Amra Pajalic

Just met my last group of students. Only four volunteered to do the Monday workshop and they are all boys. A second group of students were settling in to watch Looking for Ali Brandi and weren’t about to volunteer themselves for work instead. The boys were so sweet. They are all self conscious about their English skills.One of them was in English as a Second Language class for two years. They were very eager for help to write and edit their stories and we ended up having a discussion about how to improve their English skills.

My advice was that they read as much as possible. The school librarian is very passionate about reading and encouraging kids to read. She buys books that the kids are interested in so I was encouraging them to make contact with her. Reading is what saved me and gave me a way out of my circumstance. I told them about my brother who doesn’t have good literacy skills and as a tradie it limits his opportunities for work as he can’t present quotes, invoices or handle accounts for his business and so only works with industrial contractors.

I also told them that they need to use their teacher’s comments/feedback as a resource. They need to look at what mistakes they make in their assignments and start a revision sheet identifying their weakness so they can look out for those mistakes in future. When I began university I received a lot comments about my grammar as I was of the generation where we didn’t get taught grammar formally at school. I didn’t know how to use apostrophe’s correctly and this brought my mark down (even now I have to evaluate how I’m using them). By the end of my degree I didn’t have any comments on my assignments as I learnt to correct my own mistakes.

I had already decided to apply for further study and be a teacher, but this group of students have really inspired me to hold onto this dream. I could relate where they were coming from as they were all children of parents from a Non-English speaking background. Just like me they don’t have the help at home to assist with their schooling and provide them with guidance. While I decided to be a teacher because of future work opportunities for myself, it made me realise that this vocation needs to be about more than a paycheck. I want to inspire and help students and because of my background and circumstance I have the skills and experience to do that.

Things are accelerating for me. Have so much on I’m in bunker mentality where I can only deal with the task directly in front of me. I feel like it’s feast or famine. Earlier in the year was so dull with nothing going on, and now I’m hanging on the edge of my seat fighting to stay on for the ride. Just looked at my diary and I have had at least one meeting every week for the past two months as I coordinate my various projects. Was beginning to feel burnt out, but took some time to relax on the weekend. Read two books:

Steph Bowe’s Girl Saves Boy-an impressive debut for a 16 year old and a really lovely story.

Kathy Charles Hollywood Ending-a dark book dealing with gritty issues. Really well developed and deep. Reading it felt like dropping a rock in a pond where the ripples are still washing over me.

Other things in no particular order:

• I did a talk to a Year 8 comprehension class last Thursday.  Began reading an extract where Sabiha is rude to her teacher and looked up at their sweet,  little faces and stopped short of her rude remark. Usually my talks are for Year 9′s onward so I’ve now identified a suitable extract for this group. A Literacy Officer was observing and I received some constructive criticism about how to improve my talk and what activities I can introduce for the future so I was wrapped with that.
• I’m doing another teaching gig from 6 September at another school in the Western suburbs. I’m excited about continuing teaching and I’ll have this group of students for a whole 6 weeks so I’ll be able to do more writing activities.
• Next week is my debut at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. I’m so excited. It’s been my dream to appear on that stage since I began writing and I’ve gone pretty much every year, so I’m really looking forward to it. Best part is my girlfriend Jodi is coming with me so we’re going to have a day out, sans babies. Such fun.
• With the MWF beginning have a few night events. This Thursday going to the Text Party. Hope to meet Kathy and Steph there and have a chat to them about their books. There’s a YA dinner organised next week by Melina Marchetta which I’m desperate to go to, but the bub has been a royal pain the butt at night so we’ll see how Thursday goes and take it from there.
• Started watching True Blood Season 3. Already feel like my day has a special zing because I have an episode to look forward to at the end of the day. Speaking of Vampires-watched the spoof movie Vampires Suck and was so disappointed. Was hoping it would be a great spoof of the whole vampire obsession going on in popular culture, instead it was a scene by scene remake of Twilight with a supposedly comical element that fell flat. People don’t seem to understand what satire is these days. It’s such a shame too because there’s so many vampire movies and tv shows that could have been incorporated for a hysterical send up of it all.

