Meet the Writers

Jenny Taylor
Jenny started her writing life as a poet before taking up song writing. With a 30-year career as a singing/performance teacher and a choir director, she is well versed in producing written technical and procedural documents related to music and is a published song writer. The subjects she writes about are diverse, with the moods ranging from gentle and joyful to quite confronting.

Jillian Durance
Jillian enjoys writing local community history in book and essay form. For the past few years, she was been working on a memoir of the historic house in which she lives. The memoir weaves together the stories of past inhabitants with an account of her own contemporary experience of restoring the place as a beloved home. In 2007 Jillian won the Victorian Community History Prize for her work ‘Still Going Strong: The Story of the Moyarra Honor Roll’ and was again short-listed in 2017 for her publication ‘The Shrine on the Mountain: The Story of St. Peter's Memorial Church, Kinglake.’

CS Hughes
CS Hughes is a local children’s poet but he has also written short stories, articles and essays. He has produced several poetry collections including ‘The Book of Whimsies’, ‘The Little Book of Funerals’, ‘The Book of Bird & Bear’ as well as the illustrated children’s verse, ‘Sweet Christmas’. At the start of last year, CS edited a poetry collection called ‘From the Ashes’ which featured some of Australia’s most renowned poets – as well as those just starting out – to provide a unified response to the 2019-20 bushfires crisis and to raise funds for charities that were working to rescue injured animals. A member and organiser for Burrra Poets, CS was busy during COVID, releasing a speculative poetry narrative which featured a hand printed Lino print artwork.

The Loch Writers Group
The Loch Writers Group consists of five members: Anne Taib, Allana Young, Heather McCloy, Melissa Austwick and Joel Evans. They have different backgrounds but are unified as residents of Loch Village. The group meet weekly for two hours and share texts that are produced around a common theme or prompt. They recently displayed examples of their work at an Exhibition of Local Artists at the Artspace at Loch.

The Loch Writers Group explore a wide writing forms including short story, personal narrative, poetry and short articles. Due to the regular nature of their meetings they favour a genre known as Flash Fiction which sets a word limit on each written piece - often 500 words or less. The group have become adept at producing very tight, engaging pieces exploring prompt or theme, which often relates to their lives in Loch, particularly during the COVID experience, or to our life experience more generally.

John Tebbutt
John Tebbutt is currently one of a number of South Gippsland Shire’s ‘Writers-in-Libraries’.
John is an essayist and specialises is factual writing. His project for the Shire program is to write about how the COVID pandemic has affected artists those associated with the arts (including gallery owners, journalists and administrators).

John has had a number of years researching and teaching at Monash, and La Trobe universities. He is currently an honorary Associate Professor with RMIT University. John’s research focus is media and popular culture.

John is the managing editor of Continuum: a journal of media and cultural studies. He has written about ABC Radio, community radio and the Melbourne music scene. John has also produced radio programs for national broadcast and written features for newspapers and online. He is active in history with his local community – Meeniyan – and is interested to write about the music and the arts generally in the Tarwin River valley.

John will be a South Gippsland Shire ‘writer-in-libraries’ until the end of March. He is interested to talk to anyone who has been associated with local arts, including in service clubs and schools, about their experiences during the time of the pandemic. He can be contacted at johntwritersinlibraruies@gmail.com