News from the trenches

Well, the term's quickly wrapping up. Sherryl and I came in today to be part of a panel, along with Christine, Julianne and Sue, for Industry Overview. The students were split into groups and each group got one of us to interview for five minutes, and then had to devise further questions to interview us in front of the whole class. I hope the students found it interesting and productive. I know I did. I learnt things about some of my fellow teachers that I'd never known before!

This week the five students involved in shortlisting for the Ada Cambridge and I met to have our shortlisting meeting. These students have been busy reading all of the stories and ranking them so that we could come up with a shortlist of ten stories to be passed on to the final judges. These ten stories will all be published in a booklet that will be available after announcement of the winner at the Williamstown Literary Festival. It's an interesting process, and one of the students is going to blog about it for me, so I won't say too much here, except that we came to our decision without the need to spill any blood, which is always a good thing.

This last week, we've also had the Poetry Bus -- I haven't heard any reports of this yet, but Kristin Henry is always a terrific reader and poet -- and Paul Mitchell and Lisa Gorton are great too, so I'm sure it was a brilliant night. (I'll see if I can get someone to write us a report). 

In other Rotunda news, our next event is Sherryl Clark interviewing satirist John Clarke on 23 April, which promises to be hilarious. (Venue yet to be announced.) If you're interested, you'd better let Bruno know fast, because he's already had a mountain of interest. Email Bruno if you want to go (bruno.lettieri@vu.edu.au). It's $5 for students or unwaged people, and $10 for everyone else.

In the meantime, you students will be on your mid-semester break. I hope you'll all be doing lots of writing. I know we teachers will be!

Happy writing!

Tracey Rolfe

Students from the Ada Cambridge shortlisting panel (from L to R): 

Melinda Hall, Andrew Mead, Rhiannon Lacy, Andrew Ellis and John King