Time to back to work. Bub is in childcare all day so I have a whole day to try to be super productive and move forward with my to do list.

On Monday night the Muslim Women’s Leadership group I’m a part of hosted an Iftar Ramadan Multi-Faith dinner. Zeina and Manal were the driving forces between organising the event and it was a big success. We had a great turn out, beautiful food and everyone had a great time. I had the privilege of MCing the night with Zeina and it was challenging, but great fun. We made some wonderful connections to build on the future and to develop future community projects.

On Monday I finally submitted two community strengthening grant applications. These were bloody hard yakka because I had to get auspiced, which was an ordeal in itself, write the bugger and send them in. Just when i was breathing in a sigh of relief that it was all done, I received a message from council that the documents weren’t readable. So I had to print them off and toddle off to my milkbar to fax them. Finally the ordeal was over.

Even though searching for an organisation to auspice our application was hard yakka, auspice means to sponsor our project and handle the money, I ended up creating a lot of networks and making people aware of the project we’re working on ‘What a Muslim Woman Looks Like’ profiling the women from the leadership group.

At the moment I’m receiving work from the students I’m doing workshops with during my Artists in Schools residency. There is such a breadth of ideas and I’m enjoying reading the stories. I’ve asked them to submit them electronically so I can write comments electronically and then I’ll have individual sessions to discuss my comments.

Today I went to the city and met with Robyn Bavati, author of Dancing in the Dark, and Ruby Murray who is our facilitator during the Melbourne Writer’s Festival on the 31 August. I’m looking forward to the panel. Both our books share a breadth of themes and it should be an interesting discussion. Feeling exhausted right now and would really love to have a nap. It’s all up to the bub. Hopefully she might want to have a nap together. I can only dream.

Pressed for time at the moment. I’m putting in two community partnership applications. Spent the past week on the phone and email coordinating details. Will blog more later in the week. Didn’t teach on Monday because of curriculum day so I had the day to myself. Went to the movies and saw Inception. Is a must see movie. For now here’s the article I did about my guidance counsellor for newsletter.

“My name is Amra Pajalic and I’m a former student at St Albans Secondary College. Returning to the college as a Writer in Residence has been a strange and wonderful experience. There are so many familiar faces from my time as a student.

One of the people I was really happy to see again is Mr John Kortuem, my former guidance counselor. I was pleased to have a conversation with him and tell him the ways in which he helped me on my journey to becoming a writer.

When I graduated from high school in 1994 my future was a blank slate. I always knew I wanted to be a writer and I also knew that I wanted to go to university, but both these goals seemed unattainable. I come from a migrant background and no one in my family had graduated from high school, let alone attempted university.

I knew that to be a writer I could study or I could gain life experience and I always imagined that there would be this magical moment when I would sit down and produce a literary masterpiece. Instead my life took many twists and turns, each one bringing me closer to my dream.

Like my peers at high school I put down my uni preferences, even though it seemed impossible I could enter this strange world of academia that I knew nothing about. When we had the opportunity to change our preferences I put down only one option. I thought if it is fate then I will get into university, if not then I will go on to gain life experiences.

I did no research about the course that I was changing my preferences to and so I did not get in. I looked for my name in the newspaper and even though I knew that I had sabotaged myself, I was still shocked that my name wasn’t there. I stood in the milk bar holding the newspaper feeling scared. What was I going to do with myself? After 12 years of knowing what every day would bring, I had nowhere to go and nothing to do.

At this time there was high unemployment and the age group of 18-25 was most represented. Most of us had no skills and no work experience to compete against other applicants. While we were undergoing our VCE exams most of my peers went to Centrelink and registered for unemployment benefits, but I didn’t want to do this.

