Timmah Ball
Blueprint for Another World
Is the best way to create a new world to work through broken but powerful systems, or to exit and oppose them? Timmah Ball reflects on her disillusioning experiences in urban planning and the productivity or lack thereof of 'creating in the negative, adopting a permanent critical position to imagine another world'. (Note on access: this essay is available in audio format.)
'The only way through is in the belly of the architect. To physically slip into the schemes and acts that dispossess us in order to write a new zone from within. It is possible, I’ve seen it happen...But I hesitate for too long, concerned that if I enter I might never come out again.'
Six Walks
Birthed at the height of the adaptive arts institutional outreach to a COVID-absent public, Six Walks invited six Naarm-based writers to host pre-recorded walking tours around the city. The resulting tours have a lot to offer the immobile listener too.
Tony Birch’s walk with the Birrarung, seasoned with anecdotes, stories and poems, brims with a familial intimacy: the river is unmistakably precious to him. He describes its former path leading all the way to Lutruwita, its bed now submerged by Port Phillip Bay and Bass Strait. Idil Ali’s walk around the Carlton Housing Estate bubbles with childhood mischief, but also with a loss of innocence caused by pervasive experiences of racism and class prejudice.
Take these walks for embodied encounters with disembodied company; they are infused with the ambling pace and rambling attention of a classic stroll. The best app? Why, it’s reality!
Where Nonfiction Belongs
Reading nonfiction that avoids easy classification has led me to write nonfiction that is difficult to classify, because it frustratingly – and sometimes delightfully – doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. This elusive category could also be described as experimentalism, hybrid essay writing, literary narrative nonfiction, zine-making, autotheory and ficto-criticism, although the last two have been subsumed or at least collapsed into the autofiction genre, which has been experiencing a comeback in contemporary novel writing.