Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:18
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper and I guess today is novelist, short story writer and comedy writer and performer Tracey Crisp. Tracey, welcome to the program. We talked last week about your novels and your approach to writing. I'm delighted to continue the conversation this week about some of your other creative work including your comedy performances.
For many years now you've written, produced and performed comedy scripts including for the Adelaide Fringe where you have a very enthusiastic following. You did some stand -up comedy in your mid-thirties then some years later you began writing and performing monologues. What was it that drew you to perform stand -up comedy in those earlier days and what was that experience like?
Speaker 3 01:12
Well, that is a very interesting question. So I was doing a masterclass with Ruth Starchy, who was one of our wonderful South Australian writers who passed away recently. And we were working together on Black Dust Dancing, actually, in an earlier iteration. And at one point, she said, do you know, I just don't understand where your sense of humour is. This is very bleak and very dark. You need to get some humour in it, which I completely misinterpreted. I mean, she just meant lighten it up a bit. But I went and did a stand up comedy course. And it was it was pretty interesting. I mean, I stand up really wasn't a natural home for me. I wasn't very good at it.
I mean, I was OK at it, but I was in my mid 30s and had little kids and my dad was dying. And I was looking after my grandfather, who was in the early stages of dementia. And I was going to these clubs and it's full of these young blokes in their 20s. So the key to comedy is really relatability. And I had zero. So at the time, it's very different now. There's a lot more space for women and a whole range of experiences that certainly didn't exist before. So that experience was genuinely terrifying, but a lot of fun. You know, when it works, there is nothing better than sharing a laugh when when it works. I did have some pretty good success. There was there's a comedy competition that I don't know if triple J still runs up, but they did at the time, their Royal Comedy Competition.
And I went into that and this is another competition. And in fact, this was around the same time as the unpublished manuscript. Might even have been the same year. And I didn't win the South Australian Heat, but I was the runner up. So I got a wild card entry or an invitation to do the grand final, which was over at the Melbourne Comedy Festival at the Melbourne Town Hall. So I was amazing, do you know? I don't know. There's a couple of thousand people in that town hall. And it's on the TV and, you know, everybody would see it. And then so at school, the next day, people say, Oh, I saw you on the TV and my little boy. Yeah, my mum's famous. So, do you know what? As a little kind of insight into what that world is like, it was very fun.
But stand up is very, very hard and very, very frightening and very hard to get practice at, especially in Adelaide. There's not a lot of clubs. So it was hard, but it also really it helped me set up to do what I was really more interested in doing, which was like you said, the kind of the monologues and the performance that is got funny elements in it, but is a lot more layered than stand up on its own.
Speaker 2 03:52
You drew on your stand -up experiences to write an evening with the vegetarian librarian, which tells the story of how you became involved in another of your professional roles, that of Funeral Celebrant. And in last week's program we did talk about grief. Would you give us a snapshot of that story?
Speaker 3 04:12
Yeah, so that is a that's the silliest. Well, it was the silliest of my stories until last years. But it's it did come from a character I developed during stand-up who... I'm the character. And then we discover that the head librarian or another librarian who's been sitting at the same chair at the same desk for 25 years. She isn't just quiet. She's dead. And so the premise of this story is trying to work out what to do with this dead librarian. So it's really silly and funny and we end up having their funeral in the library. But at the same time like I was saying I really like even in a silly monologue like that I really like to take the people who are in the audience on the full emotional journey, and in that I was kind of trying to explore what books and reading and the shared experiences of books and reading mean to us.
So it opens with a little kind of separate monologue that's about my memories of my mom reading to me when I was a little girl and then partway through it It has this thing about the experience of how I dealt with the thousands and thousands of books That I had to either accommodate into my own house or work out what to do with because I had my mums my dads and my Grandfathers enormous collections of books and it was a very Kind of difficult thing to work out what to do with so what we do with the books and the stories because there's so much more to us than simply books that kind of Their little insights into the lives of people who had them.
Yeah, so I perform that show a lot actually probably still half a dozen times a year I really love it. It's fun and silly and it makes me laugh.
Speaker 2 05:54
I can relate to having loads of books. When my father died, we also got most of his books and I already have my own, my daughter's got hers. There isn't a room in the house that hasn't got books with shelves brimming over, books I'm ashamed to say on the floor at the moment, looking for shelf space. I can entirely relate to that.
Speaker 3 06:16
It's quite, yeah, they're hard to know what to do with.
Speaker 2 06:19
Also hard to let go of. They're very hard to let go of. I'm happy to lend them but it takes a lot to actually give away a book because you never know when you might just want to read it again and I've had that experience. Well I'm...
