EVENT CANCELLATION
We are very saddened to have had to cancel the Heroines Festival Day on November 6th. Firstly, we found out belatedly that there is a closure of the only road to the Coledale Community Hall until 3pm on the 6th due to the MS Gong Ride bike race. The venue had not been notified of the road closure. We also had advice from our printer that due to supply chain issues, they were not able to supply us with copies of Anthology before the event. We deeply apologise for the inconvenience of this late cancellation, particularly to those who have made travel plans for the event. This is obviously a very upsetting outcome. We will look at postponing this event to another date in early 2023.
Award-winning novelist Kathryn Heyman speaks with Festival Director Sarah Nicholson about the craft of writing women and her latest book, the memoir Fury. Author Michelle Cahill speaks with author Meredith Jaffe about her novel Daisy & Woolf, which follows the disappearance of the Eurasian character Daisy Simmons from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and a writer who returns her to life. Malika Reese performs from Lost In The Shuffle, the incredible unsung story of her great-aunt songwriter Jessie Mae Robinson.
The festival day also includes the launch of the festival's fourth anthology of short fiction and poetry The Heroines Anthology Volume 4 and the awarding of the Heroines/Joyce Parkes Women's Writing Award. Kyla St Jaye, Paris Rosemount and Emma Darcey will read from their short fiction, and Brittany Riley, Sara C. Motta, Verity Laughton, Kathryn Reese and Lin Bythe will read a selection of exquisite poetry from the Anthology.
GUESTS
Kathryn Heyman
is the author of six novels, including Storm and Grace, and her memoir, Fury. She has won numerous awards including an Arts Council of England Writers Award, the Wingate and the Southern Arts Awards, and been nominated for the Orange Prize, the Scottish Writer of the Year Award, the Edinburgh Fringe Critics’ Awards, the Kibble Prize, and the West Australian Premier’s Book Awards. Her radio plays for BBC Radio include adaptations of her own work. She has taught writing for many years, including as Scottish Arts Council Writing Fellow for the University of Glasgow, and teaching fiction and poetry for the University of Oxford. From 2011 – 2013, she was the Senior Judge for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. Kathryn Heyman was the founding director of the fiction program for Faber Academy Australia, and is the director of the Australian Writers Mentoring Program.
Meredith Jaffé
is the author of four novels for adults— The Tricky Art of Forgiveness (2022), The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison (2021), The Making of Christina (2017) and The Fence (2016.) Her bestselling novel, The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison, was voted in the 2021 Booktopia Favourite Australian Book Award Top 50 and the 2022 Better Reading Top 100. She also writes for children. She regularly facilitates at writers’ festivals and other author events. Previously, she wrote the weekly literary column for the online women’s magazine The Hoopla. Her feature articles, reviews, and opinion pieces have also appeared in the Guardian Australia, The Huffington Post, and Mamamia.
Dr Sarah Nicholson
is the Creative Director of The Heroines Festival, Editor of the Heroines Anthology, and Director of both the South Coast Writers Centre, and the South Coast Writers Festival. She has been a director of the National Young Writers’ Festival, an awardee of the Ian Potter Cultural Trust for Literature, a recipient of a Writer’s and Translator’s Centre of Rhodes fellowship, and an Emerging Writer in Residence for the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre. She has a PhD in feminist philosophy and previously led student learning as an academic in the field of creative arts, religion, philosophy and literature. She is also the author of The Evolutionary Journey of Woman and an editor of Integral Voices on Sex, Gender and Sexuality.
Kathryn Reese
is a writer and poet living in Adelaide. Kathryn is passionate about collaborative process and facilitates workshops that teach participants to settle anxiety and access their creativity. Her writing explores themes of nature, spirituality, myth and the possibility of shapeshift. Her poetry collection Despair Dragon: notes on survival was written amongst the chaos of parenting and trauma, finding hope and connection in unexpected ways.
