On Friday after work, I make my way to the place where I grew up, taking the Central Coast & Newcastle Line train northbound. From the window I watch bushland claim a world that’s now familiar: first the brick-and-tarmac jigsaw suburbs of Strathfield and Epping, then Hornsby and Berowra where the view will occasionally flush green, if only for an instant. Some time after, trees flood the landscape, and it becomes hard to imagine being witness to anything different.

This train ride has been both haven and hurdle throughout my life. It is a meditative place, one where—growing up before the ubiquity of smartphones—I was largely separated from my online self. As an adolescent it always drew my attention to what I had found in internet communities like Tumblr and Deviantart—empathy, kinship and a space to write for myself as opposed to the endless formulaic essays of Australian English education—and how badly I wanted that kind of supportive environment but in physical space, with people I could speak to. Today, the train is a reminder that it wasn’t until I moved to the city that I developed the confidence to submit to journals, learn to edit my own work, and foster some sense of discipline in becoming a better writer.

It feels cheap to conjure the train as a metaphor for my journey towards access, knowledge and opportunities; I’m conscious that such an image reifies the cultural chokehold of Australia’s east coast cities. But despite the legitimacy of these criticisms, it’s hard to shake how something in the image speaks to my experience: a young person who grew up reading and writing but isolated from spaces of literary culture and discussion.

When I learnt that Riley Hammond, poet and participant in Toolkits: Digital Storytelling, grew up in Kahibah just outside of Newcastle, I immediately wondered if we had ever caught this train at the same time. Were her experiences anything like mine, and how did she feel about her connections to Australia’s literary world in the midst of the online Toolkits program? So we met, the day after the National Young Writers Festival had finished, to catch the train and talk about the internet, writing and community.

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Rory: I guess in my head I’m trying to link my experiences with this train to your experiences. Do you get this train often and if so where to? Would you like to talk about your feelings towards this train line?

Riley: [laughs] I would love to tell you how I feel about this train line. I feel at different stages of my life this train has been very different things. When I was in high school I used to have a boyfriend and half his family lived in Sydney. I would catch this train every few weeks to see his family and they would take us to cultured events and I would be like, oh my god. And then like now as an adult I go to visit my friends, but it’s always to access a scene or something—like, that’s where the good shit is.

Rory: How long have you been writing?

Riley: I’ve been probably writing my own stuff consciously like on purpose since I was seventeen. Or like, always, but specifically like poetry when I was sixteen, seventeen. That’s when I was on Tumblr and there were all the Tumblr poets and I thought like, ‘that’s so cool’, but also that was also very based in America. They were very American-centric writing communities and so for ages I thought that was all there is. And I didn’t really have any concept of an Australian writing community that I could access at all until I started getting stuff submitted in Voiceworks, and I think that is how I ended up finding out about all the little niche groups and communities... like there are people making stuff—

Rory: —everywhere.

Riley: Yeah [laughs], turns out in fact.

Rory: It doesn’t feel like it at the time! Especially when you’re growing up you have the immediate space around you and then you have the internet which is like… how do I say this? It’s not shaped geographically... it can be much harder to find stuff about the next town over then about stuff from—

Riley: —it’s not spatially logical or anything.

Rory: Yeah it’s mostly arranged via a popularity algorithm, so of course you get all the like, media and culture from the States and you don’t get anything from Australia. Although that does change the more you learn about, like, I definitely know when I first became aware of writing in Australia and begin paying attention to it more, Melbourne becomes higher and higher in my search results. It’s like, oh you’ve clocked me. How did you find out about Voiceworks then?

Riley: I think honestly like what might have literally happened was I think I googled publications to submit to in Australia or something and through that I started using Submittable and Submittable was like Voiceworks? and I was like Voiceworks, who’s she?

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As important as practice and incremental development is to a writer, I think most can point to a handful of events as dramatically transformative—times where the limits of possibility fold back, revealing the horizon to stretch much further than you had ever imagined. In 2015 I found community as a writer and then, a year later, found community everywhere.

