project thoughts:

There are three possible pieces for me:

1) another piece on living in Melbourne to go with the Melways piece I did last semester – this is the closest to standard nonfiction writing, just using my personal relationship with place to talk about the city. The difficulty with this might be making it into a proper stand-alone piece without involving what I’ve already done.

2) a fiction piece towards a longer story I want to do about a group of young dropouts living in the country in the early 80s (based on journals and personal memories of people I knew then). Again, could be hard to limit – a series of character sketches would be the proper place to start, but possibly insufficient for assessment, and the longer story would be too long and couldn’t be written in time anyway.

3) a more experimental but in a way standard memoir piece using personal artefacts (couldn’t call my boxes full of paper “archives” with a straight face.) I found a set of letters between me and a person in Ireland, written in the mid-80s – the problem is I don’t remember who he was or how I knew him – it could be interesting to do an essay piece around the things I don’t remember – digging through papers and investigating myself as a different person, in a way.