On Becoming Lillie Bloom single work   prose  
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 On Becoming Lillie Bloom
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'There’s a story I’ve often told over the years, about a cross roads I came to at a difficult point in my life many years ago. In this story I describe how, as a young single mother of a fourteen-year-old boy, I made some important changes in my life. I’d tell this story during orientation week at Southern Cross University (SCU) where I have taught creative writing for more than two decades. As part of a pitch to expectant groups of new students I’d describe how, after a being a musician in a rock band, I needed to get a proper job and how I’d applied to come to university so as to do just that. My juxtaposition of rock musician and proper job was designed to make the students laugh, and to put them at ease. Then I’d tell them about my second career, – the trajectory from undergraduate student to teacher of creative writing – hoping that I might inspire some of the new students to take up a writing life of one sort or other. Over the last two decades, I’ve taught creative writing to thousands of students. Not all have become published writers, but the majority, I would hope, have learnt a set of writing skills, from the team of teachers in the writing department at SCU, that have assisted them greatly in articulating their chosen worlds through the written word.' (Introduction)

Notes

  • Epigraph:

    You’d sing too

    if you found yourself

    in a place like this.

    You wouldn’t worry about

    whether you were as good

    as Ray Charles or Edith Piaf.

    You’d sing

    You’d sing

    Not for yourself

    but to make a self

    out of the old food

    rotting in the astral bowel

    and the loveless thud

    of your own breathing.

    You’d become a singer

    faster than it takes

    to hate a rival’s charm

    and you’d sing, darling

    you’d sing too.

    (Leonard Cohen, ‘You’d sing too’ Book of Longing, 2007:6)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Long Paddock vol. 77 no. 2 2018 12916282 2018 periodical issue 2018
Last amended 25 Jan 2023 12:58:16
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