Young Writers Collective

S O U T H C O A S T
W R I T E R S C E N T R E
YOUNG WRITERS
COLLECTVE
Includes an interview
with Helena Fox
and short pieces from the
Young Writers

An Interview with Helena Fox
about the Young Writers Collective
by Leon Vasilakis
Helena Fox is the program facilitator of the SCWC Young
Writers Collective, a dynamic group of teenagers who meet
throughout the year to write in a variety of genres. Helena has
had a wonderful career in the arts so far, and is a graduate of
the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in
North Carolina.
Her debut YA novel How it Feels to Float was released in
Australia and New Zealand in 2019 by Pan Macmillan, and
published in North America by Dial/Penguin Random House. It
is a profound, moving tale of living with mental illness, with a
warm-hearted, funny character named Biz. This makes Helena
perfectly positioned to run an amazing series of workshops for
our young writers—so if you’re interested in joining, please
contact the Centre!

I believe the program has helped many young writers grow
more confident about their writing, learn a great deal about the
writing process, and develop unique writing voices. The
program has also provided young writers with many new
experiences, including regularly sharing their work with others,
providing constructive feedback to their peers, having public
readings, and seeing their work published in the annual zine.
The writers have also had a welcoming and safe space to come
to every week, to share their stories and feel heard.
It is very rewarding to see how supportive the Centre is towards
young writers. Not only does the Centre happily provide a yearround,
workshop-based program that offers young writers a
space to gather, share ideas, and build their community, the
Centre also offers many opportunities for young writers to read
their work publicly and publish their work.

The Young Writers program began mid-2014, with a threemonth
course that focused on various writing forms. Different
tutors ran monthly sessions and Centre staff ran extra support
sessions. At the end of the course, I offered to run out-of-season
workshops until the 2015 program, which ran again with a
similar format.
In 2016, due to the high interest and enthusiasm of the
young writers, the course became a regular, year-long program
of fortnightly sessions run by me, with some guest tutors. In
2017, again due to the eagerness of the young writers, the
program began running weekly. Today, the Young Writers
Collective (aged 14 and up) meets throughout the school year to
explore prose, poetry, scriptwriting and non-fiction writing,
and they appear at numerous public readings. The Young
Writers program is thriving; the numbers in the Collective are
consistently full, and there is a waitlist.

Helena Fox is a writer and
creative mentor. Born in Peru,
Helena spent time in Spain,
the UK and Samoa throughout
her childhood, settling in
Australia at age eleven, and
gained a Master of Fine Arts in
the United States. She runs
workshops on creative writing
and is proudest of her work
helping young writers find
and express their voice.
Her workshops and her
writing have a focus on
improving mental health.
Helena's novel How it Feels
to Float won the Victorian
Premiers Literary Award for
Writing for Young Adults.

I think the program has worked so well because the focus of the
workshops has been on exploring and having fun with writing,
rather than on ‘teaching’ young people how to write. Through
experimentation, discussion, and responding to challenging and
fun prompts, the writers have naturally learnt many important
writing skills. There are no grades or assessments, and there is a
great deal of room for risk taking.
The young writers have become much more comfortable
trying new ideas and sharing their work, and they have
developed powerful and unique writing voices. I think the
program thrives because this is their community. The space is
safe, supportive, and non-judgemental, and from the moment
they step through the door, these talented young people are
seen as writers, sitting amongst fellow writers and learning from
each other.

One of the biggest highlights for me has been watching the
young writers read their work in public and seeing the effect of
their words on the listeners. I also love how every week these
writers blow me away with their sensitive, funny, and
extraordinarily powerful words. I love how they don’t hesitate to
try new ideas. I admire the fearlessness in their writing, and also
how they face their fears in reading their work out to each
other. And I love how much we laugh every week in our little
community space.
I should also mention there is a school-based Young
Writers program offered by the Centre, where tutors go into
schools to run workshop-based sessions for children aged 12-18.
One such program ran very successfully at Albion Park High
School in 2017. The course ran for ten weeks, and the students
explored both short story and poetry writing, creating a great
deal of interesting work over the term. At the end of the
program, the students submitted their favourite work to the
Centre, and Ron Pretty, the poetry tutor, turned it into a book
which was launched by the students at the school.

