Announcing Girls Write Up!
Stella Schools Program
The Stella Schools Program is thrilled to announce Girls Write Up: a gender-inclusive, intersectional, daylong wordfest for teens that teaches empowerment through writing and sharing stories. Girls Write Up will be held in Melbourne on 17 June, and Sydney on 21 June, 2016.
Girls Write Up is for anyone who has felt limited by their gender and wants to understand how language can be used to liberate and empower.
Authors, journalists, activists, artists, poets and other creative thinkers will share how they have used their writing to define their identities and shape the world around them. The program of panels and practical workshops explores the relationship between language, gender and power, and the effects of unconscious bias on our sense of self. It unpacks the ways that the female voice has been devalued in literary and popular culture, and gives participants the opportunity to discover their own creative voice, equipping them with the skills and the confidence to use it.
Full-day tickets for the events in both Melbourne and Sydney are on sale now for $35 each.
Fiona Wright, 2016 Stella Prize-shortlisted author of Small Acts of Disappearance, who will be appearing at the Sydney event on Tuesday June 21, says:
"When I started writing I was a teenager, and full of the passion and fury that makes being that age both so powerful and so difficult. I didn't know anyone who wrote, let alone anyone who was writing and publishing and making their way through what seemed, to me, a totally mysterious and impossible creative field. I don't think I ever thought that I'd be able to do so myself – and so I know how much Girls Write Up would have meant to my awkward, nervous, feisty fifteen-year-old self. It would have made finding my voice – and the confidence to speak it – so much less fraught. This is such an exciting opportunity, and I'm utterly thrilled to be involved."