Winnie Dunn - Author/editor

Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian writer and editor. Her debut novel titled 'Dirt Poor Islanders', is the first novel to be published about the Tongan-Australian community.

In this episode, Winnie talk about how she honed her craft at Sweatshop, a literacy movement in Western Sydney, how self-insert fan fiction was her gateway to writing, and how working solidly as a writer and editor has allowed her to move out of the cramped family home she grew up in, to a place of her own.

#winniedunn #areyoustillworking

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Are You Still Working?!
Series 2, Episode 2 - Winnie Dunn
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[00:00:00] 

Courtney: Hello, gorgeous listeners. Welcome to Are You Still Working?! How to take your creative ideas seriously. I'm Courtney Collins, and today I'm talking to Winnie Dunn. Winnie Dunn is a writer and General Manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement in Western Sydney. She's the editor of critically acclaimed anthologies, and her first novel, Dirt Poor Islanders, was published this year [00:00:30] by Hachette.

The novel follows Meadow Reed, a Tongan Australian girl, as she navigates identity and community within Western Sydney to find a love of her own culture. Winnie Dunn herself is Tongan Australian and grew up in Mount Druitt. Our conversation took place at Sweatshop on Dharug Country, which is becoming a hotbed for new Australian writing talent.

The day we sat down to talk to Winnie, the workshop rooms were packed out with emerging writers,

[00:01:00] all committed to finding their unique voice and determined to move their stories from the margins to the centre.

Winnie Dunn, it's such a pleasure to be here with you. I've recently finished your wonderful novel, Dirt Poor Islanders. As soon as I finished it, I needed to find a way to speak to you. So I'm so glad we've managed to pull that off.

Winnie: Thank you.

Courtney: The title of your novel, Dirt Poor Islanders

Winnie: Mm.

Courtney: Where does that come from?

Winnie: I really, because it's the [00:01:30] first Tongan Australian novel, I really wanted the word islander to be present because I wanted the

book to be recognized as a Pacifica Australian novel, not just by my community, but people outside of my community.

Cause we are referred to, as Pacific Islanders. And so it was very important for me to have Islanders in the title, but I didn't want something called the Islanders or Islanders. Cause I just feel like it didn't really hone into what the heart of the book [00:02:00] really was about.

And so, I started thinking about different ways to describe Pacific Islanders or Pacificas and what were the stereotypes, how could I subvert it or contradict it.

And the phrase 'dirt poor' then came up to me because it's a phrase that I often used to describe myself growing up to my peers because I did grow up in a very working class family where we were just living on top of each other. [00:02:30] And, it's a very recognized phrase in Australia because Australia is so obsessed with kind of class and class structures.

I just felt like putting dirt poor and Islanders together just really summarised the book and the heart of the book. And for me, I just hope when readers open up Dirt Poor Islanders, they see the wealth and the beauty of Meadow Reed's story and the Pacific Islander community through all of that muck and mire.

Courtney: The muck and the mire really become [00:03:00] redeeming for us in such a satisfying way. 

Winnie: One of my favorite Tongan words actually is Fonua Momoko. So Fonua refers to land, Tongan land, and Momoko refers to being cold. And we use the phrase Fonua Momoko when we're talking about a person's womb, and the womb being the place where the earth is passed on as a gift.[00:03:30] 

And so if your womb is cold, you can't pass on the gift of land of dirt to the next generation. Dirt is really how I also define an earth is how I also really define being Tongan and that privilege of being able to pass

on, tongan land, I think, or Tongan ness through my novel by calling it Dirt Poor Islanders as well, because of that cultural context of the importance of passing on land.

And so I feel [00:04:00] like hopefully when people pick up Dirt Poor Islanders, it's that picking up of that land that's so important in my culture.

Courtney: I would love to know, and it is a question that we ask all of our guests. How did you learn to take your creative ideas seriously?

Winnie: Yeah, I think when I look back on my desire to write, it was something that was very innate. My dad likes to tell this story about how one time he saw me as a toddler staring very [00:04:30] intently at the back of this like 48 pack toilet paper roll. Cause I have seven siblings. And I was just so engrossed in it and he just found it so shocking that I was staring at this packet of toilet paper and it slowly dawned on him I was trying to read, the back of the toilet paper packet. And so I just had this natural inclination towards words and trying to understand them. And when I was a teenager the only things that were really accessible to me were [00:05:00] mainstream fantasy novels, like Twilight, Harry Potter, Narnia.

