Disposable Camera #15
My first zine of the year is a new issue of Disposable Camera – and the first, I think, that I’ve actually included the issue number on. I thought it was time to count them up and figure out where I was up to. Disposable Camera is the typewritten little-sister zine to I am a Camera, put together over a day/in the moment. This issue starts with a scene at a photo booth and then moves back and forth in time. I’ll have copies with me at upcoming zine fairs and also it’s available here.
I made this zine for Sticky’s Festival of the Photocopier in Naarm/Melbourne which was held, as is now traditional, on the second weekend of February. Sticky has just moved locations so make sure to check out the new space if you’re in town.
In other zine news, the Blue Mountains Zine Fair was a huge success this year back in March, and we also have a new zine shop to visit in Sydney with the opening of Wolfbound Books. Other Worlds Zine Fair is coming up in June, too, and I’ll have more details about that soon.
I am a Camera 23
After a good long while, a new I am a Camera, #23, that is, the issue for 2023: with stories of objects and memory, flea markets, coincidences, and looking closely at everything at every moment.
Gentle and Fierce Audiobook and Events
At the start of the year, I began the recording of the audiobook version of Gentle and Fierce, at the appropriately named Echidna Audio studio – fitting for a book about human relationships with animals.
It is now live on various audiobook platforms, including Audible and Kobo: it should be in all audiobook streaming services. Please do let me know if you’ve listened to some or all of the audiobook – it’s the first time I’ve recorded an audio version of one of my books and I’m curious to hear how it works in that format.
Coinciding with the audiobook release, I have an event coming up soon based around Gentle and Fierce – Animals in the City: Telling Stories, a discussion about storytelling and urban animals, with me, Bastian Fox Phelan, Clare Britton, and Jakelin Troy. It is coming up at the State Library of NSW on August 4th and is free to attend. We’ll be discussing the ways that writing, visual art, and language carry the stories of place and encounters with plants and animals, and attune us to our environment and caring for it.
Since my last update some further Gentle and Fierce reviews have appeared, and with gratitude for their careful attention and insights: Snail Trails by Jessica White in Sydney Review of Books, a review by Andy Jackson in The Saturday Paper, and a review by Fernanda Dahlstrom in Mascara Literary Review.
Gentle and Fierce book launch
Now we’ve emerged from lockdown and can gather, we can launch Gentle and Fierce in person! To celebrate the publication of Gentle and Fierce there will be a tea party launch at Frontyard in Marrickville, on Sunday 21st November.
It will be an all-day affair that you’re welcome to drop in on at any time from 10am-4pm. There will be tea, books, a giant papier mache bear, and a signature Gentle and Fierce tea, blended by Blackwood Apothecary specially for the launch. All are welcome, though do note Covid safety requirements (you must be fully vaccinated, check in, and have a mask with you to wear if necessary). Books and zines will be on sale, or drop by for a signature if you have a copy already. I look forward to seeing some of you there!
Online Launch for Gentle and Fierce
My new book, Gentle and Fierce, came out last month, and we’ll soon be officially celebrating its publication with an online launch on Wednesday 18th August. It’s free and open to all, and I’ll be chatting to Keri Glastonbury about some of the ideas behind the book, and doing some short readings from it: to register, click on the image above and it will take you to the booking page, or this link.
In other Gentle and Fierce news, you can read some of the behind the scenes stories from the book at gentlefierce.com and an excerpt, the essay Perec’s Cat, at the Sydney Review of Books. Thanks to everyone who has sent me messages over the last few months – I know the book’s been a good companion to some of you in lockdown, which makes me happy! For all the frustrations of having a new book come out in lockdown, it’s good to think of it out there, finding its readers.
Gentle and Fierce
At the beginning of 2019 I began work on a new book. I started it knowing I wanted to write a set of stories that were based around my relationships to animals, and how animals had figured in my life. As a writer I’m most interested in how memory exists within and outside of us, how other people and beings and objects and places act as memory triggers. I wondered what might arise if I turned this way of thinking towards the animals of my life.
Gentle and Fierce is the result: a collection of 20 illustrated essays that examine the presence of animals in my life and memory. It will be in bookstores this July, and you can read more about it for now at the publisher’s website.
As the publication date comes closer I will share a little more about the stories in the book and the process of writing them, but for now, here is a glimpse of some of the desks at which I worked on Gentle and Fierce.
