I’m incredibly honored to be the feature artist that night – which also means I’ll be under examination by MC Matt Dean prior to my set. If you want to hear me rabbit on about my craft, performing and mentoring please come along. As with all ASA Wax Lyrical nights, this is a free show.
At the moment, I’m trying to find out if we can film the interview so those of you who are interested but don’t live here can get an opportunity to see and hear what I’m about.
As the snow piles up on the mountain and the days are getting noticeably shorter, it’s really good to have lots of projects on the go.
The Woman on the Edge of the World is foremost in my mind now, the art is kinda sorta in place and the liner notes are written. However, knowing me I’ll find something to edit in the next few days. Interestingly, I’ve maintained the original art work I produced to tag the digital download version, including my cover, featuring the Currie lighthouse on King Island.
Inner sleeve, ready for liner notes!
It’s going to be a very limited run, 150 copies only (numbered and signed), so please contact me here or via the comments if you want to go on the pre-order list.
And today, I’ve just had a lovely lunch and meeting with friends, discussing a game project I’m writing narrative/screenplay for. It’s all in it’s very earliest stages, but really exciting, working with some very talented men and women who are equally passionate about games, art and storytelling.
Looking forward to a busy winter here in Tasmania!
Wow, it’s June already! Who stole my year and can I have it back please? I don’t know about the rest of you but life’s been a blur the past six months.
Yesterday was the first day of winter here in the southern hemisphere and it was a reminder that the year is marching on. Firstly, there was snow on the mountain, our second reasonable fall in a couple of weeks. Yes, we had heavy snow in March this year, very unusual for this part of the world (see the pic above, snow to approx. 200m/220 yards!) The garden is looking a little shabby as it always does this time of year, with fallen leaves that need raking and using as mulch, fruit trees that need attention and weeds competing with winter vegetables. Nevertheless, I love winter gardening in Hobart on those crisp, sunny days that we generally see so many of through June and July.
The chickens are looking equally tatty, all five of the old girls are in various stages of molting, and because of the shorter day length, no eggs at present. On the up side, the rabbits are thriving. They much prefer the cooler weather and all three have very luxurious winter coats, plenty of food, bedding straw and shelter.
Out of view in this photo is a heavy duty enclosure that I’ve fitted with a tarp, where each of the bunnies gets a chance to run around, feast on grass and get plenty of exercise. I have been known to go and have a break in there with them, which usually means rabbit cuddles. Life’s hard ❤
And June heralds a new study period at online university, this time my first unit for a Creative Writing major. It’s really interesting as a much-lauded songwriter and lyricist that I’m going back to basics but my mantra throughout life is that you can never know it all – there’s always new things to learn.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m studying online through Griffith University and even a few days in, I’m really enjoying the course material, meeting new people on the discussion board who have a similar passion for words and the prospect of learning new things, new ways of doing what I love.
Hopefully, this will mean more regular blog posts!
Well, last night saw the Australian Songwriters Association – Tasmania‘s final gig at Irish Murphy’s in Salamanca Place. It was a raw night to be out and about – the weather here in Hobart has been typically Winter (with a capital W) since last month’s plunge into single digit temperatures. However, kudos to all the brave folks who came out on such a night to support and perform – you are all diamonds!
It bears noting that the opening act was emerging songwriter, Cassie O’Keefe, who has really improved as a performer – so much so that I let her use my Seagull guitar last night!
Cassie has really come into her own in the last year or so, thanks in part to the amazing support of her wonderful family and friends – and shows like the ASA, which provide a wonderful avenue for new writer/performers to share the stage with proven hands like Tony Brennan, myself and the consummate professional, Ian Paulin.