And so I would write a lot of self insert fan fiction.

Courtney: Cool

Winnie: Which I love the idea of self insert fan fiction because for me, it's like that form of autobiographical fiction where I'm just placing myself in this already established world. But obviously I, I never took it seriously. It was just something that was for fun. But then [00:05:30] I was the first person in my family to go to university, and it was only in a university setting that I came across Sweatshop Literacy Movement, which is the organisation that I now work for. And it was founded by award winning author, Dr. Michael Muhammad Ahmed. And it was the first time I was introduced to writing about Western Sydney by people who lived in Western Sydney using like very culturally, specific words and languages and phrases, [00:06:00] slang as well. And because I think I was in a university setting, I was like, this is a piece of literature that we're unpacking together and it just, opened my eyes, to the possibility that writing by somebody like me could be taken, as seriously as, you know, Sylvia Plath, who I was studying, or Jane Austen, who I read Northanger Abbey at university three separate times for three different units. And so it was only through [00:06:30] Sweatshop that I started to take writing seriously. Can you tell me where the name 'Sweatshop' came from?

Winnie: Yeah, so twofolds. Sweatshop historically, as we know, is used as a space to disempower people of color this indentured slave labor is what we know as a sweatshop, where just hundreds of people of color are packed into these tiny rooms being overworked.

And so we used sweatshop and kind of flipped it on its head to be [00:07:00] like, Sweatshop Literacy Movement is a space that empowers people of color rather than disempowers. It also is in reference to the Latin word for text meaning 'to weave'. And so again, it's that idea of stitching in a sweatshop.

But instead of us stitching fast fashion garments, we're stitching novels.

Courtney: Amazing. 

When did you feel like you had a novel in you, or that burning to write a novel?

Winnie: [00:07:30] Yeah. I feel like it came together very slowly. At my first Sweatshop Literacy Movement workshop, I remember I came with this awful poem about feeling like a lizard. Cause some guy that I met on Tinder had dumped me

two weeks before the workshop. And then I just remember reading that poem out loud and then Dr. Michael Muhammad Ahmed looking at me and just being like, you can't write, start again. And so I had to go back and it was very [00:08:00] confronting obviously, but I was like, okay, like clearly there's something I don't know about writing. and so instead of. Getting defensive and shutting down, I think I opened myself up to learning what good literature or good writing could be or look like and it was from there that I started writing this kind of three sentence story structure.

So how could I tell a story in the most limited amount of words and be very concise about it? And then I just grew my craft from there. And from about 2016 to 2018, [00:08:30] I was writing short stories. Just about any kind of interesting thing that I thought happened in my childhood. I also started writing little nonfiction essays about kind of Pacific Islanders in Australia, which was a very rare phenomenon outside of academia. And then in 2018, I got my first grant to compile all my short stories together.

Courtney: Amazing. When Dr. Muhammad said to you, [00:09:00] you can't write, what do you think he meant by that?

Clearly you were robust and ready to hear that because it could have been potentially crushing to somebody else's ears.

Winnie: I think he literally meant I didn't know how to construct an original sentence. 

If I'm writing a poem about feeling like a lizard, Courtney, I'm sure you can find about 500 other poems where somebody's talking about feeling like a lizard. But can you find [00:09:30] 500 poems talking about The figure in Tongan culture, which is a woman who serves drinks in a circle of noble men, and she is the and metaphorical representation of a woman named Kava in old Tongan myths who was literally sacrificed for the king in order to feed him, you'd probably only find one poem [00:10:00] like that, and it's published in the Lifted Brow, which I wrote, I think, in 2017. And so for me, being able to create an original contribution to knowledge is what makes you a good writer.

And that kind of process and being told, being challenged, I think, to try and do that in my writing was really a profound moment for me and also a very empowering moment as well.

Courtney: I love that. And you do that so beautifully in the novel.

a reader [00:10:30] I felt dropped into a world like, ah, what is this world, and there's a time shift. Yeah, it was beautifully done.

Winnie: Yeah. I put the Tongan myth story the beginning, very intentionally for two reasons. The first is it's starting with a birth and it's starting life. And I think that's what happens when you open a book, you're stepping into somebody else's life or somebody else's shoes for a short time to learn something.

Two, [00:11:00] and this is generally speaking for the writers who write autobiographical fiction, we get told that it was really easy to write our novels, because it was just based on our life and we just fictionalized it a little bit.

