Patreon Preview: Tayla Richardson - Ambiguous Loss, Unequivocal Joy

0:00 Hey friends, and welcome to this preview of our latest Patreon exclusive episode. To continue the conversation and listen to the full episode, head on over to the I Think Therefore I Slam Patreon and sign up to be part of the Slam Fam. The link is in the show notes. Slam Poetry. Doesn't care if it's. Perfect. It's time to. Slam. It's the biggest poem I've got inside of her. She was a thief you love. Me to love a haunted house. Blood black nothingness began to spin. This day. I hate pork. Chops. I am the master, I am the captain. Long live the car crash.

0:42 Hearts cry on the couch. All the poets come to life. Welcome to I Think Therefore I Slam, the podcast bringing you the best spoken word and slam poetry artist from around Australia and around the world. My name is Andrew. My guest today comes nominated by former guest Steve Atkinson. She is a Melbourne based multidisciplinary artist, writer and disability advocate. Her creative work explores themes of connection, ambiguous loss and impermanence, drawing from her personal experiences. Her poetry has been recognized with a University of Sydney Art Prize, was highly commended in the 2023 Rideability Fellowship, and has been featured in various art exhibitions and publications like Rush Magazine.

1:25 She is also an Australian poetry slam Victorian state finalist. Taylor Richardson. Oh, come on. Thank you so much for having me. Taylor, what does it feel like? I know that you are a fan, a a mega fan if you like, of the podcast. What does it feel like knowing that you're about to become part of that beautiful tapestry? Yeah, it's super exciting. I've been a fan from early on and I love what you're doing and to be a part of your journey and your story as you grow and expand is really exciting. Growing and expanding like what's her name? The the, you know, the, the the grape girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I can't remember. Veruca. Is it Veruca? No. She's the Violet. Violet. Yeah, the blueberry.

2:07 Yep. Expanding Violet. There we go. Well, let's get you set up in that tapestry in that scene. We'd love to hear your first piece. Great, my first piece is actually I'm just going to speak and then I'd love to chat about it afterwards. This is called self-portrait. As a conch shell, you press my skeleton to your flesh when you long to hear a mouthful of home buried in the blood pools and sea glass. Impression splinter into grit, embedded not in motion but vibration primed to echo in your delight. Sculpted by the shifting winds, buffered by imperfect spirals, A procured Pearl essence refracting shadows in direct light, a cradle to the soft bodied. Be tender with this mortal frame as you trace fractures of a fossil who could not be traded, the rust to the fire. In transparency you will see my veins and pallor are no different to yours.

3:18 Lean in these whispers. Leak my story. I wanted to ask you the fact that you know we've got all the gear here, do you like the kind of ASMR factor that comes in when you're reading your own work? Definitely. I think it like suits my voice a little bit as well I think. So too, I think so too. A voice, a voice made for radio as, as as they say. What a what a lovely piece. What? What kind of insight can you give us into this piece? Yeah, so this piece, like many of mine, was spurred from one line that I was actually created in a workshop with an incredible mentor I had Madison Godfrey and it was just to, it was a self-portrait that she asked us to create.

4:04 But only one line of that really stood with me and it was about the cradle to the soft bodied. And that was a line that really spoke to me. And then I was thinking about if I was an object, what might I be right. And a conch shell actually came pretty quickly because I was born on a tropical island. Really. Yeah. On Magnetic Island up in Queensland. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's definitely a part of me. And I moved back, I moved to Melbourne when I was three years old, so. But it's always really stayed with me. And I have a special connection with the ocean and with the beach, so. And I love to the fact that a conch shell, when you put it to your ER, you, you hear so many different things.

4:49 And I feel like sometimes I'm that for many people as well. And this piece is actually being chosen by Writers Victoria to be published soon. So it's upcoming with Writers Victoria, which is really exciting. Yeah. Through their write ability program, which is incredible program for writers with a disability. So my mentor through that, Ruby Hill Smith, has helped shape that a little bit. And then, yeah, it's going to be very soon. So it's exciting. Wow. And that central question that came from the workshop, like if you were an object, what you could, what would you be? I'm being funny here, but like, it's kind of getting dangerously close to like, if I was a worm, would you still love me kind of thing. Do you know what? Totally, totally. Amazing.