I’m therefore very pleased to tell you all that I’m taking Cassie down to Belfry Studio next month, where she’ll be recording with my favourite engineer in all the planet, Malcolm Battersby. It’s an incredibly gratifying experience to see someone grow from an uncertain child into a powerful young woman, who can turn a pub crowd on a Monday night into a listening audience, and hold them in the palm of her hand. It’s every teacher/mentor’s dream and inspires me to keep doing what I do 😀
Also, I must mention the fine work by the ASA Tasmania coordinator, Matt Sertori. His job has been so difficult over the last few months, with people pulling out at the last minute or turning up late for their set. Seriously, organising musicians is like herding cats, and not for the faint hearted – we are a difficult mob! Matt has kept his temper and his outrageous sense of humour well intact and I thank him for all his support and unwavering friendship over more than ten years of ASA shows.
I’m not sure where the ASA will be heading next, there isn’t a venue lined up at the time of writing – but that in itself is kind of exciting and makes me wonder what we can do next!
Watch this space and stay safe and well, wherever you are on this beautiful planet ❤
I feel like I’ve lost a couple of months somewhere, it’s been so hectic and now I realise that spring is here and I haven’t done half the things I meant to this calendar year. But I have managed a few that I wasn’t expecting!
The university experience has been wonderful so far although I won’t pretend I’ve enjoyed every unit. At the moment, I’m preparing papers on two of my favourite things – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and the personal still camera. And I’ve had to watch classic films such as Rear Window and Citizen Kane. Yes, I’m loving my units this semester!
But today I’ve been distracted from study. Tomorrow night I’m playing at a House Concert in Hobart with wonderful Queensland singer/songwriter Francesca de Valence and Hobart duo Butterscotch Pony in one of their all-too-rare live shows. However, instead of doing a solo set or playing with the wonderful girls in Straddlepuss (more on that next time!) I’m doing a special set with dear friend (and half of Butterscotch Pony), Matt Sertori.
We’ve been friends for a long time and decided early in the year that we wanted to do a music project together that included a documentary about our personal process and the creative world that we inhabit. We’ve done some filming already but will be adding to it at this gig. Meanwhile, our trusty doco guru, Josh Troy put this little gem together to promote this event. I hope it makes you laugh as much as it did all of us!
Please note, there’s some bad language at the end 😉
And we really did decide to call it ‘All at Sea’. The moral of the story is Matt has the attention span of a flea………… ❤
To begin with, irrespective of what you believe (or don’t believe) I wish you all a peaceful, relaxed holiday season. I’ve been having a great time, taking some time off with family and friends. But I’ve been pretty lax with keeping up with my blog – sorry!
Probably one of the best presents I’ve ever had was dumped in my lap recently. As a mentor and music teacher, you always wish the best for your charges but this is just outstanding 🙂
For those of you outside of Australia, this is something to truly celebrate, I really can’t begin to describe how proud I am of this up and coming artist! The song she’s uploaded “Swallow” is a really excellent pop song with quite a mature, dark lyric. This young woman is an inspiration to us all, to stick at it and follow your dreams!
I encourage you all to go to the site and have a listen – “Swallow” is available for free download.
Meanwhile, play nicely, stay safe and have a great end to 2013!
Well, today is momentous. I am now officially back at University! I’m a little scared still but very excited about getting back into scan reading mountains of papers and books for references, making coherent arguments in essays and referencing it all correctly – oh dear, what have I done??!!! No, seriously – it’ll be fun once I get back into the swing 😉
Thanks to my beautiful friends Lauren and Patsi, I’ve been able to log on and join in the discussion board and download extra material that Griffith University didn’t post to me. Yes, I still don’t have a dedicated internet connection at home and sadly, I haven’t been able to keep up with my NaBloPoMo committments, but I’m doing my best.
Over the weekend, I also had some great times with other beautiful friends, namely Jax and Malcolm Battersby. Mal and I played a really nice gig at the Richmond Festival. It was the inaugural Songwriters Concert at the festival and we got to work with some great local artists and the organiser – champion of original music, Roger Joseph.
The other truly beautiful thing is I heard a new song Jax’s written (as yet untitled) and it’s just gorgeous. I understand she’s going to debut it live at the ASA December 11th gig and I can’t wait to hear it again! I heard a rough from Belfry Studio but once the mix is finalised, it’ll be up on Jax’s Triple J Unearthed page. It’s so satisfying to see someone with so much raw talent start to blossom into a confident and accomplished writer and recording artist – it’s really inspirational!