We didn't necessarily have to do any groundbreaking research and we didn't necessarily have to think up a whole new world like Narnia for instance. 

Cause you know, I could have written a book that was just completely about some old Tongan gods and had nothing to do with [00:11:30] a mixed race Tongan girl who grew up in Western Sydney. But for me, that was important because

I'm still very much invested in autobiographical fiction. It is a craft. It does take skill to learn and just because I'm using myself as a primary source doesn't take away from the craft of the writing.

I've had the privilege of being edited by you Winnie in the Newcastle short story anthology I Want to I guess know your process when you're at [00:12:00] the desk revising your own work 

if that editor self plays by different rules than the writing self that the self that's put the words on the page in the first place.

Do you have a distinction in your self around that? 

Winnie: for me, the writing and the editing self happens simultaneously, so I'll be writing a sentence in Dirt Poor Islanders, and then I'd be like, no, that's a cliche. Oh, no, that's a mixed metaphor. Oh no, I've put the [00:12:30] comma in the wrong place. Go back and then, sometimes it would take me two, three hours to write a paragraph because I'd constantly be refining, which I think is why

it took me five years to complete Dirt Poor Islanders because I work with my writing self and my editing self at the same time. But also as an editor, cause that's how I started off at Sweatshop Literacy Movement. And that's how I started off in the arts was through editing other people's stories.

Like with Sweatshop Women Volume 1 and 2 that [00:13:00] listeners can find on the Sweatshop website. we're a cohort of about a hundred, diverse writers who come together once a month to listen to each other's stories and provide live feedback to improve our craft together. I really understand that there's only so much of yourself you can edit.

And for me as a Tongan, that community process was really natural to me. I often think about how Tongans make something called a [00:13:30] ngatu, which is like a natural fibrous mat, which we tell our stories on through motifs and patterns.

The way that the ngatu is made is that the men grow the mulberry bark trees. And when the mulberry bark trees come into adulthood, the women take over the trees. And then the women strip them

beat down the bark, and then they make individual strips by themselves at home. And they'll agree as a community, okay, [00:14:00] each woman in the village is going to make 20 strips. And then they go, okay. And then by Saturday, each at the end of the week, all the women come together with their 20 strips and they put it together. And they spend hours putting it together. They spend hours defining how large the mat is going to be or how small it's going to be. And then once all those fibrous layers are put together, they then decide on the pattern, what story they want to tell.

And then for weeks and months they'll paint little sections [00:14:30] of the Ngatu together until it's just one big mat that tells one single story or many little stories that come together on the Ngatu. And so for me, that's how I treat my writing and editing process is that some parts I do individually, but I could never make the whole thing together or the whole novel, unless I had other editors and writers coming together to help me tell the best story that I can.

Courtney: Amazing. In thinking about [00:15:00] the structure of your novel am I right in thinking that you move forward sentence by exacting sentence? 

Winnie: So consider the strips that I was talking about, those individual strips.

They were my individual short stories that I wrote from 2016 to about 2019. And by that time, when I put them together, I had 20, 000 words that kind of had a beginning, middle and an end. It had a mixed race Tongan girl who was struggling with her identity, [00:15:30] struggling with her sense of non traditional family structures, because she felt like she had many mums instead of just one.

And those mums were not only her step mum, but her birth mum, her auntie, her grandmother, you know, how do you reconcile that when you're going to school and people say, yeah, one mum, one dad. And pulling together the many pieces of herself. And then from there, I just had to flesh it out but because I had already done those little strips and put them together, the overall structure of [00:16:00] the novel came together quite naturally.

And then I just had to paint the pattern I didn't do any forward planning and I think I, will do the opposite when it comes to my second novel. 

Courtney: What are you working on now? Can you talk about it?

Winnie: Yes. I'm taking a break. Because it took me five years to write Dirt Poor Islanders. And I gave myself a repetitive hamstring from it taking a break, just doing the marketing and the publicity around it, which I feel [00:16:30] like a lot of writers are surprised by - just because the book is out there in the world, it doesn't mean that you stop.

There's a whole other side where you're having to get it into reader's hands. And so doing that at the moment, which is really exciting. And I'm hoping to hear back soon from a publisher about our grant application to create the first definitive Pacific Australian anthology.

kind of in the [00:17:00] likes of growing up Aboriginal in Australia growing up Indian in Australia. 

hopefully that comes to fruition cause I think that'll be really vital because I think with the publication of Dirt Poor Islanders and other Books like I Am Lupe, which is the first Tongan Australian children's book, and, King, which is a memoir by rapper and musician, producer Hau Latukefu.

