Indrani Perera

poet, publisher & mentor

Tag: Cure Creator’s Block

Of Lakes

I've been watching Lakshmi R Kanchi (aka Soul Reserve) posting about the Cockburn wetlands and all the amazing events she created when she was their poet in residence. I wanted so badly to visit this beautiful place and this morning my dream came true!

Her husband Ro picked me up from my digs and along with the Washington State poet Laureate, Arianne True and her fiancee Liz, we headed out of town. On our way out, we drove past the Derbal Yarrigan / Swan river which is huge! After the Birrarung Mar in Naarm, I was so surprised to see this mighty river. It looks more like Sydney harbour than a river! We headed south along the coast, stopping at Cottesloe along the way to meet the Indian Ocean. Ro was a great guide telling us so many stories about the places we were driving through.

The wetlands centre in Cockburn is on land that was going to be cut through by a major highway but local residents and scientists banded together to save the bushland. They established the wetlands centre to educate locals, especially children about the beauty and value of the swampy area containing two unique lakes and eco systems. This idea worked because when the government again tried to develop the area, the kickback from voters was immense, stopping the roads and saving the lakes.

On our arrival at the wetlands in Cockburn we were met by Lakshmi, Jaya Penelope and the WA Poets Micro Poet in Residence, Gillian . The centre is a beautiful building that until recently was shared by many local groups, including their oldest scout group in WA. They have just finished the display in the entrance which is filled with imagery and captions in Noongar. Ro introduced us to many of the people working in the wetlands centre, including some of those who fought to save it.

We then walked through the bush to the lake. As we walked along the path about twenty metres (I think, but I'm hopeless at estimating distances!), a kwenda/bandicoot, scurried across the path behind us. It's not often that you see mammals out and about in the middle of the day (except for homo. sapiens that is). As we walked, accompanied by bird song my eyes were everywhere, drinking it all in. Seeing the details, noticing the little things and the big. Trying to see what is different and what is the same. The soil was sandy and the trees were familiar but different.

I was hoping to see some new birds but there were a lot of familiar faces. Kookaburras, fairy wrens, magpies, galahs, ravens and on the lake Eurasian coots, black swans and purple swamp hens. Walking back along the boardwalk from the lake I spotted some smaller birds in the bushes. And then later, some of the endangered black cockatoos flew over the Wetlands centre. After our walk we were treated to a traditional Aussie BBQ cooked by the volunteers. And we met some alpine dingoes.

It was so good to be out of the city. To be in the bush. To be walking the naked land.

Lakshmi's poetry residency has ended and as a farewell gift she left a poetry trail around the wetlands. these boxes contain treasures, writing prompts, waterproof pencils and notebooks so you can add your poetry to the collection. A wonderful idea and a great legacy for a remarkable year of poetry from a brilliant poet.

September 14, 2023
A Poemabulation

I'm in Perth for a week to attend the 2023 Perth Poetry Festival curated by the incredible community organisation, WA Poets Inc. The week is chock-a-block full of incredible events, open mics and workshops.

This morning I braved the rain (hello Melbourne, brought the rain and clouds with me!) to do the Searching for Uglieland walking tour of the Perth CBD. When I read the description of this event in the festival program, it immediately went to the top of my list of things to do. I love walking around cities, wandering down laneways and popping into galleries and shopfronts. What more do you want really when visiting a new city?

The best things about this tour was that it was run by locals with added poetry! That's right people, this walk included the poetic history of the city as well as poets reading their poems along the way. We stopped for coffee (or a hot chocolate for me because it was freezing!) and ended the morning with lunch together in an underground food court.

picture of Jaya Penelope (left) and Mar Bucknell (right)

I had the best morning meeting new people, hearing poetry (I even recited one that I had composed that morning on the walk from my hotel to the meeting point. Fresh!) and wandering through Perth's arcades. The original plan to walk further afield was changed because it was pouring.

It was so inspiring, particularly meeting Davina Edwards and seeing her belligerent bunting project. She dyes scraps of fabric, writes on them with marker and exposes them to the sun through the cyanotype process which I am now keen to check out.

