Welcome to 28 Days of Karaoke – because too much karaoke is never enough. This month you will hear from each of the contributors to The Kid on the Karaoke Stage & Other Stories – a collection of fiction and creative non-fiction stories from some of Western Australia’s finest writers.
Karaoke is a useful metaphor for the creative process – or so it appeared to me when I was making the selection for this anthology. In the title story (Sj Finch’s ‘The Kid on the Karaoke Stage Emptied his Beer and Cried. Men Threw Him a Line’) the narrator is never more the person he wants to be than when he is up on the stage performing karaoke, even though, paradoxically, this is the moment when he is least ‘himself’.
Karaoke, like short story writing, and other creative or performance endeavours, can have this transformative effect. It offers a chance for the participant to inhabit an artform and in doing so, to become not so much what they are not, as something more than what they are.
In The Kid on the Karaoke Stage I deliberately did not identify which stories are fiction and which are not. This is because the most effective kinds of creative non-fiction always tell a good story, and the best kinds of fiction always reveal for the reader a ‘truth’ larger than the story itself. This distillation, or offering, or moment of realisation – call it what you will – can be as rewarding for each reader as it was for the writer; spectator and performer gain in equal measure.
Watch out this month for a little white ball bouncing lightly above the lyrics as you enjoy the karaoke-inspired offerings of each author.
Georgia Richter
Publisher, Adult Fiction & Creative Non-Fiction
Fremantle Press
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