5:31 Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? What is your origin story, so to speak, of starting to share your creative work? Yeah, so I love to consider myself a storyteller, and I've been telling stories since I was a child, like many children. We have a few home videos of me when I was, say, five years old and I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I was obsessed with Land Before Time. I don't know if you know. Whoa. OK, OK, hold up, hold up. So I went through a dinosaur I saw phase as well and I, I thought I was the absolute shit, like walking around at 7 years old going, I'm going to be a paleontologist, you know? Exactly. And Lamb Before Time. Yeah. I mean, the classic 90s cartoon kind of traumatic.

6:16 Some some really intense scenes in there. Yeah. But like Ducky and Petrie and Littlefoot and Sarah. Yeah. That they're my second family. Yeah, 100 percent, 100%. And I felt exactly the same way. So I used to reenact those scenes with my little for dinosaurs and like create my own worlds off the back of the movies. So yeah, that's like little scenes of me narrating these characters. And so definitely I loved creating stories from a really young age. I then started dancing when I was around 5 years old and that became my storytelling mechanism for a really long time. I danced till I was 20 and I really connected with the lyrics, particularly of music. It wasn't called lyrical dance at the time, but that would be my favorite style was connecting with the lyrics of a piece. And that really was my mechanism for storytelling. And the way that I connected with the audience originally and felt the energy on stage was incredible. And then when I also go going back a little bit, I had quite a severe concussion when I was 8 years old where I had to relearn to read and write.

7:28 Ohh wow. So yeah, that was a little bit of a spanner in the works. So I was quite an early reader and an early speaker, but then when I had the concussion, I had to relearn to do all those things. And with that also came some visual problems. So I had some issues literally reading books for a really long time. So my love of like books and stories kind of shifted a little bit and went more to movies and TV shows that wouldn't make me work so hard to read. So I lost that love a little bit of the stories just because of the barriers that I therefore that I faced there. And then when I was 20, I started to develop my condition, which so I have two real neuromuscular conditions and pretty much they caused my muscles to weaken with use because there's a disconnection problem between the nerves and muscles that resulted in me having some issues with speech, some issues with my vision, with literally mobility and also with my breathing developed over time.

8:34 Yeah, it was, it was a lot. And it progressed over time as well. So when I was 20, it was more with my limbs. And so that's when dancing kind of ended for me. And then it, it kind of got worse and worse where I, it started affecting my breathing and therefore my speech because you need breathing to speak. So I was recommended by an incredible psychologist to go to a Buddhist meditation temple, which was incredible. And this was just before COVID, so it was about a year before lockdowns. And that's where I was reintroduced to poetry. I was reintroduced to Rumi and all the incredible philosophers and ancient wisdom creators.

9:17 And I just loved how their words could still resonate with us today. And I was really drawn to that. And we obviously did the meditations at that point too. But I think the biggest thing I took away from that was that love of words again, which was incredible. And that kind of delved me into into looking more into poetry, looking into the incredible like Ruby Core and people who were super popular at the time and the way that they were connecting with people through their words. And then pretty much until 2022, I was really in like survival mode with my body. I was not able to find treatments that were working for me.

10:04 And I was slowly getting worse with my condition. And then thankfully, in 2021, I found some medications which helped my condition, and that meant that I could focus on things that were not just surviving and actually start to create again and start to think beyond my falls. And so, yeah, in 2022, I actually joined a talent agency for people with lived experience of chronic conditions and disabilities, which was incredible. And at the time it was a lot of advocacy. And also, yeah, just using your lived experience, I guess, to make an impact got me thinking though, about public speaking and connecting with that audience again.

10:51 And then in the same year, I was fortunate enough to get into a short course with Express Media Toolkits program, which is an under 30s program and it's nationwide and it is a 12 week course. And they run like streams of either poetry, short fiction, non fiction, and they've even done like a digital one as well. Oh, wow. Which is incredible. And they link you up with a mentor and there's usually about 10 people in your in your group and you'll connect once a week for 12 weeks in kind of a course structure. And through that I found I did the poetry toolkits program and I connected with my, my incredible mentor, Maddie Godfrey, who is an incredible spoken word poet and she is quite prolific now.

