Folio Exercise Three
400-600 Words
Write a mini-essay that encompasses a personal and a private story. Find a story that is currently in the news that interests you. Structure the essay about the public story in a way that unfolds to reveal something about your personal connection to this story.
I was watching the news the other day, a rather rare occurrence, I think a better summation would be I was standing in a room whilst the news was playing. The report was a piece on the rising rate of bowel cancer among young Australians. It would appear 1,680 Australians under 50 are diagnosed with early-onset bowel cancer each year. It’s often considered an old person’s disease, though you don’t have to be particularly old to catch it.
Ostensibly it’s easy to catch and prevent and treat. It starts in the bowels, the intestines, after a life eating red meat, alcohol, and not chewing food properly. Trans fats don’t help, and neither to processed meats. A Mediterranean diet decreases many heart and health problems, but Italians sure put away wine and salami.
Scientists aren’t quite certain what is specifically causing the rises in case numbers in young people, but it’s been steadily increasing since the 1980s. Unhealthy diets and a sedentary lifestyle are big factors, and these have been on the up and up, especially in the last 3 years of the pandemic.
It takes its toll on a person, like any cancer or even sickness for that matter. You watch a person wither before your eyes. It gets out of the bowels that progenerated it and escapes. Quickly it leaps into the rest of the intestines, and before long it makes its way into the lymphatic system. It can enter a spinal column, causing the insides of the vertebrae to swell to grotesquely disproportionate sizes, breaking the bones from the inside. After that, one is forced into a wheelchair, as your body is simultaneously being killed from ‘treatment’ and the cancer which festers and maligns.
Apparently there has been a 266% increase in cases between people 15 to 24. The idea is unfathomable to me. Picture that, 15 and with bowel cancer. When I was 15, I had a lot of problems with bowel cancer, just none of them my own bowels.
They urge us, the young Australians, who are so at risk of getting bowel cancer, to do screening tests. The ones where you crap in the bag, and they tell you if you’ve got cancer or not. Indeed, there is a push to make them freely available to younger people, as they are to adults.
My mind flitters to a memory, when we received a screening test in the mail, addressed to my mother. It professed that she should do the test, and that it drastically increases the chance of detecting bowel cancer in adults, increasing the survivability rate to some high number, 90% or there abouts. Very clearly, in the last several weeks since it had occurred, her name had not been taken of the mail list.
In a way it makes me salty, and spiteful, when these news reports come on urging people to do the screening, when I have that knowledge that occasionally, people do them and slip through undetected regardless. But my bitterness quickly subsides, and any venom turns inevitably into a mournful sadness. Hating the thing which ought to have saved someone isn’t going to bring them back, and it has the potential to save 90% of people affected.
So please, if you’re shitting more than 6 times a day, go and get a colonoscopy.
Folio Exercise Four
500 Words
Take a vague memory from your past and use the 'perhapsing' technique to bring it to life.
(Exercise by Lisa Knopp)
Moomba parade
The midday sun beat down upon the island with a harsh fervour. It was already mid-March, but the heat was as intense as any summer day would have been. It had probably reached the high 30s by the time I clambered aboard the float.
The Moomba parade, is a parade put on as part of the Moomba festival every year in Melbourne. I was only about 10 or 11 when I took part. A teacher, Kate something-or-other, a circus teacher, was in charge of talent or organisation, something along those lines, and had asked me to take part. I’m sure the actual process was likely more detailed and complicated than that, but as a child it seemed pretty straightforward to me.
I was Max, from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Complete with a wolf suit atop my island float. I was surrounded, by two of the titular wild things, who towered over me rather imposingly. I recall the puppeteers who puppeteered the puppets were equipped with full water backpacks and cooling fans, to prevent them dying of heatstroke. I think I had a woman running alongside the float who would occasionally give me a sip of water. Not quite what you want on a near 40 degree day in the middle of a street sealed into a full body suit which, in hindsight, was made of the same fabric as towels, terrycloth, I think they call it.
I remember being excited, nervous, and above all, intensely and demonstrably hot, though perhaps the puppeteers, in their full beast suits, had it far worse, being monster-ably hot. They were the sort of thing you had to be a masochist to even consider climbing into. I remember nearly passing out from heat exposure at one point.