If you're coning over to Perth, I highly recommend checking out one of these tours. Mar Bucknell is a wellspring of information!

September 13, 2023
A Week in Paradise

I have just spent six wonderful days in Bali wth my gorgeous younger daughter. We had the best time lazing by the pool and slowly defrosting after a Melbourne winter. It was so lovely to be back in paradise, staying at our favourite hotel and eating all the amazing local dishes. Gado gado and lumpia for lunch, mie goreng, beef rendang and satay ayam for dinner were a few of the stand outs for the trip. And checking out all the new little cafes that have popped up since we were last here four years ago. We just had to sample the cakes and find our favourites.

As well as snacking, there was swimming, snoozing, massages and of course shopping for sunnies and Balinese silver for the folks back home. I could have easily spent a month here, being pampered and having delightful people cook and clean for us.

When I go travelling one of my favourite things to do is to go to the local supermarket and see what things are the same and what are different. I love discovering and sampling new food items and supermarkets are great places to do so. it's also interesting to see how tings are packaged and displayed differently in different places. When we were in South America, you could buy milk in plastic bags!

We were in Bali to surprise my Dad for his 80th birthday and it was wonderful to celebrate this milestone with both him and Mum. The look on his face when we turned up for breakfast at the hotel was priceless.

On his birthday, we took him out to a fancy hotel restaurant for happy hour cocktails overlooking the beach. At his request, we had made the ultimate sacrifice and got up earlier than the sun to start the day with a sunrise walk along the beach to meet Angelique the cow. Dad can befriend anyone and anything!

It was the perfect mini break and the only fly in the ointment was that the lovely man and the oldest girl couldn't be with us. They were at home working and studying and keeping the cats company.

September 7, 2023
Gluten and Dairy Free Oat Scones

The oven is doing double time round here. Cooking dinners and baking tasty treats. My latest creation is gluten and dairy free savoury scones based on this recipe. I switched out the wheat flour for oat and used soda water instead of the lemonade to turn it from savoury to sweet. It was so simple that I can't believe I haven't made scones before.

I ate these with some red chilli tapenade the Lovely G scored at the supermarket. The kids had theirs with butter and jam. Mmmmmm, tasty!

Gluten and Dairy Free Oat Scones

3 1/2 cups oat flour, sifted

1 cup coconut cream, runny

1 cup soda (or carbonated) water

1/2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

pinch of salt

Pre heat oven to 210 C (190 C fan forced).

Line a baking tray.

Sift the flour into a large bowl.

Make a well in the centre and add the water, coconut cream and apple cider vinegar.

With a butter knife, mix it into a rough dough.

Spoon the dough out on to the tray (it’s going to be super sticky).

Flatten the tops a little with wet fingers.

Bake for 20 minutes or until golden.

July 4, 2023
Literary Games

You know I love games. And writing. Imagine how excited I was to discover a whole lot of new writing-themed games! Forget about those old standbys, Scrabble, Boggle and Banagrams. I'm talking about the modern, new kids on the block that breathe life into the works and worlds of long dead authors.

I think my favourite games in this genre are the ones that pay homage to famous writers. The Shakespeare Game published by Lawrence King and designed by Adam Simpson uses Shakespeare's plays, characters and quotes to imagines what happened in his missing seven years. That's the length of time Shakespeare disappeared from the history books. This one is a fun game where you get to try out your acting chops and recite quotes from some of the Bard's most famous plays.

If like me, you're a fan of the golden age of crime and mystery novels, Agatha Christie themed games are hard to pass up. I really, really want to buy Agatha Christie's The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge but can't really justify the exorbitant price tag of $153 for the standard edition or a whopping $289 for the collector's edition which comes with high quality props and a velvet lined wooden box. Perhaps I should invest in Agatha Christie Bingo or Agatha Christie's Death on the Cards instead.

