Postgraduate student Deb Wain was recently interviewed by Sian Gard for ABC Central Victoria and has written about her experience for us. Deb’s PhD project ‘Keepers of Culture: Women, Food, and Writing’ consists of a fiction-critical thesis of short stories and analysis provided by a number of other characters. The stories all respond to recipes from six different migrant cultures.
PhD on the Radio
I’ve been trying to keep busy since submitting my thesis in order to avoid the much-warned-about ‘funk’ that the limbo of waiting for assessments can cause. It was with this in mind that I decided to respond to a call for expressions of interest in a story-sharing project being facilitated by ABC Central Victoria’s Sian Gard. We got chatting and, as tends to happen because my PhD project has taken up most of my life for the past four years and I have nothing else to talk about, we ended up discussing my thesis. And then she invited me to talk about it on the radio.
Today, I arrived (nervous and early) to the ABC Studio in Napier St, Bendigo where I sat (nervously) waiting for Sian on a couch that tried wrap itself around me in a hug and make me feel better about it all.
The studio itself wasn’t as terrifying as I had imagined but I found the microphones quite daunting. Sian and I chatted and who-knows how many others listened in. We talked about my creative practice project, how it differs from traditional research, the characters I have created, and what I hope people who read my fiction might learn. There was so much more I could have said but how do you condense four year’s work down to a ten minute chat? Sian finished by inviting me to come back to talk about my book once it is published which was very generous of her since I’ve only just started sending it out to publishers and talking to people in the know about such things.
I look forward to being slightly less terrified of the microphones next time.
If you have a story to tell, Sian would be thrilled to have more participants in her story-sharing project. More information can be found on the ‘Share Your Story’ page on Facebook.