The second ever Subbed In reading was the first reading I’d ever been to. In the dimly lit backyard of an Enmore share house I watched readers share stories that were funny, devastating and grounded in experiences I connected with, like the writing I had been reaching for across the Pacific Ocean but contextualised in my antipodean upbringing. It was also one of the first spaces I felt comfortable in my queerness. So I did what I thought any overenthusiastic young person would do: I moved in to the house that hosted the readings and volunteered whenever and wherever I could. I wrote and read and learnt how writers, I think, learn best— through talking, through sharing, through community.

It was strange, then, to leave that community about eight months later for a student exchange program. I was grateful to be given the opportunity to study overseas, but I felt anxious about what I might lose by leaving Sydney—what Ben Walter calls the ‘privilege in geography’: those individually miniscule but cumulatively significant cultural capital exchanged over coffee, beers, or open mics. Was my only chance to develop as a writer through the place I lived in, and was soon to give up? Just before I left I was accepted into the inaugural Toolkits: Poetry program and found this assumption quashed.

From another part of the world, I logged on for twelve weeks, bonding with writers from all over Australia. I realised the Sydney literary scene I had idolised was in fact a sliver of what goes on around the country, at least as far as poetry is concerned. To learn from someone as talented as Melody Paloma was a blessing, and had a significant impact on my personal writing practice. But more than anything the program opened me up to new modes of connection, knowledge and generosity through the ongoing conversation with the other participants. After the program had wrapped up we continued to talk online, swapping poems and collaboratively editing our work with genuine and tender care. As a framework for fostering online communities that are enthusiastic and supportive, Toolkits transcends a major barrier in accessing development opportunities for writers outside of Australia’s cultural bubbles.

I’ll admit Toolkits is not without its flaws. The intimate format of its workshops means that not everyone who applies can participate, and the makeup of participants across its Poetry, Fiction, Memoir and Graphic Narratives streams suggests that those who live near professional opportunities are more likely to be in a position to craft a successful application. However, the streaming of sessions via Toolkits: Live has lead to an archive of talks that balance both specificity and accessibility. That Toolkits continues to reach writers, regardless of where they live or when they are available to learn, is an achievement that deserves to be recognised in this chokingly urbanised industry.

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Rory: Can you talk a bit about what you wanted going into Toolkits and whether that changed or not... what drove you to apply to Toolkits?

Riley: I did it because I trust Express Media—

Rory: —that’s so important—

Riley: —yeah, I was like I trust you as an establishment, I think that you would give me genuinely good resources and I really wanted access to those good resources. Which I have gotten! But yeah, I just felt like it was probably going to help me figure out what I wanted to be making and it has started to do that definitely. I had some loose stuff beforehand—a lot of my playing around this year has been with ASCII art and audio.

Rory: So the ASCII art on your Instagram, is that from before Toolkits?

Riley: Yep yeah that’s pretty much all from before that. So like I was doing stuff like that, that is best hosted online in some respects... like I have printed out my ASCII art and stuff before, but I’d make an ASCII art animation and I was like, ‘this is good, this is the stuff I wanna make.’

Rory: I’ve shown this to a half-dozen people at NYWF and they're all like ‘this is so fucking cool’, like how the hell...

Riley: It’s really hard to do ASCII art it’s really slow but that’s also something I really like about it, and I think as like a digital thing I think it’s really interesting because I get to do what I like, what my little tiny brain likes which is like, being on computer, tap tap, but also it’s really so slow that it’s also meditative. It’s kind of meeting in the middle of like, mindfulness plus logged on.

Rory: I have done a really small amount of ASCII art a really long time ago but it never went anywhere good and I don’t think I could handle the slowness of it. But I’m encountering it again now because I’m starting to experiment with making bitsy stuff and that’s like, doing pixel art, which is similar. I don’t think it’s as intense as ASCII but it’s there. It’s almost like online knitting: it’s just slow, methodical, repetitive and often... I don’t know what the word I’m trying to find here is. You only see a small part of it and you don’t see how it all fits together until way later and you have to be like ‘yeah, I’m comfortable working this little pocket and it’s going to become a full thing later.’