Possibly the world's most famous sleuth is Sherlock Holmes, created by English author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who incidentally believed in fairies. At the time he was writing, interest in the occult and the supernatural as well as the birth of psychoanalysis had a big impact on authors of the day. As you would expect, there are a lot of games featuring Sherlock (as well as movies, tv series and video games). It always helps when a work is out of copyright!

I recently bought Sherlock Holmes The Challenge Trilogy from Professor Puzzle. This cute little game looks like a boxed set of embossed books from an antique library. You know I love design and this game is just gorgeous to look at and to hold. Each 'book' in the box is a deck of cards with a different theme. You can choose between a testing game of deduction, a curious game of disguise or a tricky test of lateral thinking. There's not a lot of replayability in this set but once you're done, you'll feel a lot smarter and it will look great on your bookshelf! I've also had my eye on the game 221B Baker Street for quite some time.

I've just ordered a copy of the Polite Society: the Jane AustenBoard Game. This looks super fun and will be a great compliment to our reading of Pride and Prejudice. I can't wait to get all formal and haughty with this one!

If you’ve got any good book-themed games to recommend, let me know!

June 27, 2023
Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion

This was my first visit to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (or ACMI as it's better known) at Federation Square and I was really impressed with the enticing looking exhibition spaces leading off from the main entrance and foyer. We were there to see the Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion exhibition but I could easily have spent more time exploring the rest of the gallery.

The start of the exhibition featured glamorous goddesses and screen icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Madonna wearing iconic pink dresses symbolising femininity.

The exhibition included posters, magazines, costumes, photographs and moving images from a wide variety of films with women in starring roles. There were Hollywood and Bollywood stars, African and Asian actors as well as gender busting pioneers. We saw sultry screen sirens such as Marelne Dietrich and Mae West who got around the Hayes Code for morality with innuendo and double entendre. The Hayes Code forbade among other things the portrayal of mixed race relationships and sex outside of marriage.

I often think that the funny thing about the past is the way that we think people were less enlightened, less progressive, less everything really. But it's not the case as you can see from the movie poster above of When Roaring Gulch Got Suffrage, made early last century. Women have fought for equality for a very long time.

My favourite parts of this exhibition were the clips and exhibits about films in other languages. There was a short from the Indian film, Pakeezah (1972), starring Meena Kumari that took an incredible fifteen years to make. Unfortunately Kumari died three weeks after the film's premiere and she didn't live to see its success in both India and Pakistan. Audiences fell in love with the costumes and would buy their tailors tickets to the movie so they could make them clothes based on those of the film.

You've probably never heard of Anna May Wong. Don't worry, I hadn't either but we should know her name. She was an Asian American actor and movie star working in Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately she was limited to playing either the villainous Dragon Lady or the subservient White Lotus. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act which fuelled anti-Chinese sentiment, Chinese characters were viewed as villains. Any nuanced Chinese roles went to white actors such as German Luise Rainer who won an Oscar for her 'yellowface' performance in The Good Earth (1937), a role Wong had lobbied to play.

There was also a 1906 French comedy from Alice Guy-Blaché, Les Résultats du féminisme (Consequences of Feminism) that did a gender switch and had the men sewing and ironing while the women smoked, drank and made a mess. At the end of this seven minute satire, the men overthrow the matriarchy and gain their freedom.

Unusually for an exhibition, it left me wanting more. I could have easily spent another hour or two immersed in the world of screen goddesses. I would have loved to have seen African, Indigenous, Latinx, Eastern European, Asian cinema and actors represented in more depth and detail. But this was a good beginning.

Seeing this exhibition made me want to rewrite the histories and our narratives to include a much wider and broader range of woman. After seeing the Cressida Campbell exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra earlier in the year and talking to a friend about history books that are writing women back into the narrative, I am hopeful that we are on the crest of a wave, make that a tsunami, that will wash away the past and bring equality to our art, our screens, our books and our histories.

