S1E1: People dig it
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In this first episode of Bad Diaries Podcast, we talk about Bad Diaries Salon, the live literary series that we co-produce and co-curate – from the concept’s beginnings in 2017, when Jenny first put a call out on Twitter, to running 20 salons, with more than 70 readers, between 2017 and 2022.
We talk about what makes the Bad Diaries Salon engine (juggernaut!) run so smoothly, recite the Bad Diaries Salon rules, and talk about the gold at the heart of salons.
We talk about the origins of Bad Diaries Salon, the earliest salons in 2017, and how the concept worked right from the beginning.
It works, it just works, it’s the little concept that could – it can fill a big space; it can also get little and quiet and beautiful
We introduce Bad Diaries Podcast, our hopes and plans for the podcast. The salons exist in the room in the moment, a contract between readers and audience, that you have to be there to experience. With the podcast, we want to create something to return to. We’ll talk all things diaries – our own, other people's, published and unpublished – and feature guest interviews with writers who've read at live salons, and with people publishing diaries, designing them, and using them in fiction, film and other media.
Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode:
How we met
KSP is Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in the Perth Hills
We didn’t meet at Perth Writers Festival in 2013 — but we did return to run a Bad Diaries Salon as part of the festival in 2020
Jenny’s personal essay about going to Lake Eyre with a crush in 1989 is ‘The Primordial Place: Me and Jardo by the Lake’, published in Kill Your Darlings in 2014.
The first ever Bad Diaries Salon was held at Willows & Wine in July 2017. Jenny wrote about it here. Readers were Jane Rawson, Rosalie Ham, Cass Austin, Imbi Neeme and Jenny Ackland, and the theme was MISTAKES.
The first Perth salon was held at 399 Bar in September 2017, and featured Brooke Davis, Laurie Steed, Annabel Smith, Jenny Ackland and Tracy Farr reading on the theme of REGRET.
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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.
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