So you were saying you are keen to find digital resources and you trusted that Express Media were going to give them to you. What kind of resources have you found before doing that program?

Riley: I guess there’s stuff that I have read online myself or through Instagram. I hadn’t really found anything that I thought truly slaps the way some stuff in Toolkits has. They’ve shown me some really good little pieces and been like, ‘you can do this!’ and I’ve been like, ‘oh wow!’ So I think in that respect they’re really tuned into what’s current and good and usable for if you want to learn how to make new things.

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I am mildly obsessed with Riley’s writing, which is at once cheeky and thoughtful and crushing. Across all of her poems and digital experiments there are creatures and technologies, engaging us humans in complicated relationships: redbacks lodge in our room, a video lecture reverberates hollow speeches through our laptop, ghosts eating our bed sheets. The real and virtual coexist as substrates of a kind of surface magic, a Gestalt switch in the consciousness that cycles between animal, vegetable, mineral.

Some of Riley’s best and most interesting work is on her Instagram, where she seems to comfortably weave a flirty, ominous persona through wildly different experiments in form. When she posts new work using tools I recognise I think: How can Riley’s voice be so fully embodied in each strange new space she chooses to operate in? I think of threads in a scoobie, how colours that clash side by side seem to form an organic, obvious pattern when wound together. For all of the glitz that interactive and animated digital forms can offer, Riley’s words feel weighted with a promise, or a warning, best articulated in her recent zine Meat vs Body: ‘‘THE GHOST iS READiNG THiS NOW / THE BODY WiLL READ iT LATER.”

When I first learnt about digital poetry—both through a Toolkits: Live session and a class on multimedia computing I took on exchange around the same time—it took me a long time to start playing with it in ways that felt true to what I wanted to say. Riley hasn’t even finished the Toolkits program but already her digital work reads like a natural extension of her print practice, which makes me excited and extremely jealous of what she has in store for us in the future.

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Rory: I’m keen to hear about some of the stuff you’ve liked most in the Toolkits program, like whether that’s the discussions that you’ve had or particular work that you’ve seen…?

Riley: They’ve shown us some really good works and we’ve talked about them as a group. But overall I really just enjoyed being with a group of people talking about a dedicated topic that we’re all really interested in and want to learn about. And then just using that as a jumping off point for the next fortnight to go and be on my own and work on my own stuff, but know that... I don’t know, just like getting ideas from lots of different angles. I think it’s really nice, we’ll all have sort of looked at similar material but we all come from different backgrounds and we talk about it in different ways because we all have our own experiences. There are people who have journalism backgrounds, and then someone who’s like— I bought this girl’s book, Shastra—

Rory: Shastra’s amazing!

Riley: —oh my god, she’s so cool. And it’s just great, there’s all these people and they’re just really interested in why you would do things digitally and how you can make things accessible. They all want to talk about it and it’s just nice. It just feels good. It does that thing, you know, where you get inspired and it just kicks your brain a little bit? And you’re more likely to make something that slightly higher quality because your brain’s got some little brain adrenalin.

Rory: In my experience of doing Toolkits: Poetry... there’s an element of accountability in a group, where you are like, ‘I can’t phone this in because everyone’s clearly very enthusiastic about this, I better write something cool to share with people.’

Riley: Yeah and I’m like, I don’t want to let down Jon [Toolkits: Digital Storytelling facilitator]! He’s so cool, he’s so nice, he’s so helpful!

Rory: Oh god, I feel I let Melody down so many times during the program! I don’t think I really realised how precious and formative that program was for me until way after it was done, like two of the Toolkits people I did it with were at NYWF this year and I’ve gone to Melbourne and Brisbane to visit people from Toolkits to hang out and do stuff together. I don’t know, for me those bonds are so special and it’s interesting comparing that with like... did you develop friendships and stuff on Tumblr?

