‘I think a ‘home’ takes a while to build and I haven’t figured out the formula yet. I imagine it’s a place where I can feel at peace.’
Read More
‘If love lives in the heart, I must have the words to outline exactly where it can be found—in that artery, that atrium. There’s specificity, but there’s also the feeling of the incantatory, the potential for magic. If you say the right words, something can change.’
Read More
‘Literature and music deal with honesty, truth and fact in such different ways, and it’s cool to challenge that in a process of balancing and paralleling them.’
Read More
‘The only reason we need to have specific diversity initiatives is that the industry, by default, is already skewed towards one side.’
Read More
‘Coming across that casual reference to Melbourne as a publishing backwater was sobering, and a reminder that for all that new technologies have lowered the cost of entry, cultural behemoths are still created in a few geographic centres.’
Read More
‘[In my] Visual Arts Degree...There was no cultural competency whatsoever. I thought the arts was meant to challenge the status quo! I started asking myself—Why do I care so much? Why do I care about the stories that are left unacknowledged?’
Read More
‘Though I admire memoirists very much, and in the glory of the internet age, the personal essayist, I can’t write like them. Yet all my poems are rooted inside my life...’
Read More
‘At this year’s Sydney Writers Festival, I spoke about self-determination through literature. After the panel, I got approached by a White woman who asked me what places she should visit in Vietnam and how to pronounce Phở.’
Read More
‘Part of me feels like coming out as a trans person has been the easiest part of my whole artistic career.’
Read More
‘I viewed myself more as a leaking receptacle of culture than as an agent shaping and defining it.’
Read More
‘The personal is political, especially for people from marginalised and minoritised groups, and to me, art is personal—so, then, art is political.’
Read More
‘I’ve gone through many phases of being Chinese-Canadian: curiosity, realisation, ignorance, acceptance, and finally a full and forgiving self-embrace.’
Read More
‘Don’t bully yourself by constantly comparing your work and your output to other people; some people work quickly and some more slowly, some have more time, or more access to materials.’
Read More
‘As a person of colour, in the arts it’s an exciting time where for the first time it feels like voices and stories from diverse communities can just ‘be’, rather than curtailing to a white framework as a given.’
Read More
‘I have been thinking a lot of the power imbalance between artists and curators / arts workers. Inequality runs so deep within this power structure. I believe that there is so much to be done, to be changed.’
Read More
‘What I am suggesting is that some people may have either multiple senses of belonging to diverse cultures or no sense of belonging even to one culture at all.’
Read More
‘Fantasy literature shaped me wholly... fantasy as a mode is about transformation & so is poetry itself. It rearranges the possible.’
Read More
'Exposing the ways that those discordant parts exist is important to me: here I am, I do exist, & I’m probably not the only weirdo in this situation so I’d like to connect to people who can understand. Liminality is the only constant thing about me.'
Read More
'There is a tendency to only talk about exploitation of workers in the garment industry as something that happens overseas, but it happened in Australia for a long time.'
Read More
‘We deserve to be happy. We have the right to be seen, and the right to demand to be seen.’
Read More