On the magic of a Hot Desk Fellowship
Supported by The Readings Foundation, the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships offer emerging writers the opportunity to pursue their writing at a dedicated desk at the Wheeler Centre for ten weeks, supported by a $1,000 stipend for each writer.
Following the announcement of this year’s successful participants, 2018 recipient Jem Tyley-Miller reflects on what she gained from her experience last year.
When applications for the 2018 Readings/Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships opened last year, I had just closed another polite rejection reminding me I was an unpublished writer. I had some early success with competition short-listings, but none were recent. I could boast none of the accolades writers who won fellowships and residencies seemed to have. It was longer than a long shot. Still – needing to strengthen my dealing-with-rejection muscles – I prepared my application and hit send.
Then I got to work pre-emptively justifying to myself why I wouldn’t need this fellowship: I could get just as much writing done at home. I wrote every second the kids were at school and then again after they went to bed. If I wasn’t working at my paid job, I was writing. Besides, I thought, an office in the city would be inconvenient and require me to spend a significant amount of time away from my kids, which was the reason I’d pulled back from my career in film and TV in the first place.
When the email informing me of my success landed in April last year, I was gobsmacked. Not because I’d been picked out of hundreds of applications (which was in itself pretty cool), but because someone at the Wheeler Centre thought I could write well enough that they wanted to give me money and a work space. The magic was instantaneous. New-found confidence fuelled my synapses allowing creativity to flow into everything I did: my daughter’s hairstyles, the way I folded the washing, but most importantly the stories I was continuing to write. And this was all before I made it up the severe grey steps on Little Lonsdale Street to smile at Harry in reception, while waiting to claim my hot desk.
Inside on the mezzanine, my desk was three times bigger than at home. All around me was the buzz of friendly, creative people, not the stares of washing piles and an unmade bed. Opening my laptop, my keyboard surged when I touched it. The light streaming through the arched windows made the screen glow a different hue, and within days my already well-developed manuscript began to undergo a remarkable change.
Characters rose from the story, demanding I pay them more attention. Entire pages dipped in sections as previously unseen plot holes emerged. The ‘why-dunnit’ explanation for my villain’s heinous actions flipped-up in front of me like a cut-out from a pop-up book. My manuscript was insisting on a whole new level of commitment.
I worked the entire 85,000 words of my story almost twice over during those ten weeks, a greater outcome than I ever thought possible. The thousand-dollar stipend was gobbled up by before- and after school-care for my kids, an always hungry Myki card that let me jump on the V/Line, and a coffee each morning. As a family we went financially backwards, but what I gained was worth so much more. The cogs in my writing universe had been jogged forward. I had my first piece accepted for publication, and then another. A prominent lit mag was holding onto a story until their next round. The Digital Writers’ Festival asked me to come onboard as an artist. It was the fellowship which pushed the first domino down.