A few days after I found out I didn’t get into uni I received a phone call from Mr Kortuem. He asked if I had any plans for the future, if not there was an administration course I could study at TAFE. I agreed, at least I would be able to postpone making a decision about my future. I didn’t know it at the time, but this phone call would change my life. Completing this administration course would set me on the path to achieving my dream to be a novelist.

I’m sure most of you find this strange. How could an administration course change my life and lead to me becoming a novelist? But this is the wonder of life. Sometimes you do things you don’t like to make you realise what you want to do. By completing the administration course I gained skills that meant I always had a job, I never had to worry about unemployment, and the jobs I did along the way were all part of the journey to becoming a writer.

I went on and did further TAFE study and I eventually gained enough confidence to embark on my university career and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. I learnt that there is no magical moment where I would sit down and produce a literary masterpiece. Instead my writing journey has been a series of small steps on a long journey.

I’m not done with studying or with trying different career paths. Mr Kortuem showed me that the most important thing is to be open to trying new things because you never know what it will lead to.”

So yesterday also began with a baby drama. Went in to pick up my daughter from her cot in the morning and found her cot wet from vomit. Had an instant panic attack-she’s never vomited. I’m due at the school and have to run the workshops and have a meeting with a Arts Victoria Officer afterward. Get on the horn to my husband and he comes home from work. I end up spending the morning cleaning up after vomit-she vomited three more times and being a human pacifier because she needed extra liquids so she was breastfeeding more.

I went to school later and arrived during lunch. The workshop was great. These kids are part of the accelerated class and they’ve all decided on a story and were writing in class. Some of them were handwriting, others typing up their stories. I set a deadline for them to submit their stories.

I figured out I need to firmer to steer their creativity in the right channels. We’re focussing on getting stories based on realism. One of the students began writing a story and it was going to be a mafia boss story. I focussed in on a paragraph where she had an interesting description of the narrator’s brother and suggested she focus on the family dynamic. The story she had written so far would be the same, but the focus would be closer to reality. I also had a consultation with a Year 10 student during lunch and it was the same thing. She wanted to write a forbidden love story based on the American south, but I tried to get her to look closer to home for inspiration. Same story, but a more realistic setting.

This is something I’ve been struggling with. When critiquing other writer’s the focus is on respecting their writing style and story and critiquing the big picture so I haven’t wanted to interfere with the student’s creativity. I’ve realised now that they need to be steering in the right direction. A lot of them begin writing stories and don’t know what’s going to happen or why. I remember doing the same thing when I was their age, so I’m trying to talk through the why and have them underpin their stories with logic.

Had a great meeting with Arts Victoria. The school has been fabulous about supporting the project so we’ve been really on track. She told us about the 1000 Pencils project and Neil Grant the artist is now studying to be a teacher, while David Williams the teacher is looking to get into writing more. So even though the project is about student’s benefitting it ends up being a creative journey for the artist’s too. I know it has been for me. Til next week.

Yesterday’s workshop was a bit scattered. I had to organise three students who missed last week. Thankfully everyone has settled on an idea and did some writing. I collected their email addresses and set a deadline to have them email me either a complete draft or some writing.

I got in contact with David Williams who was the Project Manager for 1000 Pencils and he indicated that the students he worked with needed a lot of one on one time to develop their stories and then later to revise. So I’m going to give them an extra week after the deadline and then slowly start nudging. I’m planning on revising their stories on the computer and then booking them all for individual meetings, or maybe small group meetings, in order to give them support and really develop the stories. I’ll also be returning to the school the first four weeks of Term 4 to give the last workshop group support and help edit the anthology.

In other news I’m a busy bee cordinating the What a Muslim Woman Looks Like project. I need to write a media release for a Iftar dinner our group is hosting to celebrate Ramadan, requested a quote from a photographer that is going to work with us on photographing women for the project, put in a funding application with the help of Michelle at Brimbank Council. Now I need to focus on writing the profiles. One is down and another three to go. There is also one more woman to be interviewed, but we seem to be crossing wires when it comes to availability.