S2E5: Janine Mikosza

In this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast, Jenny talks with Janine Mikosza about art, writing, her extraordinary memoir Homesickness, and reading Duran Duran fan fiction at Bad Diaries Salon.

Jen and Janine talk about how Janine came to writing, and her memoir Homesickness. After majoring in sculpture, Justine completed post-graduate study in photo media, and practised for a decade with solo and group exhibitions. She’s now a research assistant for money work, with writing and art on the side. Jen and Janine discuss the memoir, how Janine came to decide upon the form, why memoir and not fiction (and how memoir as a form was resisted initially), Janines’s early reading influences, and the trajectory to agent and publication for Homesickness.

Moving onto the specifics of work processes and archiving, Janine explains her different approach between $ work (as research assistant, where she is ‘highly scrupulous’) and her personal creative work diaries and notes, which she says takes the opposite approach, and is ‘all over the place’. Janine writes on anything: napkins, back of supermarket receipts, but mostly post-it notes. We hear a short reading from Homesickness that explains this ‘post-it approach’.

Janine read at one of our Bad Diaries Salons last year: NOTES at the Motley Bauhaus in Carlton. We hear her thoughts on being asked to read, her preparation for the reading, and that she knew straight away what she’d read: a piece of Duran Duran fan fiction that was all about desire, aspiration and escapism. We finish with our usual closing: Six of the Best, the Bad Diaries questionnaire.

Content warning: this episode contains reference to child abuse.

Janine Mikosza lives in Melbourne, and writes fiction and nonfiction. She studied sculpture and photo media at art school and has a PhD in sociology. Her essays and short stories have been widely published, and her writing has been shortlisted for national and international awards. Janine's debut, a literary memoir called Homesickness (Ultimo Press, 2022), was published to critical acclaim. Homesickness challenged the memoir form by using an innovative device to ‘demarcate a protective boundary between self, character and reader’. Described by critics as ‘form-bending, exploratory memoir’ and ‘a remarkable and emotionally moving work that also pushes memoir forward’, it was named as one of the Guardian's ’25 Best Australian Books of 2022’.

Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.