Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 28 June
6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
For many of us, death is an incredibly confronting topic – the stuff of solemn silence, implacable grief or a very particular kind of fear. For others, it’s a defining mystery of living, a necessary finality; even its own kind of miracle. How much can we actually know about death?
Joined at the table by Pia Interlandi, Hayley West and Elizabeth Flux, we’ll chew over the nature of death – and our ways living with it. Whose deaths matter? Do we lack death literacy? Who is commemorated or erased in death? How do we ritualise grieving, healing, and celebration after death … and why?
Join us for dinner (and drinks), with an entree of keynotes followed by an (actual) main course, and roundtable conversations between dinner guests and speakers.
Ever had something big to discuss, only to be told not to make a meal of it? Well! At this year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival, no subject is off the menu and three particularly complicated subjects are on it.
Swing by for a great meal (and a drink or two) as we tackle timeless dinner-table taboos with some of the sharpest thinkers we know. We’re talking sex, death and money. Dine out on that.
All Speakeasy meals are vegetarian, with vegan and gluten-free options available at point of booking.
Arrive at 6.30pm for a 7pm start.
Presented in partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival 2018.
Featuring
Pia Interlandi
Pia Interladi is a fashion designer holding a PhD in Architecture and Design from RMIT University, where in 2013 she completed her doctoral study [A]Dressing Death: Fashioning Garments for the Grave. A full time academic in the School of Fashion and Textiles as RMIT, she has also completed Funeral Celebrancy training from the Celebrants Training College and freelances as a Creative Ritual Facilitator within the funeral industry. In 2014 she co-founded the Natural Death Advocacy Network (NDAN), is an ambassador for Dying2Know Day and is a member of the Order of the Good Death.
She has spent ten years immersing herself into the funeral industry, including two years working at the award winning Clandon Wood Natural Burial Ground in the UK where she was involved in over one hundred natural burials and funerals. In 2013 she was featured in an ABC Artscape Anatomy documentary called ‘Soul’ in which she worked with her first Garments For the Grave client, and then nominated and was runner up at the Good Funeral Awards for the Most Significant Contribution to the Understanding of Death. In 2017 she was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, for a Little Black (Death) Dress, emphasising the importance of dressing and touch at the end of life.
Hayley West
Artist and death literacy advocate Hayley West is located in Castlemaine, Central Victoria. Hayley co-hosts Death Cafes in her community and has recently been appointed to the board of the Castlemaine Cemetery Trust.
The Departure (currently transient) is Hayley’s studio and advocacy space where the public can ponder their own mortality, educate themselves on end of life matters, and encounter death themed artworks and events.
As an artist working in the public realm, Hayley believes in empowering the community by sharing practical knowledge through exchange and generosity. Her practice spans over 15 years of research, exhibitions and international residencies.
Elizabeth Flux
Elizabeth Flux is an award-winning writer and editor whose fiction and nonfiction work has been widely published. She is a judge for the 2019 Award for and Unpublished Manuscript for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and is an editor for Melbourne City of Literature’s ‘Reading Victoria’ project. In 2017 she was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, was a judge for the Scribe Prize, was the winner of the inaugural Feminartsy Fiction Prize, and her short story ‘One’s Company’ was selected for Best Australian Stories 2017.