Responses to the sculpture
'Love' by Alexander Milov
Image reproduced with permission from French photographer
Gerome Viavant (geromeviavant.com)

The architects used your birth certificate as a blueprint: that’s
why your skeleton looks like scaffolding. I see a glimpse of you
behind the robust, never rusting bars. The remnants of your
handprints are on some of your bones, stubborn and refusing to
fade. Did you build this behemoth, or were you trying to
deconstruct? Sometimes, I think you leave a space between your
ribs so I can stick my hand through and hold your heart, only
we never know when the hole will be plastered. Maybe they will
lay the brick, or maybe your fingers will stain the steel.
we were both caged when we met.
you were almost slender enough to slip through your bars.
i wanted your voice to
stroke me like a paintbrush, and i wanted your fingers to lay
against my neck.
(your touch would taste like peppermint).
when you saw me, you wanted me closer. you wanted to
hear me not from a
distance but from that shallow space beside you, chin resting in
that perfect hollow next to your shoulder.
(my voice would sound like silver).
we wanted to slip from that space between ourselves and
admire each other like mirrors. we wanted to move, to touch, to
tangle.
(but we loved our cages too much to break free).

Somewhere, teenage renegades are falling in love to rebel
anthems and watered-down booze, leaving stories in the bottom
of their boots and growing gardens of somedays and maybes,
knowing perhaps they won’t make it but hell if they aren’t going
to try.
Here, it’s different. There’s the same spark, but it’s
breathing in dirt and crying soil, trapped, like them—the
anxious kids who don’t have somedays, who don’t know the
meaning of maybe, only tomorrow, and it’s hanging on by its
fingertips.
The renegades don’t flinch; they paint their skin in wild
colours and cut their hair or their clothes and shout, ‘I’m alive
and I’m young, I tore off the shackles with my teeth.’ While the
anxious kids make friends with the shadows, and fall in love
with one a.m. because they are still bound with phantom
restraints the powerful put there.
Why do the children with black and white actions get to walk
under the golden sun? Why are we putting stickers on the vests
of children who are learning what men already do? Why are we
not encouraging their rebellion, their desires to do what men do
not? Shouldn’t we tell our infants to explore the empty
moments they will soon encounter in Kindergarten? Shouldn’t
we show them the way to dive into their marvellous brains? We
teach our children to swim at a young age so they don’t use
floaties at age twelve. I am approaching adulthood and I am still
learning to breathe through my own thoughts.

Rufus was awoken by the sound of a crying baby. Why the hell
was there a—
Oh, it was his baby. Damn. He’d forgotten about that.
He glanced across at Jodie, lying beside him in the bed on
her stomach, head tilted to the side so he could see her smooth
cheek. They would be married soon, he suspected. Reaching out
to stroke her face, he tried to smile, but as the baby started
bawling again, the smile slowly drooped.
Goddamn. If only his father could see him now …
Rufus glanced at the clock. It was three a.m. Perfect. As the
baby continued to scream, Rufus occupied himself by trying to
plan Jodie’s eighteenth birthday party.
Hidden love
Pregnant? That couldn’t be. Pregnant? Not me. Not with this
child. No.
I slowly lift up my top to see a small bump, seeing the
bruises and scratches littering a canvas that wasn’t meant to be
drawn on. I put my hand on my stomach, stare at myself in the
mirror and put a hand over my mouth to mask the pitiful sobs.
He can’t know. Not now, not ever. For your sake.
*
The day he found out, it was hit after hit.
Then snap. Pain, and that’s how easy it was—you were gone
forever.