June 19, 2023
Liminal Spaces, Beyond the Page Workshop

Has the muse left you and inspiration fled? Do you find it hard to put into words your feelings, thoughts and emotions? Are you stuck in a rut with your writing — revisiting the same metaphors and line breaks again and again? How can you see the world with new eyes so that your writing becomes fresh and imaginative once more? Don’t worry, help is at hand with this two hour workshop that aims to get you out of your rut and thinking in new and different ways.

The key to writing differently is to learn to think and do things differently. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds as anyone who’s tried to break a habit will know. But it is possible and in this workshop you’ll get out of your head and creep into the cracks by exploring the spaces in between. Bring your child-like self, a sense of adventure and a willingness to play. Through movement, sound and drawing you’ll discover how to write poems that move beyond the page.

Bring along any art supplies that feel inspiring (coloured pencils, textas, watercolour paints etc) as well as journals, sheets of blank paper etc. It’s an excuse to go wild in the stationery section. If you want to stick with pen and paper that’s fine too but no screens please.

There will be time during the workshop to share your work with the rest of the group. Sharing is optional and positive feedback is encouraged. This workshop is suitable for poets at any level from emerging to established. Please come at least 5 minutes early so we can start on time.

Liminal Spaces – Beyond is Page, is part of an incredible line-up of events at this year's Perth Poetry Festival where I'll be appearing as a National Guest Poet alongside Juan Garrido-Slagado from South Australia and Jean Kent from New South Wales as well as International Guest Poet Srijato Bandyopadhyay from India and Local Guest Poets Lisa Collyer, Caitlin Maling, Talya Ruben and Luoyang Chen.

Workshop Details

Facilitator: Indrani Perera

Event: Perth Poetry Festival 2023

Organiser: WA Poets Inc

Time: 9.00 – 11.00am AWST

Date: Saturday 16th September 2023

Venue: Centre for Stories. 100 Aberdeen St, Northbridge, WA

Cost: $25-30

Book your tickets for the workshop here.

(early bird discount availabe until 1 July 2023)

June 7, 2023
Verdant

The latest game on high rotation in this house is Verdant, from Flat Out Games. It's a puzzly, spatial card game for house plant lovers. We can't have house plants because our two cats eat anything green we bring into the house including kale and broccoli on the kitchen table. So the next best thing is this super fun game.

This game is gorgeous and lush with its beautiful plant illustrations, botanical details and descriptions along with the superb components. I'm a sucker for wooden playing pieces and the monsterra leaves that are used to add verdancy to your house plant are sooo cute! It also comes with a customise screen printed bag in which to store the cardboard item tokens.

One of the things I am starting to notice in more recent board games is the new levelled game play on offer. Typically this looks like a basic set-up as an introduction to the game with some bonus goals that can be added later to make the game more difficult and up the level to advanced.

Calico which is from the same designers has a similar layered playing level mechanic going on. I picked up a copy of Calico when I backed Verdant on Kickkstarter and it was the game that we were playing at the end of last year. At the time I couldn't believe that the Verdant was the game I backed but wasn't being played. You must never know what the people are going to go nuts for. And Calico is all about cute cats so I guess it was understandable.

So far we have only played Verdant in the introductory mode and I look forward to trying out the bonus goals once we have nailed the basics. Oh and the Kickstarter copy which we have also comes with the spotless plants expansion, so lots there's lots going on to make this game super replayable.

June 5, 2023
The Gift

The right word or idea at the right time is a gift. It can take you from where you are, flailing in the mud and set you back on your path. Or perhaps on another one nearby. Or turn you around completely. Whatever it does, it gets you out of your rut and moving again. At least that's how I feel after attending the incredible Poetry Retreat with Pádraig Ó Tuama the other weekend.

Pádraig has such a love for poetry as is evident in his Poetry Unbound podcasts which have over a million listeners! But it was being in the room with him and hearing him recite lines he had learnt by heart that really hit home. His love of language and skill with words infected me with a new enthusiasm for poetry.

