if you go along to some of our genre conventions.

It’s not just that, though. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely thrilling to sit next to someone like Trudi Canavan in a pub, or be on Kate Forsythe’s team at a spec-fic romance gauntlet, or to be chauffeuring someone like Alisa Krasnostein between the airport and the hotel. But I have made some great friends with writers in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and even further afield through Conflux. Which is one of the reasons why I put my hand up to help out this year. I love that somewhere as small as Canberra is able to offer up something as wonderful and jam-packed with opportunity as Conflux.

Plus, going back to the theme of community, as Conflux is entirely run by volunteers, everyone who’s involved is there for the love of it. Which makes the Conflux committee its own little community of awesomeness. Which is why I’ll be putting my hand up to help out again next year.

Leife Shallcross lives in Canberra, Australia, with her family and a small, scruffy creature that snores. She reads fairy tales to her children at night, and then lies awake listening to trolls (or maybe possums) galloping over her tin roof. Her work has appeared in Aurealis and several Australian and international anthologies, including the forthcoming CSFG anthology The Never Never Land. She is actively involved in the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild and is the current president. When writing is not consuming her spare time and energy, she plays the fiddle (badly). She can be found online at leifeshallcross.com and on Twitter @leioss.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Photo by Chris Fitzgerald. Used with permission.

Brewing Community is a series of guest posts in which readers, writers, artists and fans are invited to share their experiences of community. Whether online or in person, these groups bring a great deal of support and sometimes stress to their members. The aim of this series is to share the joy and find ways to brew stronger communities. If you have some experiences you’d like to share, please let me know.

Today I’m joined by Helen Stubbs. Helen and I first met when I edited her story The Stormchilds in Winds of Change and we quickly became firm friends. She’s currently working on a very exciting project centred around brewing community, so I’ve invited her to share it with us.

Dear Readers,

Writing communities are wonderful, and helping to build them is satisfying work. I first discovered writing communities through Authonomy, Write That Book – a course supported by my local council, Vision Writers and the Australian speculative fiction community (through attending Aussiecon in 2010).

These communities certainly have taught me about writing and provided opportunities for publication but more importantly they’ve introduced me to writers with whom I share deep friendships sprung from a love of literature and a special weirdness writers seem to have!

As a result, when I come across the opportunity to develop local writing communities, I pounce on it. My current project, supported by Gold Coast City Council, is called Writers Activation.

I started planning Writers Activation when the council put out a call for applicants for the Found Mentorship program. They asked for creative projects that would enliven Southport.

My initial idea was to create a short story project, and collect short stories onto a website while also spreading them through the city through words on walls or public artwork and products such as napkins, as Tiny Owl Workshop did with Napkin Stories.

As an artist and cultural producer, I know that projects change! You develop a definite vision of what you want to do, and then respond to new opportunities, restrictions and whatever resources are available. When I had been shortlisted and was preparing for my interview, my prospective mentor asked me to show how this project could work within a defined space – a shop or a room.

This naturally transformed the project in my mind from something spanning a suburb or more to something that could happen within a space that belonged to writers.

When I began to ask my network what writers wanted from a dedicated space, the response was overwhelming – they want everything! The Gold Coast is yearning for a writing space. So that is what Writers Activation is becoming, within the parameters of limited resources and timeframe.

While I’m still working out exactly what can happen with that space, (it looks like it will be a shop in a shopping centre), our local writing community is jumping with ideas and enthusiasm.

The space we’re looking at would work well as a hub where writers can meet and chat. We might also host writers in residencies, workshops, talks and book launches. As a pop-up project, it might only be for a very brief period of time – possibly just two months. However, if the project grows legs and leaps off into a gallop, it could lead to a permanent writers’ space in the city.

The Gold Coast is really growing culturally. It always has had a vibrant creative culture, though when I moved here thirteen years ago I found it hard to find. Maybe it was harder to connect because our city is a sprawl along the coast.

It seems like the network’s connections are growing rapidly now, thanks to the development of social media and also the momentum for growth the upcoming Commonwealth Games is creating.

Writers Activation should be up and running quite soon. I’ll drop by again for an update.

HELEN STUBBS writes stories that are dark with pointy edges. Some have been published in venues such as Winds of Change, Next, Midnight Echo, Subtropical Suspense and Mirror Dance. She recently won a Ditmar Award and is currently curating Writers Activation on the Gold Coast. Helen is on the committee for Contact 2016 in Brisbane. She interviews speculative fiction writers for Galactic Chat and tweets as @superleni.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.