Sit under the yellow lights, old man,
That flicker and blink above you.
Consider your life
Lived, and then spent,
As you ride the train to somewhere.
Hunch your shoulders and sigh, old man—
That’s just the world pressing down
On jaded lungs
That stifle fancies of laughter.
Run your hands through your hair, old man,
But don’t let them wander further—
There’s no time to search
For fire or fuel
In this desert of existence.
Pull your collar over your ears, old man.
Ignore the red-coated children
Who giggle uncontrollably
At knock-knock jokes told wrong.

‘YOU ARE THE BEST HOPE FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE
HUMAN RACE!’
The training camp sergeant roared at his newest recruits.
The two babies were simultaneously screaming for their
mother and wearing two of the deadliest bio-mechanised suits
of armour ever designed. The sergeant began to roar again.
‘STOP SCREAMING LIKE BABIES, AND START FIGHTING FOR
REAL.’
The two babies screamed louder. The sergeant seemed to
realise his screaming was doing little to help, and in a quiet,
kind manner, approached the babies.
One of the babies reached out, the suit mirroring its action,
and closed its fist around the sergeant’s throat. He began to
gasp, then to turn purple, then to gurgle, before finally falling
silent.
The baby giggled.
I used to look deep into her eyes, face to face. These days, it
seems we are more often back to back, refusing to meet each
other’s gaze. I believe in the soul, and I believed ours were
intertwined. Now, though, my soul is like a little child, wobbling
on its undeveloped feet as it once again learns to walk alone.
I sometimes wonder if our souls miss each other. If, behind
my back, mine is reaching out for hers. I sometimes still feel
that gentle touch, the innocence of young love, blissfully
unaware of the reality that is yet to come.

Two broken cages, sitting amidst the lonely company of nature.
Each with their own sorrows. They sit there, abused and beaten.
By whom? By society. The draining days and nights at the office,
all the hard work. For what? Just to get scolded by the boss, cut
by the files and drowned in their own tears.
Where did the magic of life go? Where did the happiness
and joy go? Where did childhood go? When they were young,
they were told that adulthood was something to look forward to,
so they spent all their time wishing that they were grown up, not
fully appreciating childhood.
Amidst the lonely company of nature sit two broken cages,
wishing to be children again.
In the city centre, most preferred death. Humane morality had
developed entirely separately to the surrounding world—an
isolated ecosystem of ideas. Lives spent in such close proximity
that they began to overlap one another, experienced in unison.
The city centre was collapsing, reaching critical mass of flesh
and bone. The pregnant cowered in darkened valleys between
grim battlements, wagering on the life of another. Losing. Their
debts invariably claimed by the detestable flightless vultures
who crawled along the gutters. Abandoned husks piled along
the walls of alleys until wandering shamans came, uttering
benedictions and spreading holy water, dissolving through
flesh, revealing their fractured scaffolding or the unformed
features of those untouched by the scavengers.

I could feel fists beating, bawling, at the insides of my stomach
again, clawing to get out. I fell to the concrete, cried for help.
But no one came.
I heard a sob, echoing up from within. A familiar raw-voiced
plea for freedom.
The little voice would’ve ripped me apart from the inside—kept
clawing until I was bled dry and he’d drowned in the blood, so I
thrust my hand down my throat.
Tiny hands scaled up my arm, nails digging trenches into my
skin.
I vomited the thing up in a scatter of viscera. Smattered with
blood, sitting atop the pile of organs, was an infant, staring up
blindly at the midday sun, smiling.
He was free; I was rid of him. Yet, in that moment, the wind
whistled through me. Inside, I was hollow.
The nuke
It’s been fifty years since they fired the nuke at us. No one
knows why they did. Maybe we shot first. I can’t remember.
All I know is that sometimes, when someone is affected by
it, they just sit there. They just sit side by side and wait to die.
Sure we could help them, but we would be force feeding
them at this point. No one has time for that. Not even me. The
guy who writes these pages for …
Why do I write them?