11:42 And she really inspired me to look beyond the course and think about how I could connect wider with my poetry, which was incredible. That's also when I first found Littlefoot. Yeah, our old friend Littlefoot. Yes, Speaking of, you know, land before time. Yeah. Oh yeah. Amazing. It was so incredible. I'd actually met Eden a couple of years before. I'd done a few of her art workshops with Buniel Place and I then saw kind of as well coming out of those lockdowns and those first few out of lockdowns that they were hosting them again in person. And so that's when I first attended and saw the incredible, like a scene that they had created and the community they had created.

12:28 And I think, I think I spoke on the first night that I went, I just went and had no, no expectations and was like, The funny thing is, is like my experience with my condition has made me have less fear because I'm just like, well, the worst that can happen is more like I experienced like full body paralysis episodes where like I can't move at all and I can't communicate with the world. And like, that's could be someone's worst nightmare. And if I experience that every day, like standing up in front of an audience, to me is like, it doesn't feel feel anything, right? It's just like, this is joyful. This is great. Like, this is so yeah, that was a unique experience. And I'm so glad I went because they're incredible.

13:08 Yeah. Wow, there you go. The the full, the full origin story. There it is. That's so cool. How like you said, your your lover story kind of came around again. What a what a you know, what a stunning and and and beautiful context to rediscover, you know, that love of words, you know. Yeah, wow. That is the very unique origin story. I don't think we've had we've had something like that. And, and I'm so glad that, you know, you, you do practice that fearlessness, you know, because like you said, you've been in the wars you've experienced, you know, you've experienced things that are that are far worse than, you know, flubbing a line in front of of a crowd. So I think we could all learn from that. So what's really cool, Taylor, is that last year you and I got to represent Casey City of Casey at the Victorian final of the Australian Poetry Slam.

13:54 So we got kind of got to be running mates in that that case. We haven't talked a lot about this particular event on the podcast. So I want to know, what were your recollections and highlights from the experience? I mean, I could, I could sit here and say that I felt like everyone was on like their AAA game. And I feel like, yeah, anyone, you know, could have got through to the next stage. But what did you think? Yeah, definitely. I would love to talk about like the heats first and then go to the finals. That would be like, amazing. I just think it was such an incredible process for me. I hadn't heard about APS until the year prior, so that was the first time I'd heard about it. And I attended one of the heats with the incredible Ren, who was hosting at the time. And then I had done a bit of watching online and seen previous previous state finals and stuff before, was really inspired by all the incredible poets that were up there. Then the day of the heats, I actually didn't know if I was going to be able to attend because my health was quite unstable that day.

14:51 So I decided pretty much an hour or two before that I'd be able to go. And I'm so glad I did. And it was actually a really cool piece that I spoke that was really important to me called synchronous, which is about the concept of crypt time, which was coined by an academic called Allison Kafa. And this is a concept in the disability, chronic illness and neurodivergent community where we often experience time in a really flexible and unique way where things can slow up and speed down and just change. And we often need the pace of things changed as well.

15:33 It may take us a lot longer to get ready for the day, or things might be a lot shorter for us. And it's just that idea of like, flexible time. And I loved that concept, and I had not heard about it until a few months beforehand. And so, yeah, it was a really special piece for me to be able to kind of share with our local community and just kind of put a little bit of a, a creative spotlight on and, and just introduce it to people who may also not have understood the concept before. And yeah, I was super pleasantly shocked to have obviously got through with you. People loved it. Yeah, it was really cool. So then I set myself the challenge. I do not have the best memory and my memory is not great.

16:15 So I'd never memorised a piece before. And so I set myself a challenge to memorise a piece for the state finals, which was such an interesting process to learn how I absorb things best. And I ended up doing a combination of kind of like playing the words back to myself. So I'd like recorded myself and kind of listened to it for a while. And I found I absorbed that really well. I was also deciding between two poems for the night and I kind of decided the week before which one I was going to do. My voice, as you would probably know from the first one, is not traditionally slam. I would say it's more, it's more like a quiet, like a quieter, more gentle tone probably.