In 2020
My new year’s eve ritual is to read through my journals from the year: in 2020 these were the yellow ‘Herakles’ and a foolscap journal labelled ‘Meeting’. I’d kept these books by my side, written in them most nights, and by so doing wrote the story of my year.
Usually I write daily observations in my journals, the details of things I’ve noticed out in the world as I go about my activities, and thus I expected to have written less in 2020 than in previous years. I’d mostly been at home, after all, and the days conformed to a similar pattern. But against my expectations there was plenty to notice, in myself, the immediate environment, and the world as its news filtered through to me. As I read I re-lived the year, shaped as it was by fires, protests and the pandemic.
As I read through I began to take note of metaphors. In my writing for others, I’m careful and sparing with metaphors – I sometimes say to my students that every metaphor they put in their writing they have to imagine is something really physically present for the reader, there beside them – so too many and it gets confusing or crowded – but in my journals, which no one but me reads, I use them frequently to describe particular states of mind. There were a lot of metaphors of broken things – I felt like a deflated balloon, my attention felt like a frayed cord, my head felt like a broken plate – as if I was progressively embodying a pile of hard rubbish. Then things turned towards the surreal, after weeks at home “my room starts to feel like a portal. All its objects the controls of a spaceship.” This was my favourite metaphor of the year, and indeed I did pay extended scrutiny to the objects surrounding me – in April I wrote some of the stories of these objects on Instagram (private account but please feel welcome to request to follow). Some are pictured here: a VHS recording of a Cure special on Rage from 1993, the Trodat Typo stamp set, Nescafe jars, peacock pocket warmers, the ‘Vanessa’ diary from 1985 that tells the story of an EH Holden…
Metaphors and difficulties aside, I kept working and writing. At the start of the year, Anwen Crawford and I organised the ‘We, the Animals’ benefit reading at Frontyard, with readings by Michelle Cahill, Julie Koh, Mireille Juchau, and Julie Vulcan, as well and Anwen and me, to assist Wildlife Rescue South Coast in their rescue and care of animals after the fires in that region.
Early in the year I worked on the 20th issue of my autobiographical zine I am a Camera, the first issue of which I put out in 2000, making the zine 20 years old. I launched it at Other Worlds Zine fair in May (the fair occurred online and you can still visit it here – you don’t need to register, just click on the tabs on the left to go to the various aisles, I’m in Aisle C and you can watch a video of me reading from the zine here).
The Mirror Sydney podcast came out in May, after I’d been working on it with producer Lia Tsamoglou in the earlier part of the year, and I continued the Mirror Sydney blog, writing about places such as Grand Flaneur beach in Chipping Norton, the ‘Videomania’ building in Rosebery, and the Banana Joe’s supermarket in Marricvkille, which closed down in 2020.
Throughout the year I was a Visiting Writer at the State Library of NSW, a position established by the Sydney Review of Books and the library, for a writer to research the library’s archives. For a while it didn’t seem as if I’d be able to do much visiting, but as restrictions eased mid-year, I made research trips to the library to examine materials relating to department stores. You can read the essay I wrote based on this research – In the Catalogue – on the Sydney Review of Books.
In August, I was an artist in residency at Gunyah, on Worimi country/North Arm Cove, where I spent a week writing and walking and working on the manuscript of my new book. You can read my blog post describing my time at Gunyah here.
In 2020 I contributed short stories to HiLoBrow – one on the 1959 film of The Flyand one the Cure song ‘So What’. I also wrote a story for the zine Cat Party #6, edited by Katie Haegele, for the quarantine-themed issue. I wrote about my sometimes-editor, Soxy.
It wasn’t the year I or anyone expected it to be, but I have plenty to be grateful for. Thank you to you my readers, supporters and friends, for being there with me this year. In 2021 I’m looking forward to the publication of my new book of essays, Gentle and Fierce, mid-year, with Giramondo, and to filling many more journal pages with the details of my days.
Mirror Sydney Podcast
At the start of this year, audio producer and musician Lia Tsamoglou and I started work on an audio-series of stories from Mirror Sydney. Now I’m excited to announce that it is available as a podcast, with the first two episodes released today, May 11th, and each of the remaining four episodes weekly on a Monday thereafter. You can listen to the episodes at mirrorsydneypodcast.com or search for Mirror Sydney on your podcast app.
For those of you less familiar with Mirror Sydney, here’s a description of the project by one of my favourite Australian writers, Shaun Prescott:
Sydney is an increasingly impenetrable city, shapeshifting and unknowable. Beneath the surface of its 21st century globalised homogeneity, traces of the city’s history are allowed to remain, but it takes determination to find them.