I've spent the last few years doing as many poetry and writing workshops as humanly possible with Australian and overseas organisations including Writers Victoria, Writing NSW Queensland Poetry, Poetry School, Coursera and Masterclass. These classes have been in person, online or on demand. All my 'pocket money' and spare change has been spent on improving my skills, discovering all the things I didn't know and learning from some amazing poets and authors including (in no particular order): Joelle Taylor, Mark Tredinnick, Sara M Saleh, Eve Grubin, Mark Smith, Caitlin MacGregor, Vika Mana, Ellen Van Neeren, Benjamin Dodds, Holly Isemonger, Therese Catanzairiti, Miriam Tag, Andy Jackson, Nicole Brimmer, Morganics, Timmah Ball, Felicity Plunkett, Lou Garcia Dolnik, Jazz Money, Pip Smith, Billy Collins, Jo Weston, Hannah Luddbrook, Douglas Keanny, Maria Takolander, Rebecca Giggs, Deb Abela, Felicity Castanga, Laura Jean McKay, Peter Hill, Inge Simnpson, Vanessa Kirkpatrick and Lee Koffman.

(A side note – if you're wondering how I find the time to do all these classes it's because I don't watch television except for the odd movie here and there and I have an ambivalent relationship with social media. There was also a lockdown and I became a hermit for a while!)

It has been my own personal Master of Creative Writing, specialising in poetry and it has been amazing to learn from these incredible poets. But I recently reached saturation point. And when I look at that long list of names above (which isn't everyone I have studied with in recent times), I can see why. I have written in the company of a lot of incredible people. And I have been diligent in keeping an open mind, meeting the prompts and doing my homework. But… you knew there was a but coming, didn't you?

But I could feel something shifting when the last Writers Victoria program for the first half of this year hit my letterbox. Dear reader, I didn't open it. I haven't opened it. It is still sitting there, unread. Or maybe I've thrown it out. I don't actually know where it is. A year ago, I would have devoured it, circling all the workshops I wanted to attend and then figuring out how many I could afford and then choosing the ones I wanted to do and then working out which ones fit in with the rest of my life. But this time was different. It felt like being in workshops wasn't something I wanted to do anymore (except for Amanda and Dave's Poetry As memoir and … there's always an exception of course!)

And then on the weekend, hearing Pádraig recite Emily Dickinson or read a selection from his forthcoming book Kitchen Hymns (2024), I realised that what I want to do now is spend a few years reading poetry. Devouring it. Buying books from poets and reading them. Borrowing poetry collections form the library or browsing my own shelves to discover hidden gems. Contemporary and classic, I want to read them all!

I'm going to start with this book which Pádraig was kind enough to give each of us a copy. Tell me, what poems are you reading? Which poets set your mind on fire?

June 3, 2023
Perth Poetry Festival 2023

I am honoured to announce that I will be a National Guest Poet at this year's Perth Poetry Festival alongside Juan Garrido-Slagado from South Australia and Jean Kent from New South Wales. We'll be joining International Guest Poet Srijato Bandyopadhyay from India as well as Local Guest Poets Lisa Collyer, Caitlin Maling, Talya Ruben and Luoyang Chen. The festival will take place from 9-17 September 2023 on Whadjuk Noongar land in and around the glorious Western Australian city of Boorlo / Perth.

I've been enviously observing the vibrant Perth Poetry scene from afar for quite some time and I am looking forward to discovering new poets, hearing amazing poetry and being part of it all, even if it's only for a short time. There are so many great poets coming out of Western Australia including Shastra Deo, Madison Godfrey, Scott Patrick Mitchell (who I got to interview in season one of Pocketry Presents), Rashida Murphy, Nadia Rhook and Elfie Shiosaki. And so many workshops I wish I could do, especially those being held at the Wetlands Centre (where Lakshmi R Kanchi is the poet in residence) and at the Centre for Stories.

It's going to be my second visit to the city. The first was with my parents when I was in primary school and I can barely remember anything from that trip. I'm looking forward to rediscovering this west coast city.

WA Poets Inc put on a great festival and there will be performances, open mics, workshops and more!

If this sounds like your cup of tea, you can find the workshops here. There's an early bird discount if you book before 1 July 2023.

May 31, 2023