Speaker 3 06:32
Also they fit with each other right. I have lots of audiobooks as well and they all fit together.
Speaker 2 06:40
In 2018, you wrote the first monologue in your trilogy, Pearls. You originally intended Pearls to be a memoir, but then realised that it was meant to be performed. Would you tell us the story of your Pearls monologues?
Speaker 3 06:54
Yeah, so Pearls is really another way of telling the same story that I read and Tonya's gift. It's about my mum and her life and the narrative of that story is the string of Pearls that I used to watch her wearing and that I wore to my wedding and then I thought my dad lost and what happened to them. But the other kind of underlying narrative is my mum's strange Pearls of wisdom that she used to give me across her life. So those two kinds of things weave together and Pearls actually I also do tell this story a lot.
It did start as a little kind of piece of Pearl's poetry. The editor I sent it to at the time said it was beautiful but the most un -commercial idea I'd ever had which none of my ideas were commercial. So it was very un-commercial. Having said that we are actually going to be putting that out as a published piece but Pearls is really the foundation I think of all the rest of my work. It all kind of comes back to there either in story or in format or in style or in some kind of way.
Speaker 2 08:06
You're also experimenting with new creative practices, including working with textiles. And this year you had your first visual art show which was very much connected to your trilogy pearls. What has that experience been like working with textiles which as you write on your website always come back to text?
Speaker 3 08:27
Comes back to text because I'm not very good at drawing. So if I put the foundation, if the foundation of words is there, then I feel confident in it. So the piece that I did this year, which I will be in the fringe as well, so my mum died very suddenly in a car accident and the year before she died I'd got married and I wore my wedding dress which she had sewn for me and this year I realised it was going to be 30 years since she died which is by coincidence the pearls anniversary.
So I had this idea, I don't even know how I came up with it, but of unstitching my wedding dress and then sewing the text of the play onto the wedding dress as a means of, as a means of all sorts of things, but as a means of I think honouring that time. Grief is a very strange thing of the longer it goes in many ways, the easier it is but the much more profound the loss becomes. Actually I call it a loss but I would rather call it an experience. It's a much more profound experience because your relationship, and I do say this in funerals all the time, the person has died but the relationship continues and in some ways that's just a cheesy sort of cliche thing to say but I say it because it's true because that relationship does continue.
So that's what that was and so that is very text based but it was also a very sensory experience for me at the same time. It took a long time and what actually took a lot longer than I thought would take was the unstitching of it. If I had made it, my mum was very very good at sewing. If I had made it would have just fallen on the palm of my hands pretty much my sewing is very much more slapdash but of course it was beautifully sewn. So it was actually a really nice way of being connected to my mum and I was kind of spending time with her in a strange way.
Speaker 2 10:33
And your connection to grief and your very deep understanding of how grief works differently for each person but as you say there's the connection and the relationships. As we mentioned before you also are a funeral celebrant. When did you decide to branch out into that area of work?
Speaker 3 10:54
That was maybe about eight years ago when I moved back to Adelaide. I'd always been really fascinated by it and I had like lots of writers actually thought about becoming a marriage celebrant and I had a twice enrolled in the marriage celebrancy course and never finished it. So that I took that as a sign that that really wasn't where I wanted to go. But funerals, I do really, I feel like a good funeral. It's a really important piece of our story and it gives people a chance to be together and reflect on somebody's life story and to properly bring all the elements of somebody's story and life together.
Speaker 3 11:34
So for me, the funeral is very much about, it's about lots of things, of course, but from this storytelling point of view, it's about telling the person's story and thinking about what they've shown us from it. And I know in saying that it makes it seem like you're trying to create a narrative of someone's life, but it's not. I mean, we, I know there's this thing in memoir about we live forwards, we live our lives forwards, but we look backwards. So we make sense retrospectively and quite often we have not lived with that idea of making sense of it. But whether we have or not, we're our own person with our particular cognitive processes and stuff.
So we do move step by step through our lives so that I guess I kind of got interested in that aspect of what that has meant about grief, especially because I have spent a lot of time telling and retelling and making sense of mum's story. And I was just thinking of ways that I could do that for other people as well.
Speaker 2 12:32
It also goes back to what you were telling us in last week's program about that idea of community because while we go to a funeral to honour and respect the person and their relationship to each of us, you also then learn about what that person meant to other people and you're there as a community of people around the memory of particular person.
Speaker 3 12:55
So true, nearly every funeral, somebody will say, oh, I learned something new about or I didn't know about this. And it's because we do all live these multi faceted lives, not that you're keeping secrets or hiding things, but just you, you know, there are things that you did at work or something. And, you know, quite often people say, oh, that really makes sense now. Yeah. So yes, it is definitely about community.
