Celebrate fifty years of rap and its transformative power with this session hosted by Simone Amelia Jordan, Australia’s top hip-hop journalist, and witness an electrifying rap battle between L-FRESH The Lion and Mari. with DJ Capital Zee.

Join author and city-maker Jess Scully, writer and poet Mohammad Awad, Shelter NSW Planning Officer Stacey Miers and moderator Dominic Santagelo for a panel discussion on the housing crisis, and the power of words and lived experience to affect change.

First Friday, our monthly conversation with an industry professional, is a chance for our community to learn more about the writing and publishing industry. This October, we invite you to our online event with John Morrissey, judge for the 2024 Boundless Mentorship for Indigenous Writers.

This month the Writing NSW team has been devouring poetry, fiction and non-fiction, read on for what we’ve been enjoying!

‘The notion that we write simply from our minds is a myth. Our bodies hold our emotions and secrets and tensions and blocks. We need to engage the body, just as much as the mind, if we want to write with authenticity.’

‘I’m not trying to say everything, or say something important about climate change and how it will affect the places I’m writing about and what we need to do, now, to save those places for future generations. I’m just trying to make a connection, to give these places texture and emotion. You don’t have to write about ‘the future’ to write the future. Writing about the present inevitably shapes the future. It’s what gives the future substance.’

‘I don’t want to read a romantic comedy where the romance looks like red roses and diamond rings and sounds like an Ed Sheeran ballad … The most romantic moment in Five Bush Weddings centres around a meat pie being dropped on the ground.’

‘Process, for me, is a compound and an evolution of the known and unknown. Eventually I wound up here as a poet obsessed with this ineffable substance I hear in the storytelling of my Elders. I don’t know if should call it poetics or spirit but it exists in just about everything …’

‘Dirt Town started as a short story. I wrote about a group of small-town kids, describing all the different ways they’d made their way home from school on a Friday afternoon. After I’d written that, it occurred to me that there needed to be a reason for them to be talking about that day, in particular.’