7 - Dr Georgie Harriss: Writing, Trauma & Creative Freedom

Can creative writing be pleasurable without being redemptive? 

This week's episode is a conversation with writer and academic Dr Georgie Harriss, who has somehow gone from receiving rubbish from the set of Real Housewives of Melbourne to writing comedy scripts, plays, and researching trauma and queer narrative theory. These are fun viewpoints of the world that most of us don’t get to see at all, let alone in combination.

Taking full advantage, we dig into:

• The psychodrama of reality TV production and the spreadsheets behind it

• Why “conflict equals story” is a deeply Western—and limiting—idea

• Whether artists really need to suffer (emphatic no)

• How narrative has been co-opted as a commodity

• The absurd dance of Australian arts grant funding

Along the way, we touch on the tyranny of screenwriting rooms, the decay of shared cultural narratives, and the strange dissonance of writing for the sake of grant applications that ask if your play will solve climate change. It would be nice if it did.

🔗 Read Georgie’s play Lovebird: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59576388-love-bird 💸 Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/endrey♥️ Follow the show: https://www.instagram.com/chrisendreypodcast/

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