I’m currently working on a script adaptation of Vixen which I hope will be made into an animation one day. Revisiting it makes me realise how much some of my views have changed- the book stops in the 1990s- but somehow I want to pull the end into the early 21st century. If the film gets made I don’t want it to be just a pretty animation (although that would be good!) I also want there to be a message about human rights both in Australia and Vietnam. I think I was pretty naive when I wrote Vixen- she is not really an active participant in history, the actions of a little fox is against the backdrop of history.

So does fiction need to say something? Or does the reader need to feel something?
I had this discussion with my writing group the other day. My two cents is that the reader needs to feel engaged whether it is intellectually or emotionally or they won’t read the book.

My motivations for writing fox fairy fables in the first place was the need to say something. She was for me an expression of anger, she could do what I could not about some situations. Fantasy fiction for me was an escape where you could create your own happy endings and outcomes. In fiction I said what could not be said out loud in the environment I was living in.

I’ve been asked recently what makes me tick and what pushes my buttons as a writer. I said it was about change and transformation and that is what drama is to me. I also added later that it was about strength in situations and the ability to be a change agent in one’s own life which sounds a little bit like the psychologist in me.

Nowadays I wonder how much of these private thoughts I need to speak out loud to communciate with other people- especially since I’m drifting into theatre. My supervisor Kathleen Fallon said that fiction gives you the freedom to speak the unsayable. I think that’s also the freedom in theatre too- to bring out what has been kept hidden. That is the empowering and liberating aspect of it.

Just had a good supervision session with Kathleen Fallon today. She encouraged me to use my imagination when it came to one of my characters going mad- or experiencing a psychotic breakdown. I’m wary of misrepresenting this state, my best friend’s mother has schizophrenia and so does my grandmother. But Kathleen has told me to let go a little and go crazy with it (no pun intended) to loosen up my writing. She says there’s a great deal of careful craft in my writing but it needs some wildness in it.
Think about what you want to read, she has advised me. What will hold you to the page. Extremes do hold you and a kind of voyeurism when it comes to madness. I attended a living poetry session that was themed madness, and they talked about the preconceptions of what “mad” writing looks like. I think I can do this writing on paper but perhaps not type it straight away. Typing requires a form of concentration in my mind, and pre formation rather than automatic or wild like writing.

Somehow I became the president of Australian Vietnamese Youth Media the other day. We had our first board meeting at the Dancing Dog Cafe and I was elected! Tony Le Nguyen has all these ideas for AVYM- to have our own space and to become as big as some of the community theatre groups overseas. It’s a great dream and I’m thrilled to be part of it- but also wary of taking on too many commitments. Huu Tran one of the “elders” of AVYM pops by my work office every so often to say hi. Today we had a conversation about why we do our art. Huu says it is to tell a story. He is concerned about breaking into the mainstream. Someone else said, I’ve forgotten whom, that we need to create our own art the way we want the mainstream to do it, and the mainstream can follow us. I think it was at the AVYM meeting actually. I write because I need to, to make sense of what is around me. When it comes to publication and public work I’d like to tell a story well, and I’d like to bring to light stories that aren’t heard very much.
I saw Merlinda Bobis today and she was inspirational! She talked about how you have to hear and listen to stories of war and terror and do the research. That your very voice in your story will change after you’ve heard it. How can you remain unchanged I wonder? Her story the “Fish haired woman” has been transformed into a prose and music piece and into a novel. It took her ten years- which makes me feel better about not publishing anything for six years.

I’m involved in a couple of projects that need writers to come up with submissions!

First: Peril is a new Asian-Australian website designed to build a critical mass of Asian-Australian art and cultural concerns. Our ambition is to have two core issues a year on the site with a forum board for people to chat and comment. Why Peril? From the so called Yellow Peril that labelled the wave of Chinese immigration in the 19th century. We are perilious and take risks but not in the way that the Pauline Hansons of the world think!
Our first issue is themed nerds so check it out: http://www.asianaustralian.org

Second: The Voicebox is compilating an anthology about women’s experiences of drugs or how drugs have affected women’s lives. If you have a piece of prose, poetry, first person view or article send it to voicebox@buoyancy.org

Just finished reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of Myth which covers myth making from primitive times up to the present day. She suggests that nowadays we are dominated by logos- rationality and that novelists and creative artists are the ones left to ritualise and enact out myths. I actively drew on myth to write Vixen and am still trying to make my own myths with Pearl. Somehow Vixen reached something almost spiritual in me and seemed to touch other people as well. I don’t know how to recapture that (if I did I wouldn’t have so much trouble getting published again!) But I am having a short piece “yolk” published in the next issue of HEAT- my first real publication for 5 years.