Speaker 2 13:22
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is novelist, short story writer and comedy writer and performer Tracy Crisp. Now, for the Adelaide Fringe in 2023, you wrote, produced and performed Where To From Here. I saw it and I really enjoyed it for many reasons, including your calm and understated delivery. And we quoted earlier from the Sydney Morning Herald about your understated writing style. But I also enjoyed it for the way in which I could relate to some of the emotions that you shared. Where To From Here is also part of a trilogy. There's a pattern here. Why trilogies?
Speaker 3 14:05
Well, I think in a way it's part of giving the work momentum and structure. So pearls, I kind of said it was a trilogy. I think as a way also of giving it legitimacy in a way, like this isn't just this one standalone piece of work that it's part of something bigger. And I think partly that was me trying to, because it's pretty nerve wracking putting something out there. So kind of trying to say, well, even if you don't like this, it's late, just practice for something else or something like that. But also trilogies, I always really love reading trilogies. I think, I think there's just something nice and contained. And even though I've messed around a little bit with this as a body of work, the different stories and fit them together differently, it definitely did end up being a trilogy of stages of life and experiences.
Then with where to, from here, partly I ended up calling that a trilogy because I was having real troubles writing it. And I realized one of the troubles I was having writing it is because I was just trying to say too many things and put too many things in. So I said to myself, well, tell yourself it's a trilogy and then you won't feel, you can take that stuff out and you won't feel like, oh, but I need to, I need to get it in there. So that's sort of why. But it is, it is structurally, I think it does give you a way of thinking more broadly about the story. So yeah, it's kind of a many pronged reason, I think.
Speaker 2 15:40
And also, I guess a chance for different perspectives on a particular question issue or aspect of life that you want to talk about. Yeah.
Speaker 3 15:50
Definitely. So something I do try and include is I can't actually afford to do audio description or have Auslan interpreters at the show but I did a few years ago I got a grant and I learned how to make or I got some training in how to make enhanced program notes so that people who want to come to the show because my shows don't have heaps of visual elements I feel like they're quite accessible in that way but I do the notes beforehand which describe the stage and lots of the other elements of the show my costume and all of those kinds of things and I have them available beforehand I record them I try and record them early but quite often done just a couple of days before and I include links to them on my website so that I read them out but I also have them available on my website as straightforward word documents that people can download and use.
Speaker 2 16:53
Fantastic. Thank you. Would you tell us about your second annual World Famous One Night Only Christmas Letter Live Reading which is on the 19th of December at the Goodwood Theatre and Studios? I've got my ticket already but would you tell our listeners how they can get tickets for this performance and what they can look forward to?
Speaker 3 17:14
You're so lovely Kate, I didn't know you'd bought a ticket. Thank you very much. Yes. So, so I really love Christmas and the Christmas season, but I used to really not like it at all. And it's a really difficult time, I think for lots of people for all sorts of reasons. It's because we set up this idea that, you know, there's some perfect family Christmas dinner that everybody can go to and there's all the money and the consumerism and all these kinds of things. But a few years ago, I thought, well, I can be unhappy and cynical about this for the rest of my life if I want to be.
Or I can lean into the bits I really love and just go with them. So the fairy lights and the prettiness of it. And then one of our best Christmases, we were really lucky when we were living in Abu Dhabi. We got to do lots of traveling and for one of those where my husband and I took our young boys to London and Christmas week in London was so magic because there were just lots of little things to do that weren't tied up with other big obligations or any of those kinds of things.
So I had this idea that I always wanted to do this little pantomimey kind of thing. And then last year I thought, oh, I could and I still love sending out Christmas cards. But last year I thought, oh, I could combine that idea of the Christmas, you know, the letter that people used to send. I could combine that with this little show and just make it a cheap and cheerful little thing that people can come to in Christmas week or not. And I was going to just do it for my friends and family. And then I thought, actually, if I turn it into a proper show, my friends and family won't feel obliged to come. They'll come if they want to, but no, there'll be no obligation if I and it went really well and it sold out in three days.
So I've moved that's why I've moved to the Goodwood Theatre, which won't sell out because there's like a lot of seats there. But it's half the actually over half the tickets have sold. So you can get them from my website, tracycrisp.com.au. And it is it's just me reading the letter that I would send if I was still sending you a Christmas card. And last year I did reflect a little bit. It's got quite a bit of Dickens in it because Dickens is very good on Christmas. And people say, oh, Dickens, because of a Christmas carol and he invented all of these traditions and things. But Dickens has got a lot of really interesting things to say about Christmas and about reflecting on the year and in particular on about accepting the failures of the year and the difficult relationships.
