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Winehouse, who grew up memorising the music of jazz greats like Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughn, might possess a voice that sounds like velvet cigarette smoke – but to undermine her artistry, we made self-destructiveness her myth. She might have dabbled in crack cocaine, but she became a tragic heroine because she dared to contain different things.

– From my Daily Life story on the new Amy Winehouse documentary a couple of weeks ago. It’s a masterful and heartbreaking piece of filmmaking – if you haven’t seen it already, I thoroughly recommend it.

The lovely people over at Express Media interviewed me for National Young Writer’s Month last month. You can read the interview here. 

Turn-of-the-century heroics might be hopelessly outdated but the ghosts of Jeffries and Barr are still looming large. In the last two years, the fact Chinese investors have overtaken the US as the biggest buyers of Australian property has sparked headlines that could wake the ghost of Edward Said, the thinker whose 1978 book Orientalism first suggested the West imagines itself in relation to the “Inscrutable Oriental”, a deviant Asian Other whose strange customs and shadowy intentions should be mistrusted at all costs.

– Have the property wars become racism’s new frontier? – I have a new Daily Life column up today

Last week, I chatted about freelance writing, motivation and rejection with Sydney radio station 2SER, along with Express Media Creative Producer Fiona Dunne. I’ll be running a Freelancing 101 session as part of Express Media’s awesome National Young Writer’s Month program on the 23rd of June – listen to the interview here and check out the full program here – it’s full of tips and advice I wish I had when I was starting out.

Three years since I packed up my life in Melbourne, booked a one-way ticket to Sydney with no plans except the vague desire to take cliffside strolls, stare out at the Pacific ocean and work entirely for myself. Thankfully, it’s working out so far and I wrote about it for Hijacked last month. Here’s a full-text version of the article in case you missed it. 

Back in 2010, US culture site The Awl ran a widely circulated story about a freelance writer who was so impoverished he had to resort to making soup out of crushed vitamins for dinner, despite being published everywhere from Rolling Stone to The New York Times. That piece, which still surfaces on social media feeds, worked as a cautionary tale for would-be freelancers. ‘If you ditch the day job,’ it seemed to suggest, ‘you’ll end up broke and alone.’

Last month, I celebrated my three-year anniversary as a full-time freelancer and I’m happy to report that I’ve never had to learn how to crush vitamins to make soup (I hate soup). But I have learned that you can build a freelance career that sustains you creatively and financially, if you can take risks, be strategic and prepare yourself to work incredibly hard.

Although I’ve always dreamed of being a freelance writer, the idea that there’s a hero moment that sees you dramatically quit your job to spend your days scribbling in your Moleskine at a cafe or relocate to Iowa to pen thinly veiled fiction like Girls’ Hannah Horvath is a lie that’s mostly designed to hold you back. Personally, I studied Professional Writing and Cultural Studies in my hometown, Perth, Western Australia, headed to London to work and travel in my early twenties, and spent four years in Melbourne working in business writing and custom publishing. However, I always felt a niggling dissatisfaction that I wanted something bigger and I trusted this enough to spend early mornings and weekends pitching and writing about art, film, travel and culture for publications such as Broadsheet and Metro. When I moved to Sydney to freelance, my portfolio and experience meant that editors and clients took me seriously even though I was as good as unknown when I got there.

These days, I spend my time juggling features, columns and profiles for publications such as Daily Life, VAULT,Open Skies and The Collective with copywriting and content projects that draw on my skills as a writer and editor, and ensure that my bills get paid on time. In the first couple of years, I was so hell-bent on succeeding that I’d regularly clock 60-hour weeks, but I’m now in a much better position to slow down a little and take stock of what I’ve learned.

Firstly, the one thing that’s enabled my writing career is the fact that I found a niche that pays well. Writing articles on topics such as business and technology afford me the hours I spend pitching to overseas publications, labouring over a piece of cultural criticism that truly matters to me or doing whatever it takes to nail a story. There’s nothing more toxic than the myth of the starving artist. Not being able to make rent might be seriously stressful, but it can also shrink a writer’s creative ambitions.

As important as it is to be practical, it’s equally essential to back yourself and your ideas. Two of the biggest stories I’ve published – a piece on a secret collaboration between Chicks on Speed and Julian Assange which ended up as an exclusive for The Vine and a feature on art deco cinemas of the world for the cover of in-flight magazine Open Skies – wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t pursued them relentlessly. Often, being a freelance journalist means pulling out all the stops.

You might not have a boss peering over your shoulder, but failing to think of freelancing as a profession is a rookie mistake. For me, working out of a co-working space in Newtown, monitoring my cash flow, reading magazines and online publications obsessively and improving my craft on a daily basis are non-negotiable. Hopefully, this means I’ll still be doing this in three years’ time.

Neha Kale is a Sydney-based freelance journalist writing for Daily Life, The Collective, VAULT, Broadsheet,Open Skies, The Vine, i-D and more.

A photo posted by Emerging Writers’ Festival (@emergingwriters) on May 30, 2015 at 5:57pm PDT

Image via Instagram

Last week, I was lucky enough to speak about my interviewing tips, highlights and horror stories along with Veronica Sullivan, Emily Laidlaw and Madeleine Dore during the Emerging Writer’s Festival in Melbourne.  Public speaking can be intimidating but it was so inspiring listening and responding to how my co-panelists approach interviews that the whole thing was a dream. As was the audience. I know writer’s festivals can feel like a happy, optimistic bubble that’s a world away from the loneliness of spending hours at your desk but I think getting outside your own head and realising that there’s so many people with the same struggles as you can sometimes feel like a form of survival.

As Rawiya Kameir points out in a May 2014 The Daily Beast article, Nyong’o might be stunning but we recognise her beauty at the expense of women like Precious star Gabourey Sidibe because her Ivy League pedigree and smooth, TransAtlantic accent speaks to class aspirations that are rooted in whiteness, one that flattens her Otherness and marks her out as “one of us.” Twigs, who taught herself to produce videos so she could engineer every aspect of her artistic persona, and Wen, who revealed the grit and determination that catapulted her to stardom in a September 2014 Vogue essay, fit neatly into the class fantasy that elevates those who are exceptional while ignoring the messy business of social change.

– I wrote about race-based beauty for Daily Life this week.

That time I live-blogged the Women of Style Awards for InStyle magazine and realised that as much as I like the process of spending hours on a feature, there’s something weirdly exhilarating about storytelling on the fly.

 

But if you’ve ever been unlucky enough to catch your boss air-punching a mirror before a big meeting or been chastised for being too aggressive during a presentation – right after you’ve been implored to show more backbone – you’ll know that internalising these tedious martial metaphors often feels like the only choice. Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, the bestselling manual that tells us to swap girlish second-guessing for militant goal-seeking, and Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s case for quashing your fears to step into opportunities you’re not prepared for, might be considered as essential to success as a well-cut power suit, but their vision of female empowerment still addresses a workplace shaped by masculine hierarchies. The first time I worked out that invoking a piece of jargon in lieu of articulating my feelings meant that men I reported to would take me more seriously, my internal facepalm couldn’t match the thrill of cracking a secret code. “Surround yourself with a Plexiglass shield,” writes Dr Lois Frankel in Nice Girls. “If you’re offered a seat on the rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on,” Lean In helpfully suggests.

– Why we shouldn’t succumb to workplace jargon – My latest piece in Daily Life 

I interviewed the incredible British painter Kaye Donachie for the latest issue of VAULT magazine. The issue also features a piece I wrote on Sydney art collector Clinton Ng as well as great interviews with Gilbert and George, Ramesh Nithiyendran and El Anatsui. At newsagents now!