Brittany Riley
is a writer from country NSW who tinkers in fiction, screenwriting, and poetry. She self-published her YA fantasy novel at 22, and currently works for a national children's poetry competition. When she’s not writing, she’s thinking about writing, drinking far too much coffee, or giggling at cat videos. This is her first anthology feature.
Kyla St Jaye
is Mparntwe based (Alice Springs NT), writing from Arrernte country. She studied creative writing on Ngunnawal country at University of Canberra where she won an ACT writers centre award and was featured in several publications. Kyla took this practice into the women’s refuges on Yuin country (Far South Coast, NSW) where she facilitated many writing programs and group publications under a narrative therapy framework. Her programs recognised stories as transformative power sites for women who had experienced trauma, homelessness and domestic violence. They used creative practice to position women as the authors of their own lives. She currently works these programs online, looks after her children and writes in the red dirt. Her favourite place is on the back of a camel under the Yeperenye cliffs.
‘LOST IN THE SHUFFLE’
is the story of Jessie Mae Robinson, a phenomenal African-American songwriter whose songs continue to be recorded today. Yet very little is known about her. In the 1950s, as a single mother, Jessie Mae was the first commercially successful black female songwriter in the United States penning several number one hits including - ‘Let’s have a party’ – which has since been recorded by a plethora of musicians: including Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Led Zepplin and Wanda Jackson. Not to mention her other songs that continue to be recorded today, like “The Other Woman” recently sung by Lana Del Ray. Here is a woman who straddled music of all classes and genres; Pop, Rock, Rockabilly, Blues, Jazz and good old R&B. What Jessie Mae achieved, when culture and society was against her, is extraordinary. Yet her significant contribution to our culture and her palpable influence on our modern music has not been given due respect. Half a century later, her great niece Malika Elizabeth is determined to set the record straight and have Jessie Mae honored and inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. She's also on a mission to find out more about her great aunt’s life and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death.
Michelle Cahill
is a Goan-Anglo-Indian poet and author who lives in Sydney. Her first collection of short stories Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo) won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing. She received the Val Vallis Award, the KWS Hilary Mantel International Short Story Competition and has been shortlisted in several prizes including the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Meanjin, Southerly, The London Magazine, The Weekend Australian and The Kenyon Review.
Malika Reese
was born in California in the 70’s, to White and Black writers. Words, and a love for them, helped shape her. Moving to Australia at a young age Malika travelled between the two countries, also spending time living in Europe and Asia. Wollongong has been home for the longest and best parts. With a creative flair for telling tales, Malika has been writing stories and scripts from a young age. She graduated from the University of Wollongong, with a BCA in Writing and a BA in English. This is where she first starting writing and directing short films and theatre pieces. Malika worked at Foxtel for nearly a decade in a variety of production roles. She has written short film and feature film scripts, and a biographical novel. Moving into performance, Malika has made music video clips; and is co-directing a documentary about her great aunt, a 1950’s songwriter Jessie Mae Robinson. Malika has also co-written and directed dozens of shows for her local community.
Sara C. Motta
is a proud Mestiza-salvaje of Colombia-Chibcha/Muisca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic lineages currently living, loving and re-existiendo on the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, NSW, so-called Australia. She is mother, survivor of state and intimate violences, poet, curandera, bare-breasted philosopher, popular educator, and Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Sara has worked for over two decades with raced and feminised communities in struggle resistances/re-existencias in, against and beyond heteronormative capitalist-coloniality in Europe, Latin America and Australia and co-created numerous decolonising pedagogical projects of radical healing and community wellbeing. She has published widely in academic and activist-community outlets. Her latest book Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield) is winner of the 2020 best Gender Theory and Feminist Book, International Studies Associate (ISA).