16:57 And that's just naturally how I speak. And it's also a little bit with my condition as well with my breathing and, and how much breath I can get out. So I think it's unique, but it's also can be a challenge sometimes when you feel like you're against incredibly energetic, incredibly powerful voices. So I kind of had had the thought to lean into it a little bit with my piece. And I spoke a poem about ambiguous loss. And again, it was a really important concept to me. And I thought, if this is the only chance I'll get to speak this, what do I want this incredible audience to hear? Yeah.

17:38 And it was such a diverse audience who had come from all over. And also I was really admired that the people we were with and incredible people who have done it for many years and who have so much knowledge. And I think I learnt so much from those people. And I also think that the the sense of support that each other gives and that everyone gave in that room was really special. And I hadn't really experienced anything like that before. I don't know how you feel, if you felt the same. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I, my personal reflection is that I've, I've done a lot of personal growth between like the 2023 final and 2024 in that I don't know if I've, I've actually told this story on the podcast. But for 2023, there was an, there was a thing that happened in the heat where I, I, I mean, look, I had a bit of an ego trip.

18:35 I had kind of tickets on myself and got a bit salty that I didn't get through initially, but I learnt from that. And that's what kind of led to doing this podcast, you know, seeing my fellow artists, not as people that I'm trying to crush in like a competition respect, but people that I create alongside and I saw it was a wonderful night. It was a bonus that the room was full of former, I think therefore I slammed guests. You know, KJ Haywood was there, Joe Yang was there, John and Glazos came in and, and watched as well. And yeah, they're just, they're just really special times. And I was so thrilled to see, to see Lane and Alex get through to, to finals as well.

19:17 But yeah, I, I couldn't believe, I mean, I, I tend to kind of blank out the, the scores a little bit, but I couldn't believe how close it was. Like I I really think anyone could have got through. It yeah, it was super close. I think the same. And I think the judges always have a really difficult decision because everyone is so unique in their voice and the way that they approach a story and the story they tell. And I just thought everyone's was so different. It's like, how do you compare apples to oranges to pears? You know what I mean? It's really, really different, which also makes I think a great show to watch as well. And I the couple couple of other little things that I remember from the night was an interval.

20:00 A beautiful woman came up and spoke to me and just said that the impact that it had made on her and I. I just think that it reminded me of why I do it. Yeah, like it reminded me I'm like, even if, you know, I don't get into finals or whatever, like this is the reason why I do it. Because she spoke to me for 5 minutes about the impact that that poem had made on her. And, you know, my mom's got incredible wisdom. And she always says if it, if it reaches one person in the room and impacts one person like that, that you've done your job, right. Like, and I actually spoke to another incredible poet on the night who actually said that he was inspired to enter the heat because he had seen both of us speak at our heat. And that was just, I just thought that was, that was incredible.

20:43 And then to see his family support him and how proud they were of him. I just thought that's that ripple effect that you have. And you may not even like, I wouldn't have known that at all unless he came and said that to us. And so I was like again, that you know, that that's why I do it like. Yeah, that. That's everything, isn't it? Former guest Nick Jenkins as well was a state finalist. Sorry, mate, forgot to spread the love over your way, but there you go. Yeah, very, very special. I think I wanna talk about art more generally now and how you know, art has the power to communicate in ways that words can't always do on their own. I wanna know how is poetry and visual storytelling helped you express the complexities of like your experiences and what does what role does creativity play in I guess the the healing process for you?

21:31 Yeah, I think a quote that I read that comes to my mind, but when you ask this is by Susan Cain from her book Bittersweet. And it goes, whatever pain you can't get rid of, make your creative offering. And I just loved that. I really resonated with that because I think for me, it's not just my pain, but it's also the complexities of all the emotions that I have that sometimes I don't feel have a home and don't have a place. And it's like, what do I do with this? I feel like kind of when you said healing, it really is like a cyclical healing journey for me and it and it goes up and down and it kind of has those really positive emotions and those negative emotions.

22:13 And sometimes I felt a little bit like I'm outside the pace of life a little bit, sometimes less so in the last couple of years, but definitely the few years before that where I wasn't able to be as much with my friends and my family. And I just felt like, you know, what was I contributing? How was I connecting with people? And that's really where, you know, my core value of connection came from. It was from that sense of probably from healing to be honest. And then how can I make a positive impact with that? For me, both the process of creating and sharing a cathartic in different ways. I think I connect with myself in that process of creating and often even I'll do a little bit of research as well. If it's something sometimes I'll write with like a scientific concepts in mind or I'll write like I draw inspiration from from so many places, from podcasts, from things people have said.