There was live coverage of the event by one of the major channels, 9 or 7. I remember they had planned and organised to interview me whilst I was on the float and had even given me a prepared list of questions and worked out some answers. This would probably be the first step towards my cynicism of the realities of journalism. I had eagerly agreed to be on television, what 10 year old wouldn’t, however, when it came to the day, my big moment on the small screen, the heat won. I don’t remember much of it occurring, as they had chosen to interview me over halfway through the procession, by which point, I was sat nonplussed and dizzy, mouth agape. I don’t vividly remember how I felt I must admit, but I’ve seen videos and photographs, and I seem like the most bored child on the planet. In terms of the interview, it was over in a flash. It’s difficult to remember lines you prepared a month ago when the sun beats down on you, when your flustered, and when you are surrounded by an infernal cacophony of noise, which inevitably accompanies such a parade.
Needless to say, my moment in the spotlight was ruined, as, when they asked me how I was in the moment, I believe my reply was a most verbose ‘huh?’
Folio Exercise Five
Universal Themes
Length 400-600 words
Write a short personal essay on any aspect of your life that draws on universal themes (love, loss, loneliness, self-realisation etc.).
The great English poet Tennyson once composed, of his close and recently deceased friend "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."
Clearly the man had never been broken up with.
His statement is representative of loss, above all it represents the fixed nature of it, a universal constant, bound by its invariable nature to royally fuck you up.
It’s not that I consider myself more experienced in the art of losing things (except gloves). Far from it, I consider myself lucky in the grand scheme of things, and there are plenty of people in the world who have lost far more than I ever have or will ever know. It’s just that I consider myself more experienced in the art of losing things than most of my peers and cohorts. What I have experienced is nothing strange, it quite literally occurs to everyone, they just usually have more time to mellow out before it happens.
Really, I am not wounded by loss. I treat him as an old friend. The sort of old friend you invite to your party more out of obligation than any basic respect. An acquaintance who you don’t really want in your house, but you repeatedly invite in full knowing the inane banality of their conversational skills. Wounded? No, it would be better to say that I am numbed by loss.
I was 16 when my mother died. Old enough to understand the situation, but not old enough to know how to deal with it. Nominally, I outclass all my cohorts in loss. A few more family members here, messy breakup there, it would be expected, you see, to compound and manifest. And yet it's not the loss of these parts of my life which one considers constant, that are the most painful aspects, but the loss of losing the loss itself.
I missed her a lot when she went, but I handled it well and the pain passed. However, as time slogged on, as it often does, I started to lose memories. Vividity gave way to vagueness. I don’t remember a great deal of her. I don’t remember a great deal of how I felt when I lost her. The loss itself I am numb-er to. Death is a fact of life, and one must accept that and move on. As I progress, it only worsens. The less I remember, the less the original loss feels a loss. It is a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle.
The other day I watched back a video of her speaking. The numbness gave way to a sullen mood of saudade. Not because I missed the sound, but rather, because it no longer sounded familiar nor recognisable.
Perhaps Tennyson’s line offends me so much because the implication is that the love, the emotions one feels as an experience, are worth having lost someone, when the alternative is never having experienced the innate beauty of them in the first place. Whilst the sentiment on face value sounds quite lovely, it doesn’t work so well when you can’t remember the experience that was worth losing someone for in the first place.
Folio Exercise Nine
400-600 words
Write a piece about a place and person you know well. Include specific and intimate detail about both. Remember to use the senses and figurative language.
I didn’t expect her to show up to help clean-up the clusterfuck that was the woodroom.
It was muggy, as always. Honestly to call it a room would be an offence to architects anywhere, as it was little more than a walk-in storage cupboard that had been converted into a wood workshop. The perfect location for circular saws, arsenic-treated sawdust, and spray paint, an unventilated room. And yet rather contradictorily, for a tucked away crevice, it was oppressively bright. It was also oppressively messy. It looked as though a tornado had been through a China shop, leaving the door open with a sign on it saying, ‘Bulls welcome inside’. Stray offcuts of plywood and MDF scattered the floor, topped nicely by uneven piles of that cancerous sawdust and large flecks of pallet wood. Tools were strewn across the only work surface, as we had long since given up attempting to return them to their correct locations. We have an overabundance of all the incorrect tools for the job, and this was showcased in the disconnected pile of rasps and chisels which sporadically dotted the bench. Cans of spray paint, empty and full alike filled the lower shelves, with a few daring specimens of their kind bravely escaping the confines of their demarcation onto the welcoming, and sawdusty, floor.
Standing over the ruined acropolis of materials, I wonder, in that poetic and philosophical manner I oft profess in, how the fuck I was going to clean it up on my own.