All in all, a very satisfying time in my life – despite the lack of home internet.
Take care everyone and have a wonderful day too, wherever you are
It’s raining – again or still – my brain is suffering from rising damp I think. The chickens are lurking under their shade table or in their coop to dry and keep dry and tempers are short in my little bunny kingdom.
Meanwhile, I still have no solid internet connection but I’ve still managed to keep NaBloPoMo going – haven’t missed a day so far! And I’ve just uploaded my final assignment to a Preparation for University Study course through Open University Australia. I’ve been really surprised and heartened by my results – but the real fun starts later this month when I begin my first proper online unit through Griffith University in Queensland.
I had a phone call yesterday, and the NBN are booked to come to my house tomorrow to wire in our new fibre connection. I cannot to begin to tell you all how happy that makes me! Above all, this will enable me to teach via Skype to anyone who has a solid internet connection. As well, I’ll be able to do my online uni studies without having to resort to leaching net connections from family and friends or docking to my mobile phone connection. (I hate to think what my bill is going to be this month!)
In the greenhouse, I’ve been incredibly pleased with how everything’s still growing despite the ridiculous weather we’re having here in Tasmania. I planted Basil seed some time ago and pricked out seedlings into egg cartons to grow them on quickly and give me a chance to pot them up without any further disturbance of their roots.
Basil from Egg Cartons
It’s a neat method and I find it gives seedlings a better start. As you can see from the picture below, the Lettuce Leaf Basil has certainly taken off well!
How the Basil Grows!
But sadly, the front balcony, which serves as my winter salad garden, is suffering badly from the wet weather. I think the only plants that are thriving are the watercress – funny that! Hopefully, we’ll get some more seasonal warm (and dry!) weather soon, so I’ll be able to collect the seed for next year’s crops.
The Balcony Garden
There will be little or no gardening today. Reading, songwriting (another song about the rain?), more recording preparation and plenty of cups of tea for me I think! Have a great day folks wherever you are 😉
I try to structure my week into bits where I work and bits where I don’t do so much. It gives me time to breathe, think and enjoy. And it’s a really good thing for my creativity. It means that I don’t earn as much as I probably could, but the payoff to my health and wellbeing is incalculable.
Having said that, my “day off” is full of activity and little work-related tasks, sadly necessary to meet current deadlines. And of course, there’s the daily blog promise to uphold throughout November. Yes, this is another NaBloPoMo post!
At the moment, I’m in the middle of a preparatory course for going back to formal study. (This is bound to be the subject of a blog post later in NaBloPoMo!) So, this morning I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading for an assignment due at the end of this week. It’s fun, I’m learning about learning again and thinking about thinking! And it’s a lot more inspiring than I first thought it would be.
Next, is some time out in the secret garden. I live in a wonderful area, 25 minutes casual walk into the city of Hobart and yet I have an urban farm. You’d never think it from looking at the front of my place! I manage to grow most vegetable needs for this household and the excess gets spread out amongst family and friends. I also have the “timewasters” out there – my lovely hens, who are laying so many eggs at the moment, and my beautiful pet rabbits – the buck, Barabas Beefcake, and two does – Bella and Boudica. I eat meat and want to take some responsibility for at least part of my diet, so their offspring will be food for me and mine. But these three characters are absolutely pets!
Barabas Beefcake
At present, it’s mid-Spring in the southern hemisphere but the weather has been so very strange (we had snow on Mt Wellington a few weeks ago) right across Australia. So it’s only been the last few days that it’s finally felt like the busiest time of the gardening year!