There's a kind of real emergence of Tongan Australian [00:17:30] writing and hopefully Pacific Australian writing more broadly. And I, I hope the anthology will be a real success. Showcase of that and a historical document of that. And then, yeah, I was lucky enough that Hachette signed me on a two book deal.

And so eventually I think by the end of this year I'll start working on my second novel, which is Meadow Reed's journey through university, so we'll see how that goes.

Courtney: Wow. I'm already looking forward to it. 

In an ideal setup for you, what [00:18:00] proportion would see you working on the novel, editing other people's work, being in the world? Do you have a kind of understanding of how you'd like that to be?

Winnie: I started off at Sweatshop wanting to be a writer and wanting to write a novel, but then very quickly realising my passion is in editing. I really love being able to help craft other people's stories, to help emerging writers grow in their writing [00:18:30] skills and to see a story go from okay, to great through the editing process.

And I feel so lucky to have been able to do that through so many sweatshop anthologies. But I felt this real sense of duty, I think, to write because even up until the beginning of this year, the only mainstream representation of Tongan Australians was Chris Lilley, who we all know, put on brown face and an Afro wig.

And he enacted [00:19:00] violent, hyper demonizing narratives of Tongan children. I think people often forget he played a high school character. And so, In my dream life, think I would be an editor more than anything else. But I think because I have this real sense of obligation, I think, to my community, and I think Australia broadly to redefine what a Tongan Australian story is outside of that kind of Chris Lilley bubble is why I'm a writer and why I choose [00:19:30] to keep writing.

I would love to just be an editor, three or four days a week, which I feel like is what I have at Sweatshop. Two days a week writing, which is I think what I do now anyway. And then one or two days a week where I can just rest and not think about things and just let my work take its course.

Turn the media and publicity train, on its own. 

Courtney: In thinking about your ideal conditions to write in, what [00:20:00] does that look like for you?

Winnie: Yeah it's just so funny because I know what my 'not' conditions are.

Courtney: Yeah.

Winnie: Because I grew up in a house where I have seven other siblings one story in Mount Druitt, with my two parents, and then for some reason we had two dogs at any given time. I lived in a very cramped house.

And I shared a bed with my sister until I was about 16. She used to tell me off all the time about leaving the light on at night to read books while she was trying to sleep [00:20:30] and for hogging the blanket. And so I never had kind of space to grow and think and read in my childhood home, because there was just so much chaos as anybody could imagine.

But for some reason I did it for some reason I did my whole bachelor of arts degree in my tiny little single one bedroom on my single bed in that cramped household, just staying up until like 4 a. m. in the morning writing my essays.

But obviously that's not ideal for me. I feel like [00:21:00] that's something I just had to survive through. But I also don't really subscribe to the idea that is classist in the sense, I would say, of kind of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own,
that a woman should have a room of her own and have money to write. And I think she was thinking of a very specific demographic when she was writing that, and it's just not feasible for everyone especially women who have children who are from welfare class backgrounds. Those might be [00:21:30] the ideal conditions, but they're not accessible to everyone. I feel like a lot of people in Australia don't like talking about their finances or their situation.

And I've got it in trouble in the past for talking about it, but I like to be really honest about the fact that I'm the oldest child in my family. I was the first person in my family to go to university. And I also the first out of my siblings to

buy myself a small property, just a one bedroom unit in South Western [00:22:00] Sydney.

And I do have those ideal conditions now that Virginia Woolf was talking about where I do just have a room of my own to write in. Is it the kitchen bench? Yes. But that's only because I think writing in your bed is a sin against nature. So, being upfront about moving from a working class background to a very low middle class background,

I think is [00:22:30] really important for me to be open and honest as a writer because

I don't want people to think we're just all these starving artists that, are just doing things for the sake of art. I just treated writing like my job so intensely that it was able to help me get out of my kind of cramped family situation. Because by the time I left my family home, my younger sister had three kids.

So there was 14 of us at one stage. And so I'm so [00:23:00] thankful for my education in university and in writing and my arts career and the arts industry being so open to stories like mine because they historically weren't in the past to be able to lift myself out of that kind of cramped family situation and into a space where I do have a room of my own to to write.

