Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 13 October
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
‘My body was still boyish and small and straight up and down, but I knew that it was interesting to men.’ Abigail Ulman’s short-story collection, Hot Little Hands, features female characters on the brink of adulthood, coming to terms with desire and what it means to be desired.
Such frank, funny and authentic depictions of girls’ sexuality (and its infinite variations) aren’t as prevalent in literature as you might think. What are the other blind spots in writing for, and about, girls?
For our HEY GIRL series, we’re bringing Ulman together with three other writers – Marlee Jane Ward, Jax Jacki Brown and Jennifer Down – to discuss these blinds spots and how, as writers, they’ve tried to address them. Ward’s award-winning Young Adult novel Welcome to Orphancorp, tells the dystopian tale of a rebellious girl in a semi-futuristic orphanage, while Jax Jacki Brown is a spoken-word artist and commentator with a focus on disability and sexuality. Host Jennifer Down is the author of Our Magic Hour, a novel about navigating grief and relationships in young adulthood.
Lust, longing, anger, rebellion, self-surveillance, anxiety, technology, friendship – our panel will discuss these topics and more. What stories do girls want to read? And what stories do they want to tell?
Featuring
Jennifer Down
Jennifer Down is a writer and editor. Her debut novel, Our Magic Hour, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. The story collection Pulse Points won the 2018 Readings Prize and the 2018 Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. She was named a Sydney Morning Herald Novelist of the Year in 2017 and 2018. Bodies of Light, her second novel, won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
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Marlee Jane Ward
Marlee Jane Ward is a writer, reader and weirdo living in Melbourne. She grew up on the Central Coast of New South Wales and studied Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. In 2014 she attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, Washington.
You can find her short stories in the Hear Me Roar Anthology, Interdictions and Mad Scientist Journal. Her debut novella, Welcome to Orphancorp, won the 2015 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize and the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. Its sequel, Psynode, was published in 2017.
Marlee likes dreaming of the future, cats, and making an utter spectacle of herself.
Abigail Ulman
Abigail Ulman is a writer from Melbourne. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction from Stanford University, and a winner of the Best Young Australian Novelist Award. Her debut short story collection Hot Little Hands has been published in Australia and abroad.
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Jax Jacki Brown
Jax Brown (they/them) is an esteemed disability and LGBTQIA+ rights activist, writer, educator and consultant. Their tireless commitment to LGBTIQA+ disability human rights and advocacy has been recognised with a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM).
Jax utilises their experience as a queer, trans wheelchair user to explore intersectional identities. They view disability as a socio-political issue of intersectional equality, access, and human rights.
Jax also runs their own business in LGBTIQA+ disability rights and inclusion where they provide sought after guest speaking, education, workshops and training for community members and allies.
Jax is the co-chair of Inclusive Rainbow Voices: a new organisation for LGBTIQA+ people with disabilities. They have served on the Victorian Disability Advisory Council, Victorian Government’s LGBTI Taskforce Health and Human Services Working Group, and the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Disability Reference Group.
Jax’s work has been published widely online and in several anthologies: Queer Disability Anthology (2015), QueerStories: Reflections on Lives Well Lived from Some of Australia's Finest LGBTIQA+ Writers (2018), Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories (2019), Growing up Queer in Australia (2019) and We've Got This: Stories by Disabled Parents (2022).
Their memoir in the making, ‘Exile and Pride’ received Runner Up in the category 'Self Told Stories by Writers with a Disability' in the Lord Mayor's Creative Writing Awards 2022.
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