And his own daughter had died one year when he he wrote one of these. So people think it's very Sakurine and over the top. But actually he has some quite profound and beautiful things to say about just working out how to have a time in your life because Christmas is going to be all around you, whether you want it to be or not. So you may as well try and find the bits that are going to work for you and that are going to give you an opportunity. It's the same as all my other work. Several things are true. Life is really, really hard and life is really, really beautiful.
And how do we reconcile those things? And Christmas is really the time when you are really reconciling that because it is really pretty. And if you're religious, of course, it's extraordinarily profound and beautiful. But at the same time, like we are this year, you know, there's a how I don't understand how they can say a ceasefire is about to end. That sounds phenomenal to me. But so we have to work out how to live with that dreadful truth, but at the same time allowing life's beauty to continue as well.
Speaker 2 20:53
And that theme that we've been following in our conversation again about community, it's when we connect with members of our own community who maybe we haven't seen for a while, but at Christmas time we do take that opportunity to let them know that we're thinking about them. We all know how busy life is and it seems to get busier as we get older, but it's telling someone they're in your thoughts that's so special and important about that. So would you tell us, Tracy, about what else you're working on and any plans that you have for the new year that you can share with us?
Speaker 3 21:34
Yeah, so at the moment I'm working pretty hard on the Christmas letter. A new show for Fringe, which is called Stitches, which is about me, and this sounds very odd, but it's actually a very silly show like my librarian show. It's about me and my Stitching Bitch group sewing our own funeral dresses, but it's silly, I'm not making anybody face their own mortality. It's a very silly kind of premise. So they're the things I'm really working on most at the moment and finishing my novel, which is the other thing that I'm trying to get done.
Speaker 2 22:07
You mentioned drawing earlier on too. Are you taking drawing lessons?
Speaker 3 22:12
I have been but my dad always said when you're a sledgehammer everything looks like a nail so when I really got excited about working on my visual arts piece this year I decided to enroll in a visual arts degree and I did do the drawing subject this semester and my goodness me what I learned was incredible I think when you work outside in a different creative medium like you know sculpture or whatever you're gonna go and do but I'm taking a break next semester because I've got the fringe show I'm putting pearls on again I've got the visual arts thing so I'll have three fringe shows and you get too far behind in your work so I am but I'm taking a break from it.
Speaker 2 22:59
It's great that you're exploring working across different arts disciplines. Yeah.
Speaker 3 23:04
Yeah, but it also goes back to what I talked about right back at the beginning of last week with the focus. And sometimes you have to think, am I doing this because it's a distraction from doing the hard work or because it is going to give me more depth? But no, it has been amazing. Yeah, really learning how to think about the world in different ways.
Speaker 2 23:26
Going to change focus for a moment now because your website tells us that you have a small olive grove in the Clare Valley on Nyaduri country. Would you describe it for us and tell us about what this place means to you?
Speaker 3 23:42
Yes, I can. So this is, we were looking for a house in the Clare Valley and we found this house that I absolutely fell in love with, which this being Adelaide, we found out was the architect was actually a person, you know, a friend of a friend of ours went to university with him, we were at 21st parties with. But so it's a very simple little house which was exactly what we wanted and it came with this olive grove. So we have 250 olive trees. In truth I'm a little ambivalent about the olives. They're environmentally, if you don't pick them, they escape. And so we have harvested them all, but we're just working out how we, what we do, that's the best thing to do with them.
But it was, it has been really rewarding. Caring for the olive trees is really rewarding. The harvest and the pruning and all of those things is great. But yeah, we do just have to think through what we do about that. And 250 trees is a weird number because it's not commercially big enough, but it's too many olive trees personally. But what I really love about is we're in this little valley and the smells and the trees and the birds. The birds are incredible. Sitting and listening to birds is, oh, I think it's, oh this shows my middle-agedness, doesn't it? But it is one of life's true joys. Now I sound like my grandfather who was a bird watcher who has, and I still have heaps of his bird recordings actually, so maybe there's some genetic thing in there as well.
Speaker 2 25:18
That sounds like another monologue in the future.
Speaker 3 25:21
Yeah possibly that's I am yeah I haven't quite got enough stories about it yet but there's something there yeah.
Speaker 2 25:30
That's a lovely place to wrap our conversation. Tracy, before we go though, would you tell us again your web address and where our listeners can subscribe to your e-newsletters and keep up to date with your work?
Speaker 3 25:43
Thank you very much Kate, I'd love to. Yes, www.tracycrisp.com.au.
Speaker 2 25:49
Thank you so much Tracy. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was novelist, short story writer and comedy writer and performer Tracy Crisp. This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at varadio.org and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts where you can catch up on earlier episodes.
Speaker 1 26:24
Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio.org for more.
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