Sydney Story Factory Update

Well, it's been quite a year at the Sydney Story Factory! In 2017 we started projects, including our two-year collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Unmapping, and an innovative partnership in Mt Druitt where local high school students are tutoring primary school students (it turns out they are incredible tutors!). We also finished projects, like State of Mind, which saw us work with teenagers all across NSW, as they wrote about things that are important to them. You can read more about some of these projects in our colourful and quite unusually exciting Annual Report 2016-17.

Throughout all this, a small group of teenagers has been quietly gathering at Bankstown Arts Centre every Sunday morning for a year to write, write, write. Their aim was to produce not just a fistful of poems, or a story, or a script, but a fully realised novella. And they aced it! Seven students finished and we have just published six novellas (purchase the full set here) with three more on their way.

These wonderful books were launched last Sunday at the new, pre-renovation home of Sydney Story Factory in Parramatta. We were moved to tears by a speech given by Vivian Pham, a 16-year-old student in the program, who wrote The Coconut Children - at 93,000 words, a novel rather than a novella. She said:

The Novella Project has changed the way I do things. It has somehow given me the courage to test my own boundaries and overcome the very things I always told myself were impossible. If you told me a year ago that I would soon write a 93,000 word story that I’m actually proud of, that I’d learn to have faith in the good of people again, that I’d be this senselessly happy all of the time, then I’d probably laugh in your face. But this is exactly what The Novella Project has done for me. Working on our novellas has taught us to listen to our own voices and trust that there’s value in what we have to say. It taught us that stories can change the world, one person at a time. It taught us that stories can change the world, and the world begins with us.