Radio Gaga at Emerging Writers’ Festival

Something that stole a lot of my attention throughout this semester was my internship with the Emerging Writers’ Festival as a Creative Producer – and specifically, my role in organising Radio Gaga.

Radio Gaga comprised of two events – a workshop throughout the day, titled ‘Audiophiles’ and a panel in the late afternoon, titled ‘Echomania // Sonomania’.

The seed for Radio Gaga was some of the work that the ever-amazing Jess O’Callaghan did with EWF last year, and she worked with me to create a new event. Jess is the co-Executive producer of All the Best radio, a show and podcast which I really love. In fact, All the Best was one of the shows we aimed to base the style of our feature for RWAV on.

We paired 7 young writers (some of whom were previously published in Voiceworks) with 7 young producers (who all work on All the Best, as well as with SYN and/or RRR) for the workshop, and they made pieces on the theme of ‘limits’ throughout the day.

The panel consisted of Jaye Kranz, as well as Kate Montague and Tiger Webb, who both came down from Sydney! Jess’ co-Executive producer Heidi came down from Sydney to host the panel and help us out with the workshop too.

It was incredible to be surrounded by writers, producers and radio-makers all day, and to get insight from 3 radio-makers I really admire and find interesting. Aside from feeling like the event went well, and we achieved what we wanted to, the main thing I went home with was the motivation to keep making more radio, to keep sound editing, to make podcasts.

A huge thing that came up in the panel was the desire or need for a community of critically-minded audio producers who will keep striving to make engaging and high quality content. Radio Gaga felt like another step towards being a part of something like that. Continuing with RWAV at RRR is a good way to keep that up too.

Now, more than anything, I’m feeling really excited about getting all my assessments in and having some time to edit all the tape I’ve been collecting…