Today, I’ve been weeding the rhubarb patch, getting ready to plant more corn seedlings, which also involves a lot of talking to the hens, feeding them weeds and collecting eggs. They live in a hutch built mostly out of scrap, so it’s not the prettiest structure but it’s safe and secure for my precious girls. We call it either “Frankenhutch” or “Cluckingham Palace” but it provides a one-stop shop for eggs and chicken poo enriched mulch for the vegetable garden. All chickens are quite silly things but I have one, Henrietta who is utterly mad. Everytime I look at her I can see the link back to the dinosaurs. Nevertheless, she eats out of my hand, loves cabbage and kale leaves, and is becoming quite tame.
Henrietta of the Mad Eyes
Another of today’s jobs was potting up Basil (my favourite summer herb) in the greenhouse. When I first moved here a few years ago, the greenhouse was a badly neglected shed with a young cherry tree trying to grow inside it! Now, it’s clad in clear polycarbonate roofing plastic and is where I grow chillies, basil, tomatillos, cucumber and eggplant as well as raise my vegetable seeds.
The Start of the Basil Crop
At lunchtime, there was a coffe break with friends under the chesnut tree, which will be a mass of bees in a week or two when the flowers come. Here, rabbits were cosseted, fed little treats of chickory leaves and generally loved. In recent months, I’ve been putting a cane lounge out when the weather’s been good, and it’s become one of my favourite places to take a break, read a book, listen to music with the bunnies or just think about nothing at all.
Because we’ve had so much rain the last few months, there are more weeds than vegetables at present, but there’s still enough to provide me and mine with all our salad needs and green vegetables for steaming and stir frys. It’s wonderful, keeps me healthy and keeps me connected to the earth 😀
In this occasional series of posts, I want to share the things that make me tick. Given that I was mad enough to sign up for NaBloPoMo, it seems a perfect time to execute the plan. The first one was about reading, so it kind of follows that the next would be about writing. Reading and writing both enrich and create me.
Writing is a powerful pursuit, and one that has given me great rewards. Writing has fed me (both emotionally and literally), caused me sleepless nights, introduced me to some wonderful people, caused arguments I’d rather not have had, and lit my way on the strange, meandering path that is my life.
Through writing, I’ve found myself.
Now this is not a cute, throwaway line. There have been times in my life where I have lost my way and lost hope. In my ongoing internal battle, writing has been one of the key factors in pulling me out of my personal, black hell. Some of my writing at these points in my journey I would never want to share with anyone in my lifetime, and yet, some of it has become some of my best work as a songwriter. And (most of the time) it feels so good to sing those pieces, like I’m exorcising demons with every single note. It’s the nature of the beast that I know it will return, and gnaw away at me body and soul. Therapists and doctors have all told me that the problem is extremes – extreme lows and equally extreme highs. And in both extreme states, I go into emotional shutdown – I don’t function and I don’t communicate.
The trick I’ve found is to write about it intimately, expose the black heart of my depression, and equally, the achingly beautiful (and potentially manic) highs. There is something downright gut wrenching about reading stuff like that about yourself post episode. Sometimes it feels like someone else has written it, like another person is in control and it can be very scary. But writing and reading it back is a levelling hand on my consciousness, a brief pause for reflection that helps me to be in control and even out the bumpy ride.
I try and write every day, even if it’s just a few lines. Being old school, I carry a notebook and pens with me and have a stack of them at home for different projects but I’ve got a great notepad style app on my mobile phone that I find I’m using more and more when I’m out. Recently, I got a new laptop and I’ve already set up a folder of “Blog Stuff” to put ideas, drafts and images as well as all my other projects. With NaBloPoMo happening at the moment, it’s another reason to just do it!
Inspiration is a funny thing, it comes from all around us. Despite the ever-present possibility of writers’ block – every writers’ personal hell – I personally believe that inspiration is in and all around us all. We must develop the eyes to see and the will to translate it. Ultimately, everything we write is in some part about us and our personal view, irrespective of who or what might have triggered it.
Finally, I learnt something several years ago that I completely failed til then to see or acknowledge – I would not write if I did not read. So this post is dedicated to all the writers of novels, short stories, articles, blogs, and television and film screenplays who have reached me in some way.
And above all, to my parents who were both readers and writers, who endlessly encouraged the reading and writing in me.
Debra Manskey 