On faking it till making it
I am taking the aphorism ‘fake it till you make it’ to new heights! I'm doing another comic thing! Hmm am I undoing the general MO of the aphorism by disclosing my approach?
Some months back, I submitted an expression of interest for Glow Comic Trails, ‘a series of walking tours and workshops championing comic art by Melbourne artists’.
I (just) missed out on being an official artist for the trail, but I was lucky enough to be offered professional development with the participating artists and, pushing my creative practice in new directions, invited to prepare and deliver a comic workshop.
My workshop will be on yonkoma manga, which are four-panel comics that traditionally follow kishōtenketsu, the four-act story structure that is widespread in east Asian storytelling. It is the narrative structure I’ve adopted for my manuscript and what I used in my comic, The Persistence of Alarms, for this year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival.
Back in Issue 11 of The Raptorial, I wrote, ‘I plan to explore the four-part structure in my own practice, with a short story version of my manuscript, and perhaps also in an unrelated yonkoma manga ...” That was a month before I was invited to exhibit a comic as part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and seven months before finding myself preparing a workshop on yonkoma manga.
Glow Comic Trails kicks off on 9 October and runs to 1 November. There is a great program of comic workshops at Laneway Learning and a walking tour with artist, educator and Glow Comic Trails creative director, Emilie Walsh. If you prefer, you can follow the trails with a self-guided tour. There are six trails with mini comics produced by six talented artists. One of the panels on each comic has a glow-in-the-dark component that can only be seen after dark!
I’ll be running two workshops for adults.
Castlemaine: Sunday 8 October, 2023, 10:00 am to 11:15 am
Sac’O’Suds Laundrette, 231 Barker St, Castlemaine
Hang around after the workshop for more drawing over coffee, tea and cake. Feel free to bring your dirty laundry (story ideas or clothing to wash while your draw)
Melbourne: Wednesday 18 October, 2023, 6:15 pm to 7:30 pm
Laneway Learning, Nicholas Building, Level 3, Rooms 14–15,
37 Swanston St, Melbourne
I’m giving away one complementary ticket for each workshop to Raptorial subscribers. Get in touch in comments, and let me know if it's Castlemaine or Melbourne you’re after!
Where focus goes, energy flows
On brown noise, my backing track for focus
In 2010, while working in an open plan office, my go-to for blocking out incessant office chatter was to stream fip radio. Back then, I was an engineer at a water utility, designing sewage treatment plants.
Fip’s beautifully programmed, truly eclectic offerings and occasional back announcements in French were enjoyable, but if the task at hand wasn’t routine and required focus, Fip was distracting. One particularly noisy and focus demanding day, when perhaps the shit had hit the fan, and considering the nature of my work, it may have literally been the case, I cast a net into the world wide web in search of a solution to the maddening sounds of the open plan office.
Enter myNoise.net, the labour of love of research engineer and sound designer, Dr Ir Stéphane Pigeon. My favourite track on Dr Pigeon’s site, then and still now, is Distant Thunder; it features soothing rain overlaid with the deep, moody texture of rumbling thunder that, as the name suggests, is distant enough in the soundscape to be soothing rather than threatening.
It turns out the sound I naturally gravitated to all those years ago is fittingly called ‘brown noise’ and is the subject of much recent media coverage, with growing evidence of its positive effects on cognitive function, concentration, and sleep.
Raptorial Writes
A monthly writing prompt
Set a timer for 10 minutes and write. Inspired by the aphorism ‘give a [person] a fish and you feed [them] for a day; teach a [person] to fish and you feed [them] for a lifetime,’ write a scene with two characters between whom is an imbalance of power.
I’d love to know how you go! Post your writing to Instagram using #RaptorialWrites, or feel free to share it in the comments here. Happy writing!
Raptorial Bites
A monthly short story book club
This month’s read is A Telephone Call (1930) by Dorothy Parker, who was an aphorist.
You can browse past Raptorial Bites and join conversations at any time — comments remain open on all threads and admittedly, I have some catching up to do.
Congrats on winning prof devt! I’d love to come to the Melbourne workshop. Sounds super interesting!
Did you know that author Katherine Collette is also a sewage engineer? And she’s now doing illustration for her middle grade novels.