Riley: Yeah absolutely.

Rory: The value of having that physical link as well, like being able to catch up and see each other at writers festivals and stuff is really nice and really different to like, oh I’ve got all these really amazing friends and they live in Canada!

Riley: Yeah I think it’s funny. I think that’s really interesting as an Australian thing too, because it’s like we have such a big population that’s so spread out along a vast area. Everyone’s scattered and there’s a huge amount of land and it’s like for me I’ve almost sort of found more of like an Australian writing community by delving online rather than by doing anything IRL and I think that ties in with the whole idea of Digital Toolkits really well because it's like: ok, well then, how can we make that online presence stronger and better and work in it you know?

Rory: Yeah ’cause like Australia has really good—I think the print journals are really high quality but their online spaces for them are always a bit scatterbrain.

Riley: Yeah I don’t think they’re being used to their full potential.

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Toolkits: Digital Storytelling may be new, but Australia has long had a quiet involvement in digital writing, or electronic literature, as it is known in academia. As far back as the nineties, when the world wide web first began to be spun into the fabric of our existence, Australian writers and artists were toying with and assessing the storytelling potential of this then-nascent medium. While VNS Matrix declared ‘the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix’, Mez Breeze was constructing mezangelle, a language borne from the debris of the English language and the syntactic formations of code, chat rooms and the command line. This work was innovative, not just at home but globally, although I feel that these early net.art figures haven’t been celebrated in Australia the way they have overseas (earlier this year, Mez won a lifetime achievement award from the Electronic Literature Organization, arguably the field’s largest institutional body).

Looking back at the past decade or so, Australia’s literary journals have flirted with stories that can only be published in the digital space with mixed results. When Cordite Poetry Review published Cordite 36: Electronica in 2011, then-managing editor David Prater asked, ‘Have we finally broken through that invisible barrier between “text-based journal” and “online journal of electronic literature”?’ In that same issue, Benjamin Laird punctured this question in an assessment of the online capabilities of Australia’s major literary journals, bluntly stating: ‘Under the circumstances it seems unfair to criticise but, honestly, they could be doing better.’ Since then there have been some interesting special issues of interactive and multimedia writing in places like Overland, Going Down Swinging and The Lifted Brow, and Voiceworks relaunched its website as a publication for digital writing by young Australians. But, honestly, I think Benjamin’s assessment still largely stands.

I don’t begrudge the work of the incredible, important journals and organisations I’ve mentioned—nurturing electronic literature is hard. No one can seem to agree exactly on what it is, let alone figure out how to file it properly. As much as digital writing can sit comfortably within the bounds of familiar categories like fiction, poetry or comics, it is perhaps more likely than print work to escape those well-fenced spaces, spread like an overfed snake across form and genre. Few website back-ends are configured to deal with this sort of ontological ambiguity, which leads to works like Jini Maxwell’s An Atlas of Reflections: A Review in Hypertext of Vanessa Berry's “Mirror Sydney” or Dan Hogan’s pop-up poem I’m selling a large suitcase? missing the spotlight they deserve mostly because our technology cannot handle our technology. Less big-L Literary but equally important forms of digital storytelling like podcasting, multimedia journalism, and web series, are also sidelined early on in these fatuous ‘what is digital’ discussions.

The other major barrier is the difficulty of becoming a triple-threat: decent at writing, proficient in another art form such as film, music or illustration, and having the technical skills to pull these together in a broadly accessible format for the web. I think the good news here is that in the battle for keeping the web open and creative, so many individuals and teams have stepped in and dedicated their time to making it a little easier to create digital things: whether that’s interactive fiction or bots or games or comics or art, or even building a machine to help make those things for you. Conveniently, most of these tools are built with the same blocks that most websites are built with today, which helps editors and publishers as well.

