june perkins

Authenticity

| June
Presenting at OzComicCon Panel on Authenticity of Women’s Voices in Writing March 2022
To young writers everywhere 
            looking for your authentic voice
and to create authentic voices
            look into herstory for inspirations 
listen and observe your 
            mothers, sisters, daughters, and yourself 
Ask questions
         whatever gender you are 

         you can do the following (see poem).

Authenticity

To write with authenticity is 
   choosing 
          to write with truth
        putting aside any 
          shackles, biases, and oppressions 
                being honest, courageous, 
                   creative, skilful, and 
                          brilliant.

It’s moving to where there is 
              balance
            finding our voices in all their 
                diversity 
               winging their ways into 
                 every writing genre;
                    popular to poetic,
                      academic to artistic, protesting, 
                           questioning
                                and free
                  respecting and remembering those 
                          paved the way for us.

                        (c) June Perkins
Phyllis Wheaton, First African American Woman to earn something from her writing. She was a poet.

To find out more visit the reflection on the panel at

Oz Comic Con Home Grown, Brisbane

True Narratives

Book Week With the Students from Higaturu Oil Palm International School

| June
Work from the students of the Higaturu Oil Palm International School which became a class anthology, Escape to Wonder

A recent week of Book Week workshops via zoom, at the Higaturu Oil Palm International School, was wondrous.

Students were willing to imagine and open their eyes to a sense of wonder, to explore other worlds within worlds, from nature, to rivers to the moon and outerspace.

We began with learning about cheeky Cassowaries hungry and looking for food after a cyclone, and imagining what they might say or think, and advanced to humourous dialogues within the river and exploring a sense of wonder, through sensory adventure poems.

Students learnt about the power of working in pairs and in groups and how many voices combined can create, extend and then joyously and confidently perform their creations.

  • Creativity is joyful! Students in action creating.

Throughout I used my own illustrated poetry book, Magic Fish Dreaming, as the main mentor text with a storytelling session also of Michelle Worthington’s Book, Possum Games.

Both had kindly been posted and provided to the school by Tina from CYA. This meant we could read together, and as I have dialogue poems and question and answer structures this was fantastic to have each student have the book on the other side of the zoom.

I was impressed by how the students worked with each other on some in the river dialogues and their humour and inventiveness throughout the week began to shine through.

Work from Stone and Seaweed Anthology, by Students of Higaturu Oil Palm International School

I am delighted the school community (families and staff) gave permission for me to share their work.

More important than products though, is the process of creativity that the children undertook within their classroom. By reflecting on that stories can come from that which you know through your senses and take you to places you might only imagine.

I hope these children, will create many more poems or stories and strengthen and contribute to building a publishing community within Papua New Guinea, beginning from anthologies within their school and moving beyond the anthologies for their communities. Building perhaps collectives for theirs and future generations.

With many thanks to the school, students , staff of the Higaturu Oil Palm International School, and Tina of CYA.

Photographs courtesy of the Higaturu Oil Palm International School, shared with their permission

Return to the Motherland 1#

| June

I never expected that my first trip back to Papua New Guinea, since I moved to Australia as a one year old, would be in my fifties and via zoom and would be working with writers based in three different countries.

Yet, none of us knows our future, and so it was that the last week my first ever Book Week experience, occurred this way.

I was invited by Tina Marie Clark, to join a CYA team, including her, Albert Nayathi, Phil Kettle, Caroline Evari, (and works from Michelle Worthington and Dannika Patterson) that has been mostly going to the Higaturu Oil Palm International School there in person for the last ten years.

The last two years they have had to conduct the visit via zoom, because of COVID19.

Screen shot of zoom of bookweek

Although I haven’t done Book Week before, I have done several workshops in libraries, environmental centres, and schools, to mentor creatives of all ages from kindergarten through to people all backgrounds in their seventies, in poetry. Something which became such a passion I ended up writing and publishing a poetry book,  Magic Fish Dreaming, for children.

I wrote Magic Fish Dreaming,  to express a sense of the place I was living in at the time, which was the Cassowary Coast, in Far North Queensland, as well as to demonstrate different poetry techniques which might appeal to children but also extend them. At the time of composing this work I was facilitating workshops in the community and needed to create original materials with a sense of the place I was living in, not just use what was already out there.

Magic Fish Dreaming, represents all the beauty, grandeur, magic, and heartache and I saw whilst living in that area, all captured for families to relive some of that and hopefully fall in love with poetry.

During this visit, I was able to bring all the experiences of the last few years, in designing workshops, as well as my recent enrolment training as a teacher (although for highschool) together into my contemporary practice.

I was delighted to see the effect of the workshops on the students and their teacher and teacher assistant. I can truly say I had as much of a feeling of joy out of this as out of being published.

My heart soared to see them engaged with the activities and WRITING! And finally confidently performing work they had collaborated on composing together.

What did we and the school do during the week to reach this point?

To be continued . . .

Illuminations: 19 Poems and 1 Story

| June

Features of interviews with creators and artists, readings, and background to some of the poems, and guest blogs.

Illuminations Interview on Baha’i Blog​

Shaking Off the Dust​

KBR Interview with Ruha and Minaira Fifita

June, Ruha and Minaira chat – Sound Cloud​

SCBWI Announcing Illuminations New Work

Queensland Poetry Festival Panacea Poets Reading​

Extract in anthology In Your Hands​

Celebrating New Books in Troublesome Times Sophie Masson’s blog

​

Ocean Series

| June

In this piece I take a canva template for an instagram post as my inspiration and structure for a poem.

I balance the text and the image and insert a question in the search window.

This is the first in a series reflecting on the ocean and all that it stands for and asks of us.

I will work with patterns of repetition between and within pieces.

(c) June Perkins

Joining International Celebrations for Ridvan!

Video | | June

 

It was so delightful to be part of the You Tube Ridvan is Everywhere Celebrations online.  And a great honour to be the epigrammatic beginning to day 7 with a brand new never before shared poem.  This poem is now being included in the next issue of Tokens.

“The “Is Everywhere” Collective, which brought us this wonderful online Naw-Ruz celebration, is celebrating the Festival of Ridvan! They are excited to provide family-friendly programming for all 12 days of Ridvan and this video features their program celebrating the 7th day of Ridvan.

The Local Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Los Angeles (USA) is sponsoring special program for the 1st, 9th and 12th days of Ridvan but every day in between features videos sharing poetry, storytelling, music, art, dancing, cooking, and crafting—all by friends from across the world! 

You’ll find the playlist for Ridvan Is Everywhere here on YouTube. You can also subscribe to their YouTube channel for updates.”

(Cited from Baha’i Blog)