Lives Improvised
This week, Alice Pung joined us for a conversation as part of a series of interviews with writers from the International Writing Program. Alice is a fiction writer, playwright, nonfiction writer, journalist and lawyer from Australia. She was born shortly after her parents arrived in the country having escaped from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and spoke to us about what it was like to grow up in a Western country with parents who had survived the horrors of the Killing Fields and were now struggling to adapt to a new country and culture.
Alice has a collection of short stories titled Growing Up Asian in Australia, as well as a memoir called Unpolished Gem, which won the Australian Book Industry Association award for Newcomer of the Year and was short-listed for numerous other awards. Her work has also been included in Best Australian Short Stories 2007.
This week our Artist in Residence, sing-songwriter John Watkins brought in a new song and we had a chance to speak to him about his song-writing process and most recent source of inspiration.
(do you want to say something about Bea here introducing his previous song - the youngest DJ ever..)
And we close the show with a radio essay called Love by Angela Regas. Angela is in her third year of the MFA Photography Program at the University of Iowa, where she takes “pretty pictures of dead things”. In this essay, Angela expounds on the trials and tribulations of being "short, fat and half Asian" and looking for connections through on-line dating.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
To find out more about the writers of IWP check out the program’s website
Find out more about Rosalee Motor Revival
Interested in Jeff Porter’s Radio essay class? Check out a course description here