23:12 And if I don't know much or as much about a topic, I'll do it like a deep dive. And from that it's even like, Oh my gosh, like I'm growing and learning from that process anyway, even if it doesn't see the light of day. I think I love to combine. And it's only been probably the past year and a half that I've kind of brought in visual art into my repertoire. First it was the written word. I think it was just the most accessible to me at the time. It was something like you don't need anything except like your foreign or you don't need anything. Like I find it hard to physically write with my hands, but I always have my phone on me. So it's like I, I don't didn't need anything else.

23:52 And then combining poetry combined with photography, because photography was next for me, really kind of made it a bit more unique. And they always say like a picture says 1000 words, right? It's like the quintessential, quintessential things. So I've always loved photos and I'm I was it's the scrapbook maker of our family. We have always one I'm that person guilty. So that was my lockdown project actually was creating family albums and family photo books to look back on because I think that you can read so much from the photos. And I really wanted to explore what that would look like if I was to then create a concept and be more creative with my photography and choose like a dimension and layers and really create a whole image from scratch.

24:46 And it really that combined with the poetry allows for people to explore things in a multi dimension. I think that we absorb information differently each of us. Some of us are more auditory learners, some are more visual learners. I think that we absorb them more deeply if they're in our preferred or combined kind of mediums. So that's where the combination came from. And also with kind of expanding that into videography as well, which I've done more recently. I think my first video that I created was with a poem. I'm going to speak a little bit later. And it really it just the, the combination of the audio with the visual.

25:35 And I always think of accessibility as well. So like a captions, I just found like I imagined it in a dark room. And then like I was like, OK, this is projected up on a wall. Like what are people going to feel from this? What emotion do I want people to feel? What I want people to take away from that? And it just allowed me to expand the breadth of, of what I was giving. And yeah, I've I've then gone on to create another one, which is actually in a, in a film in the in couple of weeks, Bill, the TS Bill. The TS What's? This Yeah. So the poem that I actually spoke at state finals, I created a video of that, a short film. And that I've, I sent it off to a couple of international poetry film festivals. And yeah, it was excitedly accepted into one, which was very exciting.

26:23 And so it's based in Texas at the beginning of next month and it's also gonna be shown online. So there's screenings kind of two days on the 4th of April and also on the 9th of April kind of our time. So our time, it works out like once at like 5:00 AM and I'm like, who's watching at 5:00 AM but also at 11 AM is the other one. So yeah, that's really exciting. And then it's also gonna be available for any anyone to watch who has a ticket for until the middle of May. So that's really exciting. Yeah. And am I right in saying you? You've had some work featured at Abbotsford Convent recently, Yes, Yes. So I've done a few things actually with the incredible platform exhibitions.

27:07 So they usually work to a theme each time and you submit a or an idea or it can be fully finished or it could be in process. And then they select usually up to 50 artists, sometimes it's 30 up to 50. And I've had my first collection with them was actually a seven piece collection which I went like all out. So this was based on a poem actually, that I had combined with art and it was based on the concept of memory and fragmented memory and a created a photograph and then a little poetic kind of caption underneath each photograph to kind of, yeah, symbolize the different stages of the memory and the poem.

27:57 I'm actually going to read that one a bit later today as well. So that would be really cool, setting the stage. For it, yeah. So, yeah, you've been out there doing your thing in so many different forms. And I really like what you said as well about the the catharsis of art. I think that's such a a strong word. And you throw everything in there, your joy, your pain, your questions, your, your doubt, and you produce something that other people get to see and reflect on. And I just think, you know, I just think that's one of the most beautiful things in the world, really, that we get to do that and we get to witness other people doing that. Yeah, Yeah. It's very uniquely. Human, I think, yeah, absolutely. To do that, and particularly in times of crisis and in times where people are really struggling, I think art is crucial.

28:43 Yeah. Hope you enjoyed. This preview clip. To continue the conversation and listen to the entire episode, head over to the I Think Therefore I Slam Patreon. The link is in the show notes.