And yeah, my ideal conditions now is kitchen, coffee, my ergonomic mouse, keyboard [00:23:30] music, and coffee, and then my cat interrupting me every now and again.

Courtney: And sometimes it, it seems that's how work gets made in the sense of how a person has found a way to cobble together whatever privileges are accessible to find space and time to create.

Winnie: Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, I wouldn't have been able to write my book unless I also got grants. I was lucky enough to get my first grant through the copyright agency. And then [00:24:00] my second grant, which helped me finalize a novel through Australia Council. And again, it's also about realising that if you want to come into this industry as a writer, it definitely doesn't pay you full time.

That's a very rare occurrence. You might not see your advance paid off for a very long time. 

Courtney: In thinking about the representation people close to you and in your community,
the novel just, works [00:24:30] perfectly the way that only a novel can. But as I was reading it, I couldn't help but imagine it as a screen story and was just like, this is the series I want to see, you know, is that something on your radar?

Winnie: I'm always open to anything. And because I've been in the industry since 2016, I've seen my mentors and my peers go through acquisitions for screen like screen plays

Courtney: Being, being optioned. Yeah, optioned.

Winnie: Yes. That's the word. Thank [00:25:00] you. Muhammad, whose latest book is 'The other half of you' was optioned for a television show, and he's been working on it closely with Claudia Karven.

Which I think is really amazing. And then in this very room that we're sitting in not too long ago there was Benjamin Law, Michelle Law, Shirley Lee and they were with Flying Bark Productions to talk about her own

television show for 'Funny Ethnics' and planning that out. Cause that's been optioned as well.

And yeah, of course I'm open to anything [00:25:30] that Dirt Poor Islanders generates. And I think a television show about Meadow Reed's story or kind of any Pacifica Australian story in general, I think would be really profound and important in this country because it can show that we've moved way past Chris Lilley and Summer Heights High and Jonah from Tonga.

And we're now together as a in a place where we're wanting to hear authentic. Stories by people from that which is really exciting. 

Courtney: it is can [00:26:00] see it in your future. 

Winnie: you're like a fortune teller.

Courtney: I pretend to be. To finish, is there something in your big life that's not necessarily about writing, but it could be another person passion or hobby or habit that's helped you think differently about writing 

Winnie: when I was starting off at Sweatshop, reading was my hobby and then because it quickly became [00:26:30] my job Mohammed pointed out to me that I actually didn't have any hobbies anymore. 
He said so what do you do?

Courtney: He's a truth teller

Winnie: he really just hits it home, you know, I grow from it. So it's always good. So then I spent a long time Trying to find out what actually interested me

cooking for one, I find really Nourishing and therapeutic because I still feel like it's a hobby. I still feel like I'm learning [00:27:00] something, 

sometimes I'll be chopping an onion and then a sentence will pop into my head. 

I find in those small little breaks of doing something very mechanical that I'm able to reflect on my own work and my own story. Same with cross stitching. I picked that up recently. 

And so when I'm threading a pattern together I'm again thinking about how sentences are structured and I'm thinking about a scene in a book that I really liked or stitching and listening to [00:27:30] music. And then currently I just really love listening to YouTube videos as like podcasts, like just commentaries about silly things like video games or iceberg charts or pyramid schemes or, 

the kind of natural storytelling structure that comes through those videos I find really comforting.

And it also helps me think Oh what would happen if I started referencing how Pacific Islander communities get sucked into [00:28:00] pyramid schemes in my next book? So I find all those little mechanical things still influence my writing and still influence how I think about the craft of writing.

And I love that. but I think I'm also ready to go back to study as well, like an editing course at a university or a librarian certificate at TAFE.

something practical like that, I think is always good to have under your belt the joy of being a writer is that you never want to stop learning. [00:28:30] Yeah.

Courtney: Winnie, I have learned so much today.

Winnie: I hope so. I feel like I rambled so much.

Courtney: You rambled in a very eloquent way,

Winnie: Thank you. 

Courtney: You were very on, on track I just, yeah, feel really grateful that you have the space and time to share so deeply and reflectively when there's so much going on for you.

Winnie: Yeah. No, thank you so much for those really lovely questions and letting me ramble and letting me be really open and honest.

Courtney: Are You Still Working is an independently produced [00:29:00] podcast by me, Courtney Collins, and producer, Lisa Madden. If there's an artist you'd like us to interview Do let us know through Instagram at are you still working podcast. We'd love to hear from you if any episodes have inspired your own project.

Till next time.