Today we were lucky enough to have a session with Senses of Cinema Editor and film critic on Melbourne radio station Triple R, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. We discussed authorship and readership, as well as having a screening of the short film “I’m You, Dickhead”, directed by Lucas Testro. We were then tasked with writing a 200-400 word capsule review of the short, which would be critiqued by our peers. As with any crit session, I find it to be incredibly unnerving when someone reads my work, specifically someone who is unfamiliar with my ever-developing authoritative voice as a writer.

Here is a short excerpt from the piece that I was able to come up with in the 30 minutes that we were allocated for this task:

“This existential affirmation is cushioned with earnestly crude and wholeheartedly Australian humour, which exists in an exclusive subculture of dickhead-ery that only true blues can comprehend.”

Other topics that were covered by Alex included:

• Who do you think you are? Why do people care what I am saying? What validates my authority as a writer?
• Keep audience in mind in relation to the film being discussed.
• The amount that you must take in depends on the scale of the writing, what you have to say and how many words you say it in.
• Context and history of the film is integral to writing a quality piece.
• Opinions and individual taste are not criticism.

Week 7 brought about a pitching session for the blog posts that will eventually be posted on our anthology website. We dissected each others ideas and gave feedback to one another to help tease out the crux of our classmates pitches, to ensure that their pieces were as interesting and engaging as possible.

The idea that I pitched was an explorative piece about musician Maggie Rogers and her rise to fame in the music industry, as well as speculation about where her career could possibly lead and the the release of new music as an emerging artist. I want to specifically focus on her very otherworldly and distinctive sound, and hone in on the inspirations behind her music.

On Wednesdays class we covered all things grammar and common mistakes that were made in PB2. We touched on the importance of reading our writing out loud to help pick up on simple mistakes, as well as the difference between passive and active voices. Other topics that came up were grammatical errors such as the difference between colons and semicolons and “it’s” versus “its”. A passive voice is a trap that I’ve found myself in, specifically in critical writing and my journey to find my voice as a writer, and that is something I’ve really been working on in my current work.