Brunswick Daily writer’s club heads to Sydney Road for its first meeting.
After 6pm on a Thursday evening, Sydney Road calls for adventure. The 19 tram is rattling along, a witness and one of the main characters on this iconic road. Not too far from Stop 24 of this tram route, you can find a place that turns sepia when the sun sets across its front window. This place is called That Paper Joint, a collage design studio, workshop, and gallery space. It’s a magical venue where you can find images, characters, and tools that will play with your dreams, knock on your memories, and release your creativity. And it is precisely at That Paper Joint where Brunswick Daily’s first Writers’ Club adventure began.
Our host, Max, welcomes us to the workspace. Bones and anatomical models mingle with the printed material – artefacts from the venue’s past life as a medical clinic – and resident dog Franky briefly checks our bags for snacks before disappearing for a nap. Smurfs, elephants and supermodels peer down from their pages, surveying a broad table laid with a lawn of green cutting mats. The walls here provide a feast of inspiration for tonight’s troupe of writers, most of whom are meeting in person for the first time. Cheese and drinks are passed around as introductions are made and the inaugural Writers’ Club meeting is officially in session.
Behind the partition of books in the centre of the room, ideas bounce freely and eventually land on the page. The space is surprisingly private, despite the wide shop window opening onto Sydney Road. The evening provides a rare opportunity for adults to play, easing the shyness between strangers. We share interests, backgrounds and goals, and soon enough write a story together, layering beautiful images with the plain ridiculous. There is no pressure to produce something perfect the first time, only to pick up each other’s threads and take them somewhere. We each lean over our pages, with some laughing and others tapping their pens in thought. The air feels warmer as another can is grabbed from the fridge.
We wrap up our session by reading what we produced, a set of four collaged stories that could only be the result of the perfect environment to talk, laugh, write, learn, explore, create, and start our Writers’ Club first adventure.
Left to right: Pablo, Alice, Sophie, and Minna
If you’re looking for a place where fun collaboration happens, (think art workshops, group exhibitions, club meetings, and even creative parties!) visit Max, Zoe and Franky at That Paper Joint. It is located at 544 Sydney Road. We also invite you to book a spot for a collage workshop.
Interested in joining our writers’ club?
If you enjoy writing about local stuff (or whatever!) and would like to join our club, you’re more than welcome. We meet every month in different local venues where we collaborate, learn from each other, and of course… we write! Drop us a line if interested—> click here.
NOTE: Honouring our first host, this article was co-written and co-edited by our club’s members as a collage exercise. The first three paragraphs were written by a different author and together we co-edited the whole piece during our second Writers’ Club session!
This article was written on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri-woi wurrung People, whose sovereignty was never ceded.
