Zoe Dzunko & Annabel Brady-Brown undertook a collaborative residency at McCraith House this winter, gearing up for Women Writers in the City, a project supported by City of Melbourne 2016 Arts Grants. They write:
During our stay at McCraith House we collaborated on a multidimensional project, born from our five-year friendship and working relationship as co-editors, that explores images and experiences of weight bearing, sacrifice and the opacity of boundaries in women’s labour.
For the project, Zoe is crafting a suite of poems that respond to “Integrity Protecting the Works of Man,” the pediment atop the New York Stock Exchange, and Annabel is writing an extended essay inspired by the caryatids (architectural female columns) and the films of Agnès Varda. In speaking to these representative effigies, which render female figures as both custodians of and accessories to the politically loaded structures they adorn, our distinct texts will be in conversation with one another and our shared experiences as writers/editors. They will be combined with co-authored texts, correspondence and miscellanea, and presented as a performance in late 2017.
Zoe Dzunko is co-editor of The Lifted Brow and in 2014 she founded Powder Keg Magazine, an online poetry quarterly based out of Melbourne and New York. She is the author of numerous chapbooks, most recently Selfless (TAR, 2016), and her work has been supported by programs such as Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Writer’s Workshop, and Yale Writers’ Conference. Her writing has appeared widely in Australian and international publications, including The Age, Australian Book Review, Southerly, Guernica, Tin House, The Fanzine, Prelude et al. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Deakin University, and completed her Masters degree at Melbourne University, where she teaches creative writing, small press publishing and independent media.
Annabel Brady-Brown is co-editor of The Lifted Brow and a founding editor of Fireflies film magazine. Her fiction and criticism have been published in The Lifted Brow, The Big Issue, 4:3, Kill Your Darlings, Senses of Cinema, The Canary Press, MUBI Notebook, LOLA, Indiewire, Variety, and more, and she was a participant in the Locarno Critics Academy 2016.
