Touring, and other winter adventures

The EP tour is over! It’s been a busy, exciting, exhausting experience involving, gigging, exploring new cities, meeting new people, and trying to find a decent cup of tea. Thank you to everyone who came along to my gigs and supported me, and thank you to all the organisers for putting on some awesome shows. <3

I’m going to create a tour video diary, a zine, and a long blogpost where I discuss the tour and the dates in detail – but for now, I’m taking a bit of a rest to replenish my energy and get some Christmas shopping done!

Aside from the EP launch, touring, and all that goes hand-in-hand with that, here are some other ridiculous things I’ve been up to this winter – everything seemed to magically coincide so that I barely had a day free from September to December (isn’t that always the way it goes?)!

Here. In My Head. #16

 

Back in September my friend Kirsty and I made a 24-hour zine each, but I’ve been so stupidly busy since that I didn’t get round to printing and listing the zine on my website until now! Mine is Here. In My Head. #16, where I write about the EP recording process, being a multipotentialite/scanner, musical influences, and being perceived as a boring person. Buy a copy for £1 on my shop page.  Kirsty’s zine, Forever Incomplete #3, is available on etsy.

Sonorus: Feminist Perspectives on Harry Potter

I co-edit and write for Sonorus, a compzine about feminism and social justice in Harry Potter.  Last month we published issue 3 – find out more and buy a copy here! In this issue, I write about veela and the literal demonising of women’s anger, and Hogwarts women I’d like to go on a date with.

Introspectology

I’ve been interviewed for an episode of Introspectology, a podcast on personality and identity “where we go inside other people’s heads to find out who they are, how they think, and what it’s like to be them”.  I discussed being an introverted performer – listen to my episode here!

Netball

I wanted to try a new sport instead of running, while the winter weather makes running the most depressing, unbearable experience possible – so Kirsty and I took up netball! I’m terrible at throwing and catching the ball – 2 basic tenets of netball – but I am good at grabbing the ball mid-air, running around the court, and falling without hurting myself too badly. 🙂

Yoga
Yoga is one of those things I’ve meant to take up for years, but I can never find a class with a slow enough pace – so many classes are super-serious and are full of elegant beautiful women that make me feel clumsy and inadequate for falling over every time I attempt the downward dog.  This autumn the Swansea Uni sports centre ran a beginners yoga class which I tried, and it was awesome – it was a supportive friendly teacher, gentle yoga moves, and I wasn’t made to feel inadequate if I couldn’t do a particular position. I loved it, and my flexibility has definitely improved! I hope to continue attending yoga in the new year.

 

Feminisms and Rhetorics 2015

@catherineelms thank you for being so generous with your #zines! #FemRhet15 pic.twitter.com/WMuzJZcVjH

— Christine Martorana (@MaddoxChristine) October 30, 2015

This is pretty cool – a PhD student in the US has written a dissertation on feminist agency and visual rhetoric, and one of the chapters uses my zines as the case study!  She also did a presentation on my zines at an academic conference called Feminisms and Rhetorics 2015. Amazing!

Day job/work stuff
My department has been undergoing a huge restructure, so I had to reapply for my own job last month – that’s still going on at the moment, and I have to prepare for a second interview this week. It’s all very scary and challenging.