I don’t want to downplay the need for sustained and nuanced engagement in digital storytelling, but I think things are getting better. There are new tools, new spaces to publish work, digitally-focused festivals and awards; all of these contribute to the development of new work to emulate, critique and respond to. The seeds have been germinated to foster a more culturally sustainable space for digital writing in Australia, provided we don’t consume the earth up in the process.

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Riley: I like it when people can harness things in a really natural way and it seems like it’s all just cohesive. I’m obsessed with this girl at the moment who writes but Instagram is also part of her thing, her name is Kelly Karivalis. I just think it’s really interesting, but also because I really like the idea of poetry in particular but really any digital art just kind of like, integrated or integrating itself into more mainstream stuff. Just like being around on Instagram or on the internet or somewhere where people might see it and interact with it, and it’s accessible but just as much as any part of culture is on that sort of like social media grid. Like I really like that idea of stuff seeping in.

Rory: Instagram is kind of interesting in that way in that the kind of explore feed works I guess and the way that things that you're interested in get fed back to you. And it can be good for finding things of your taste.

Riley: It also like traps you though.

Rory: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

Riley: Yeah, it’s super vortexy—

Rory: ’Cause like you’ve got poems on your Instagram but when I think of poetry on Instagram I first think of like #instapoetry and Rupi Kaur—

Riley: Instagram always tries to get me to follow things like that. It thinks I really really like that and I'm like, ‘am I doing something wrong?’

Rory: I think, like, it’s cool that... it’s like a double-edged sword. It’s cool that people are being exposed to poetry today and not fucking like, Banjo Paterson, but actually people making art today. But there is definitely an element of Instagram aesthetics that creates this urge to clone and duplicate things.

Riley: The platform is cursed. That has to be acknowledged if you’re going to interact with it I think.

Rory: The internet is cursed and is a curse.

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When the train hits the Hawkesbury my phone signal disappears. Sometimes this is infuriating, other times it feels like a hex being lifted.

The immateriality of the internet does a fairly good job of masking how ecologically devastating it is on a material level: the organs of our smart devices were harvested in despicable conditions while the data that pulses through it is a glut for electricity. Shifting inwards, I’m cognisant at a basic level of how my computer is reshaping my body and my brain, but not so acutely to consistently practice the most common harm reduction measures—posture checks, regular breaks. Reflecting on what my gross attachment to my phone is doing to myself and the world around me is usually enough to turn me off my writing for several days.

During this downtime, Jenny Odell’s question in the introduction of How To Do Nothing dances in my head: ‘What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?’ What does it mean, and what are the ways out? How much of the internet can we rebuild in low-energy, solar-powered iterations, like the Low Tech Magazine website? How would cyberspace be different if its computational architecture was based in Indigenous epistemology, as poet and researcher Jason Edward Lewis has suggested? As I explore new ways to make things online, I hope to foreground these ideas and advocate for models of symbiosis between the natural and virtual worlds. I still don’t know if this is possible—on my most cynical days, the internet feels like No-Face, growing and swallowing everything in its path.

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Rory: It’s interesting to me that at the moment a lot of your digital work is published on Instagram. I don’t know if you’re hosting any of your stuff online yet or you’re just like playing to make stuff quickly…?

Riley: I’ve got some stuff hosted online but nothing super polished. I think I’ve been a bit unsure about what form I want wanted to take if it was polished which is kind of what I’ve been doing with Toolkits.

Rory: Have you had much of the ‘form vs content’ discussion?

Riley: Yep and it’s like... what are you actually trying to do? Should I try and learn this digital stuff and not worry about the writing and just use an old poem and format it for this? Or do I write something just for this format but then I’m like forcing it out for the format. But mostly I don’t have too much to worry about, I pretty organically have concepts and then fit them to whatever media I’m trying to use and a lot of it comes out as I’m doing it.