Sydney is subject to many and varied official histories, its story is really the story of British colonisation. But no broad account can hope to capture the particular tension of our present moment, standing as we are with one foot in a receding past, the other in a strange encroaching future. Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney blog captures this melancholy disjunct, focused as it is on the minutiae of the sprawl. Berry’s investigations usually start at a point of idle fascination: a notorious op shop at the edge of the airport, Sydney’s least peaceful footpath, newly redundant train routes. What then usually unfolds is a vivid evocation of urban space, not just its streets, people and infrastructure, but the otherwise inaccessible ambience of its former life.
Berry’s 2017 book Mirror Sydney—a lavish account of Sydney’s “suburban mythologies and unusual details”—prompted Sydney musician and radio producer Lia Tsamoglou (Melodie Nelson, Moonmilk) to make contact. After a lengthy email correspondence it emerged that they actually lived on the same inner west street. Tsamoglou’s light-of-touch, atmospheric sensibility is a perfect fit for this project, which is narrated by Berry.
I am a Camera #20 / 20 years of I am a Camera / 2020
I am a Camera zine, #1 – #20 (2000 – 2020)
By the year 2000 I’d been making zines for four years. Over that time it had become the activity my life hinged around. It’s not an exaggeration to say that zines saved me, for over the time I’d made them I’d grown from being an isolated and unwell teenager to an adult who, however shakily, was beginning to feel as if she did have a place in the world after all.
The first issue of I am a Camera was a combination of diary entries and short stories, shaped in part by what I was reading at the time, – women writers who I felt an accord with: Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood – and by the energy of finding my voice. Although I’d been making zines for four years I hadn’t regarded what I was doing as writing in the way an author might write a book, or a short story, or even a diary. I had thought of the writing in my zines more like the transmission of my thoughts. But in this new zine, I am a Camera, I thought about the shape of the words as I wrote them, about how they worked alongside each other, and how they might create their own world independent of me, on the page.
Today when I open up I am a Camera #1, from 2000, and read the first line, a line from my diary from June 1999, and it says “Things are too hard to take in”, I can’t help but wish for that naivety. I remember it and still get echoes of it sometimes, that sense of feeling too much, noticing too much. Over years this has settled, the more I have felt in control of my powers as a writer and an observer. But now, in the time of the pandemic, it’s true again. Things are indeed too hard to take in. Even reading over the beginning of I am a Camera #20, written at the start of this year, seems to describe a way of life that is now of the past or rapidly becoming so. In it I am sitting in a cafe, watching a turtle swimming in a fishtank and drinking a cup of earl grey tea, and considering what it means to have been making a zine for 20 years. Thinking about potential, about promise, about time and life and the writing of it.
This new zine is coming out in a world now operating under threat and fear. A difficult time is ahead. Writing this post wasn’t how I imagined I would launch this zine, sitting quietly in my room, listening to the wind outside and the cars going by, watching the leaves of the oak tree move. On the surface, nothing has changed. These are all familiar details, and I’ve spent many afternoons sitting here, exactly like this, but now I feel the edge, wondering (afraid) how things will change. I am sending out this new zine into an uncertain time, as a chronicle of a time before.
Thank you to all my readers, supporters and correspondents over the last 20 years of me making this zine. There are copies on Etsy if you’d like to buy one, though if you’re a regular reader and are under financial stress due to reduced/lost work in this time, just let me know, and I’ll post you one for free. Take care everyone. Look out for each other. Organise. Make things. Write. Rest.
Zine News for March
EDIT: Please note that Other Worlds, and the Wollongong workshop mentioned below have been cancelled for now. I’m still making I am a Camera 20 though and will make an announcement when it’s available. Stay safe and look out for each other. x V.
Yes, it’s true, I’m working on I am a Camera #20 – the 20th anniversary issue, for indeed the first issue came out in 2000 – ahead of debuting it at Other Worlds zine fair in May. The table applications are still open for Other Worlds until March 13th so follow the link to apply if you’re interested in having a table this year.
In other zine news I’ll be heading to Wollongong in March to host a zine workshop. This will likely be the last workshop I run this year, so if you’d like to come and make zines with me and browse some of my collection, here’s your chance! The workshop’s run by the South Coast Writers’ Centre and will be held at the awesome secondhand bookstore, free school, co-working and community events space Society City. It will run from 1pm-4pm and you can find more information and book tickets here.
Vanessa Berry Мир 