Writing to be heard

Join us tonight for July’s Yarn Night, which spotlights four writers who have published stories based on their own experiences of living with a hearing condition. Tickets are available via EventBrite and the event starts at 7pm AEST.

1. Ala Paredes

Ala Paredes is a Sydney-based writer, visual artist, teacher, and mother of two who lives with sensorineural hearing loss. Many of her career choices have defied her hearing loss, and she now advocates for it through her writing and on social media. Through writing about hearing loss, she discovered she had a supportive community of both non-hearing and hearing people. As her hearing loss is invisible and irreversible, her most powerful tool for living with it is her voice.

2. Fiona Murphy

Like many deaf children, I struggled to learn how to read and write. When I finally became literate, I felt like I had ‘overcome’ my deafness. It took me years to realise that this was audism. Happily, as I have made writing my career, I’ve discovered that no matter what I do, my writing voice is always deaf. My work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Griffith Review and the Big Issue, among other publications. In 2019, I was awarded the Overland Fair Australia Essay Prize and the Monash Undergraduate Creative Writing Prize. In 2018, I was shortlisted for the Richell Prize and highly commended by the Wheeler Centre Next Chapter program. My memoir, The Shape of Sound, is out now through Text Publishing.

3. Darren Roberts

I was born deaf and verbal. Hearing aids till 29 then fully deaf from 30. Single father of 3 beautiful children who established The Auslan Company in 2004 so l could take children to school, pick them up, attend all their sporting activities and just be a home dad. Today, along with Learn Auslan Online, we continue to provide Auslan to workplaces, schools, childcare centres and to families with deaf children who have NDIS funding. Tonight I’ll be reading from a children’s book I wrote and self published. It is a story of a deaf dad who uses Auslan to communicate with his children.

4. Kate Disher-Quill

I am a Melbourne based artist working across photography, film, publication and multimedia. My debut solo exhibition Right Hear, Right Now featured as part of Sydney’s Head On Photo Festival and toured to PhotoAccess in Canberra and No Vacancy in Melbourne in 2016. The project was developed into the publication Earshot, which portrays the myriad of experiences of Deafness and hearing loss. Earshot has received high recognition within the arts, health and audiology industries for intersecting art and storytelling with health and education.

The night kicks off with an introduction from Soundfair, after which we give the floor to our four storytellers, who will share their personal stories relating to the night’s theme. After the stories, audience and speakers will have the chance to have a conversation to share thoughts, ideas, and questions.

The event is held online and lasts an hour and a half. Live captioning and Auslan interpretation is provided.

All funds raised will support Soundfair’s hearing equality programs.