We were still slightly hung over though it had been two days past, and yesterday we’d been out until well past the sun had begun its ascent. But I showed up to clean, and she, in turn, turned up to help. She sauntered in with the same swagger and easiness that always accompanied her, and as usual on a Monday, a guitar case was strapped to her back. A long mop of mousy brown hair which erred on the blonde side of the spectrum spills out of the bandana which coronates her. Her eyes are two piercing shards of Bombay sapphire, the cornea gilt by a golden corona.
Tired, and languid from our early morning, we labour, intricately sorting through screws, rasps, files, saws, hammers, and drill bits. We stack the leftover wood for its next use, and, thinking ahead, we decide to go one step further, completing not only a catalogue of tools and resources, but hiding away those we deem superfluous. Prying open a disused and keyless locker with a crowbar we neatly jam in the crap we no longer need. So intense is our post-show need for work, so in the zone are we, we begin sweeping and vacuuming that all too familiar sawdust, which had been a hallmark of the room. A veritable desert of cough inducing powder sucked away in a flash.
Brimming with pride, dusting our hands, and patting ourselves on the back, we flee the stuffy confines of the cupboard, and gulp down swathes of fresh oxygenated nectar. You know your breathing situation is of an appalling quality when the air in the CBD tastes so damn good.
This is the place we properly met one another, and my mind races back to the occasion as I glance over at her.
A thought flashes through my mind.
It had been 36 hours since I last saw her, and yet, I had missed her all the while. Further, I was still in her presence, and yet, to my combined chagrin and delight, I began to miss her all the same.
Folio Exercise Ten
400-600 Words
Write a mini-essay on a topic of choice that is structured in a non-chronological way. Make sure that it starts with a great hook! Be sure to stick to the scene/information structure of creative non-fiction and use all the techniques you have learned this semester.
There is a definitive pretentiousness in self-proclaimed artistry. Yet I often struggle to find a label that best describes myself and my work. To refer to myself as an Artist, makes me sound like a complete and total arsewipe. It has a connotation too, of artwork, of canvases and paints, when the medium is, and I say this with definitive pretentiousness, so much more than that.
I design sets, for stage shows, you know set design. I’d like to call myself, non-professionally of course, a set designer. But that too seems to lack an implicit component of the entire process. It carries with it the artistic aspect of an intimate and intrinsic language of design you are projecting into the minds of an audience, the flow and form of your inner thoughts realised. But it doesn’t carry in my mind the complete truth.
The stench of sweat and sawdust coating your lungs as you hand saw arsenic-treated structural-pine in a dingy broom cupboard called the ‘woodroom’. The hands and face coated in paint from a rushed job where the spare paintbrush clenched between your teeth has splattered all over you. The hollow aching of bones and muscles as you step back and finally breath in the full scope of your work. Design? No to design sets rejects the, in my mind, equally important and beautiful component of building.
A Melbourne Uni show I did received a favourable review mentioning my name as the set designer. A friend of mine in the show, commented on the post, ‘Finally someone is talking about the fact that all tim augier does is make amazing sets.’ The joke at my expense went over the reviewer’s head, they took it as an earnest appraisal of my skillset instead of a carefully worded ribbing of the personality I had cultured over the last year. Whilst I found it very droll, it occurred to me I had shaped such a cult of personality, emphasising an interest in set, when in reality my artistic side expounded so much more than this.
Some years earlier, I had built a box. I often refer to it as a sculpture, but like art carries an intrinsic implication of paint, sculpture has that connotation of clay. It was a gift for an erstwhile relationship, a vampire hunting kit. I had fabricated an intricately designed toolbox, featuring mallet and stakes, holy water, Anglican-bible, rosary beads, ash, garlic powder, a mirror, and a crucifix, all kept inside a felt-lined wooden box that was a drawer in a past life. This creation was, at the time, the epitome of my artistic intrigue. I had made stuff before, but I had never been a maker before. It unlocked a new belief and comfort in my own abilities, and led me down a rather brilliant pathway, one I continue to idly plod along.
The phrase, maker, carries with it too a swathe of self-indulgence. Yet it also allows for a broad, and more practical definition of my creations. Under the banner of making, I create costumes, props, sets, art, sculptures, film, essays, stories, and so much more. There is no limit to creation and ideation, no distinction between design and build, no connotations nor limitations of a specific medium. There is that arrogance in the boldness of so ambiguous a moniker but there too is the freedom. Maybe I am an artist, or a sculptor, a set designer and a writer. But foremost, I am a maker.
Make of that what you will.
