'A story about what it means to be a friend … Five women, best friends for decades, meet once a month to talk about books … and life, love and the jagged bits in between. Dissecting each other’s lives seems the most natural thing in the world – and honesty, no matter how brutal, is something they treasure. Best friends tell each other everything, don’t they? But each woman harbours a complex secret and one weekend, without warning, everything comes unstuck.' (Source: Publishers website)
Tiddas
2022
Fortitude Valley
:
Playlab
,
2022
23446172
2022
single work
drama
'Brisbane, 2022. Five women, best friends for decades, meet once a month to talk about books, life, love and the jagged bits in between.
'Dissecting each other’s lives seems the most natural thing in the world and honesty, no matter how brutal, is something they treasure.
'Best friends tell each other everything, don’t they? But each woman carries a complex secret and one weekend, without warning, everything comes unstuck.'
Source: La Boite.
An interview on ABC Radio National's Books and Arts Daily can be accessed here. (Accessed 12 March 2014)
Dedication:
To my tiddas,
for lifting me from life's moments of darkness
into the light again.
‘In ‘Considering sameness’, author and activist Adjunct Professor Anita Heiss confronts the challenges of writing and talking complex Indigenous characters into mainstream Australian literature and public discourse. Her ‘sameness’ does not ignore or oppose expression of ‘difference’. She looks for common ground from which to take a broader view of human interaction than is permitted in oppositional same-different debates underpinned by competing hierarchies of value. In doing so she surrenders neither space nor place. She discusses the approaches taken in 13 books of poetry, adult and young readers’ prose, and autobiography and essays to be found in the AustLit/Black Words database, to challenge and reverse dominant literary stereotypes in mainstream literature by arguing that – in all genres of writing and reportage – stereotypes have influence on identity construction, perception and reception: good and bad.’ (16-17)
Anita Heiss
Nic Brasch
(interviewer),
2017
14750983
2017
single work
interview
podcast
'Nic Brasch: Welcome to The Garret. The Garret podcast is a series of interviews with the best writers writing today. This episode features the prolific writer and activist Anita Heiss. Anita’s story in just a moment.' (Introduction)
' In this essay, I use a close reading of Anita Heiss’s five chick lit novels to argue that racial identity profoundly affects the relationship between the chick lit novel and advice manual genre. In Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit, Caroline Smith contends that the chick lit novel critiques and satirizes regimes of female control through its engagement with the domestic advice manual. This relationship, however, does not always work in the way Smith assumes because the protagonist is not always white: she may be Latina, Chinese, South-East Asian, or, as Anita Heiss shows, Aboriginal Australian: Heiss’s fiction serves as an advice manual, designed to expose readers to the correct norms and behaviors for interacting with Australia’s First Peoples.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'ANITA HEISS – author, tireless advocate for Aboriginal rights and author of a new novel, Tiddas – talks to ROB KENNEDY about the challenge of counterbalancing the tone of
chick lit with meatier social comment.' (Publication abstract)
'ANITA HEISS – author, tireless advocate for Aboriginal rights and author of a new novel, Tiddas – talks to ROB KENNEDY about the challenge of counterbalancing the tone of
chick lit with meatier social comment.' (Publication abstract)
' In this essay, I use a close reading of Anita Heiss’s five chick lit novels to argue that racial identity profoundly affects the relationship between the chick lit novel and advice manual genre. In Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit, Caroline Smith contends that the chick lit novel critiques and satirizes regimes of female control through its engagement with the domestic advice manual. This relationship, however, does not always work in the way Smith assumes because the protagonist is not always white: she may be Latina, Chinese, South-East Asian, or, as Anita Heiss shows, Aboriginal Australian: Heiss’s fiction serves as an advice manual, designed to expose readers to the correct norms and behaviors for interacting with Australia’s First Peoples.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
‘In ‘Considering sameness’, author and activist Adjunct Professor Anita Heiss confronts the challenges of writing and talking complex Indigenous characters into mainstream Australian literature and public discourse. Her ‘sameness’ does not ignore or oppose expression of ‘difference’. She looks for common ground from which to take a broader view of human interaction than is permitted in oppositional same-different debates underpinned by competing hierarchies of value. In doing so she surrenders neither space nor place. She discusses the approaches taken in 13 books of poetry, adult and young readers’ prose, and autobiography and essays to be found in the AustLit/Black Words database, to challenge and reverse dominant literary stereotypes in mainstream literature by arguing that – in all genres of writing and reportage – stereotypes have influence on identity construction, perception and reception: good and bad.’ (16-17)
