S1E5: Kate Camp

08/13/23 • 59 min

In our second guest interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with poet, essayist, reviewer and five-time Bad Diaries Salon reader Kate Camp about diaries, the slipperiness of memory, and noticing what you notice.
Kate and Tracy dig down into the experience of reading at, and returning to, Bad Diaries Salon – what that means, what it brings, and what it feels like. Kate very generously talks about and reads from the treasure that is the little red diary she kept every day in 1986, the year she turned 14, “the best possible year of your life”.
Kate Camp is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s finest and most loved poets, with awards and plaudits and seven collections of poetry to her name, from her 1998 debut Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars to 2020’s How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems.
Last year saw the publication of Kate’s sharp-edged and quietly magnificent memoir, a collection of disarming true stories titled You Probably Think This Song Is About You. The pieces in the memoir are familiar but unsettling, disturbing but also somehow joyful – qualities shared with Kate’s readings at five Bad Diaries Salons at Wellington’s Verb Festival since 2018.
Content warning: this episode includes brief mention of sexual assault and drug use, abortion, and negative self-talk.

Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.
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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

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S1E4: Sarah Krasnostein

In our first guest interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Jenny talks with Sarah Krasnostein.
On a May morning in Melbourne, Sarah and Jenny sink into Succession, narrative structure and shaping a story, research stepping stones, stationery, and Sarah talks about reading her early spy diaries (hello, Harriet the Spy) at a Bad Diaries Salon in Melbourne in 2018.
Sarah reads from her 2022 book The Believer (Text Publishing, Australia; Tin House, US).
Sarah Krasnostein is the multi-award winning author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer and the Quarterly Essay, Not Waving, Drowning. She holds a PhD in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in New York and Victoria. A regular contributor to The Monthly and The Saturday Paper, she was awarded the 2022 Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. Her latest work, On Peter Carey, is out this year from Black Inc Books.

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S1E6: Notes

A mixed tape of an episode that takes in The Saints and New Order at the Seaview Ballroom in 1982 Melbourne, writes a song about a closed cemetery in rainy Paris in 1989, nicks a guitar pick from the INXS stage, and reads a lot of Dick Francis.
After the last two interview episodes with special guests, this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast brings Jenny and Tracy back together, to read from our own diaries, on the theme of NOTES.
We set the same theme for a Bad Diaries Salon in Melbourne in May this year – our first Melbourne salon since 2019 – and it got us thinking (as our salon themes always do) about the different ways to interpret NOTES. We riff on notes we write, notes to ourselves and to others, musical notes on the page and on the voice and in the ear. Love notes, lists (of books read, of spaghetti marinara eaten); notes that have fallen out of place, and notes that remain where they belong.
Both of our readings, though, focus on music. Tracy reads from her travel journals, from a few days in Paris in 1989 that she later turned into song lyrics. Jenny reads from 1982 and her music-soaked Melbourne, nights catching INXS and No Nonsense, The Saints and New Order, Night Moves on the telly.
To note is to observe, to notice, and we notice the value of notes, lists, ephemera. As Jenny says, “we might be thinking this is a podcast about diaries ... all this other surrounding stuff – the notes, the scraps, the ticket stubs, the postcards ... in some ways maybe gives more detail than the diaries themselves.”