I admire strong Victorian women like Vali Myers, Chrissy Amphlette, Joan Kirner and Phryne Fisher. Women with attitude. I found Catherine Deveny in late 2009 when I read her Doncaster/Manpower column on The Age website and I frowned thinking, ‘Who is this woman? She is brutal.’ A peek at her website displayed an attractive brunette with red lippy and matching sequined dress. My kinda gal. This thought was further confirmed when I spied her in another fabulous red dress at the Melbourne Writers Festival, with a pack of admiring males tripping over themselves to keep up with her glamorous stilettoed stride from BMW Edge to the book signing table in the Atrium at Federation Square.
The resilient women that grow up in our bluestone suburbs of hard knocks are interesting and fascinating, so I signed up for Comedy, Comment and Overcoming Procrastination, ready to sit back and be entertained by this Reservoir chick.
During the round-the-table introductions, somehow Catherine individually probed our souls with a laser sharp skill that revealed our genres and then with a Jedi like mind trick, commanded us to complete 1000 words for the next session. 1000 words, or don’t bother coming back!
Using secret subliminal trigger words like schooligans, turdlock and corporate maggots, there was not one grumble from the stunned participants (aged from 20 to 70) as we were given a high voltage jump-start to write ˜ ‘Write in the nude’, and ‘Sing from the heart’‚ ‘Go on a random creative adventure with no fixed outcome’‚ other than to work on our ‘writing fitness’.
We received our orders. Write first. Write before morning coffee, write before your shower and with other tips on smashing the obstacles of procrastination and rude domestic interruptions to our creativity, every writer easily met the challenge and captured their 1000 words. Our reward? The punishing task of reducing our masterpiece to 500 words.
It was then I realised that calling the course Comedy, Comment and Overcoming Procrastination was a trick to semi-imprison me in a Writers‚ Boot-camp with a literary dominatrix. I couldn’t wait to go back for more.
Julie Mac is the author of RAGE A Sharpie’s Journal Melbourne 1974-1980‚ and the contact for Williamstown Writers‚ Group and membership officer for Authors Australia Inc. for independently published writers.