Rory: That’s what I’ve been like most impressed about the stuff that I see on your Instagram. There’s always very different forms, like, playing with forms and different ways but the writing never feels like it doesn’t fit the form or is forced, you know what I mean? Everything just naturally kind of sticks to the form that you’re working in which is like... I can’t do that! I’m trying to figure out how that happens! So it seems like you kind of play with both like ‘oh, here’s the thing I wrote how would it look in different ways’ or like ‘I want to learn how to use Twine so I’m going to try and make something specifically for that’.

Riley: It just depends for me. I think I underplay how much of a basic phone bitch I am to be honest [laughs]. And like I’m comfortable with that, I’ve been really leaning into it. I’m just constantly on my phone and I use a lot of apps and I just really enjoy playing with them and making little videos and stuff on them. So a lot of stuff I make that ends up on my Instagram has just come from me being on my phone. I swear like I kind of want to say I just do digital work because I was going to be on my phone or computer anyway [laughs].

Rory: No, I really vibe with that!

Riley: Like well I mean it’s right here so—

Rory: —huge mood—

Riley: —but that’s kind of then fed my interest in it because then I’m like, oh I’m just doing this because I’m on my phone and because it’s my inclination to be making some kind of poetry apparently, so then how can I like keep that in a phone world?

Rory: It’s interesting I’m thinking about, on the topic of tools, because you’ve mentioned both looking at open source technology and then looking at making stuff with apps on your phone. I had a meeting with Beth [producer of Toolkits] the other day and I was talking about like unpacking my bias about what constitutes digital writing. And unthinking like, auto-generated poems is the only thing that can be digital. When I found out that Jon was going to be facilitating the Toolkits program, I only knew of Jon through audio stuff and I was like wait, podcast is digital storytelling as well?

Riley: Yeah that’s something that really confused me like in the first session! I was like, why are we talking about podcasts? But then I thought about it and I was like yeah you know what, I’m the dumb dumb, you’re right! That is digital writing, because it is a message and you’re conveying it in a way that is digital and like it’s spoken. I think that every day I get a slightly broader concept of what poetry and writing and anything in that realm ‘is’ and I get much looser standards for what they should be.

Rory: Yeah it’s like being more comfortable with like having fuzzy definitions or even like having definitions at all in certain spaces are just about like locking some people out and keeping other people in. One of my favourite poetry journals is Rabbit and I love whenever I hear people ask poets ‘so what does non-fiction poetry mean?’ Like, I don’t know, who gives a shit?

Riley: Yeah like what do you want? Go write one. [laughs]

Rory: But it’s cool to see that like you’re making stuff that’s both interested in very technical tools but also taking the platforms that you are on and saying like, let’s make art with this.

Riley: I think you should make it work for you and like harness it. Especially like sometimes I’ll do stuff on Instagram and this is like… everything I do on Instagram feeds back into Instagram. But in my little head I’m making something, and your algorithm doesn’t fucking know what this shit is—like, you don’t know me, leave me alone! But also like, harnessing things on Instagram to make that and self-refer to the fact that it is on Instagram and to be conscious of that and be a part of that. And it’s this whole gross meta thing, like I think if you’re on the internet for long enough or if you think about the fact that you’re on the internet for long enough for you just go insane.

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I spend much of this ride now writing poems into my phone—poems about the people I have met online, about the intensely personal connections that can be made between disembodied avatars on a forum, the way I was alone but never felt it. I jot down ideas on how I might share these stories in a way that respects where they came from, the messy and dangerous and indispensable internet. When I’m there, these feel like the only stories worth telling.

Spat out of the tunnel, I look up. Sunlight washes the screen, dissolving its pixels into a black slate. We’re on the Hawkesbury River bridge now, where everyone turns away from their phones to take in the view: everything green and glistening, water flowing between the hills like tree roots in both directions, jellyfish like the faintest speckles on its smooth surface. The pillars of the old bridge stand below, watching us whizz along. When I’m here, it seems obvious—if I could only tell a single story from now until I die, it would be one about my feeling of weightlessness as the train hovers along its tracks.