Paris Rosemont
is a poet with a passion for the arts. She has crafted award-winning poetry that has been described as ‘edgy confessional’ and ‘visceral hyperrealism’. Paris’ poetry was selected by Red Room Poetry for publication in Upswell Publishing’s anthology ‘Admissions’, alongside established writers, musicians and notable public figures. Having received a scholarship to study at the Australian Theatre for Young People, Paris combines her love for poetry and theatre into the exploration of the art of performance poetry. She has performed her poetry to live audiences in venues ranging from Sappho Books to West Side Slam to Sydney University’s Chau Chak Wing Museum. Paris was the first poet invited to perform a solo set of her original poetry at Rhapsody Revue and is a swing poet for the Sydney Fringe Festival 2022. Paris was a judge for the Living Stories Writing Competition 2022. She is also a WestWords 2022 Academian and a Frontier Poetry scholarship recipient."
Emma Darcy
has a degree in Creative Writing and a Masters in Museum and Heritage Studies. She works as a digital archivist and library assistant. She has always been fascinated by folklore and myth, but typically writes horror. Emma has two children with her wife, Mandy, her high school sweetheart. Return to the Labyrinth is her first published short story.
Dr Verity Laughton
is an Adelaide-based poet and playwright of more than 30 plays and other works. Her work has been produced locally, nationally, and internationally. She completed a PhD in political theatre at Flinders University in 2020. For this she wrote a new play, the epic scaled Zosia’s Story. Recent full-length works are the verbatim theatre piece Long Tan (Brink Production, 2017), and The Red Cross Letters (STCSA, 2016). Her works have been published by Currency Press, Phoenix Educational/Five Senses Press, Federation Press, Omnibus Press, and others. Awards include AWGIES for Radio Drama and Community, the Inscription Open Award, SA Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award and the Griffin Prize. Nominations include Griffin Theatre’s Martin Lycistrates Prize, STC Patrick White Award, Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, Rodney Seaborne Prize (twice), the Blake Poetry Prize, the New Dramatists’ Award. Current work includes the adaptation of a major Australian contemporary novel for the State Theatre Company of South Australia (2023) and a poetry collection, Snake, for The Signalhouse Edition (also 2023). She is a member of the playwrights’ group, 7-ON. More information can be found at www.veritylaughton.com
Lin Blythe
is a proud Eurasian woman, socialist activist and lover of speculative fiction. The biggest influences on her writing, who also happen to be her favourite authors, are Ursula K Le Guin, Alice Pung, Ray Bradbury, Ibram X Kendi, Alastair Reynolds, Ken Liu, Martha Wells and Aliette De Boddard. To her, stories are both an escape from the world and a catalyst for progress in the world. Often, Lin finds herself writing about her family’s intergenerational trauma, space and vampires. Her essays, short fiction and poetry have been published in Overland, the UTS 2022 Anthology: Turn Left on Red Permitted After Stopping and the Moon Orchard (2022) audiobook.
FESTIVAL DAY PROGRAM
10: 45 Doors open
11: 00 Welcome
Dr. Sarah Nicholson & MC Adara Enthaler
11:15 Heroines Anthology Volume 4 Readings by :
Verity Laughton
Paris Rosemount
Emma Darcey
Brittany Riley
11:45 Michelle Cahill & Meredith Jaffe in conversation
12: 35 Lunch Break
1:05 Heroines Anthology Readings:
Kathryn Reese
Lin Bythe
Kyla St Jaye
Sara C. Motta
1:30 Kathryn Heyman & Sarah Nicholson in conversation
2:25 Malika Reese performs from “Lost In The Shuffle”
3:00 Heroines / Joyce Parkes Writing Prize Announcement
Lore White & Sarah Nicholson
3:30 Close
LOCATION & CAFES
Info on getting to Coledale Community Hall by bus, train and car can be found here.
Complimentary tea & coffee will be available in the hall during this event.
There are two cafes directly across from the hall. They are both open until 2pm: Earthwalker and Sketch.
If the weather is good you can also BYO lunch and eat by the sea.
Our festival bookseller, at Heroines Festival Day, is Enough Said Books, a new artfully curated micro bookshop & poetry book subscription run by spoken word poet, Lorin Reid.