If you’re a yarn spinner or a yarn listener you’ll have something to give at the Australian Youth Hotel on the first Monday of thia month. Once again in February collective Yarn will host a storytelling night where anyone can get up and spill some beans as long as the story is not offensive, lasts no longer than seven minutes and is 100% real … which should be easy, for as they say, truth is often stranger than fiction. (NJ)

Feb 6, 7.30pm, Australian Youth Hotel, 63 Bay St, Glebe, 0407 173 780 or email yarnsydney@gmail.com if you want to tell a tale

Aesthetes, crafters, design geeks and shop-a-holics stand up – there’s a new kid on the block, and it’s throwing down the gauntlet. Built around the idea that you should be able to get sweet locally-made designer gear without mortgaging your house, The Dollar Shop is changing the retail game on Oxford St. Handpicked by Sydney City Council as part of their initiative to match creative projects with vacant spaces along Oxford St, the latest addition to the somewhat flaccid (outisde a few notable exceptions of course) retail strip should come as music to the ears of local designers. The Dollar Shop is the brainchild of graphic designers Alex De Bonis and Louise Helliwell, the duo behind Tough Titties, a well-read blog celebrating creative Australian women. Featuring a carefully curated selection of clothes, jewellery, bags, stationery, self-publishing, photography, posters, instruments, kitchenware, crafts and more, the six-month pop up shop will also offer after-hours a weekend workshops for the less design-savvy looking to release their inner crafternooner. Currently seeking both volunteers for the day-to-day running of the store, and submissions from designers who reckon they can flog their wares for $20 and over, The Dollar Shop is set to open its doors at 58 Oxford St Darlinghurst in late February. For more info head to the website at www.dollarshopsydney.com.au. (KB)

From its humble beginnings on the Eastside airwaves to a fully-fledged, not-for-profit organisation promoting the position of poetry as an artform and mode of expression, the Red Room Company has certainly gone from strength to strength. Papercuts is Australia’s only nation-wide poetry education program, with Red Room’s Artistic Director Johanna Featherstone emphasising it’s about, “Encouraging young people to encounter poetry in unusual ways allows them to experience poetry as a journey, that isn’t necessarily about getting something right or finding an answer.”

Along with acclaimed poet and spoken word performer Candy Royalle, you have the opportunity to make this Mardi Gras season about something more than sequins at the Company’s Festival-incorporated poetry workshop. Royalle gives us hints about the journey in store …

Candy, what first drew you to poetry? A need for self expression and the desire to be heard. Both still reign supreme as the reasons I remain doing it.

Is it possible to really learn the ‘secret’ of spoken word? Spoken word or performance poetry has to have some element of entertainment. It can’t be just about the artist – if that’s your driving force stick to writing for the page. If you think about what holds the attention of the audience, what helps them to connect to you, what they will relate to (essentially know your audience) you’re more likely to be successful. By no means do I mean compromise your art but there is a balance that needs to be struck so that both performer and audience feel fulfilled and that the journey was worth it.

How important do you think programs like Papercuts are? Incredibly important. The work that Red Room does, and its impact, cannot be underestimated. When I was at school, we were never offered these sorts of workshops and I would have loved it. Instead, I was shown only one side of poetry – stuff that I truly struggled to connect with, and it nearly turned me off completely! Furthermore poetry should be accessible – not some elitist art form reserved for a select few for it is such an incredible form of human expression and Red Room with its Papercuts program really does work to make it accessible.

What will poetry bring to the experience of Mardi Gras, and vice versa? I appreciate that Mardi Gras is a celebration of gay culture and lifestyle and that it is a time for gay people to feel connected to a community of like minded people. Sometimes, however, the parties and the parade, the sheer scale of it, can drown out the arts and culture aspect that many Queer people contribute to the community. Furthermore, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and actually disengaged – particularly for teenagers still unsure of the whole scene. I hope that whilst Mardi Gras can bring the fun times and the platform, poetry (and storytelling) can contribute that sense of connectedness that a lot of Queer teenagers, young adults and veterans are seeking.

What is one thing you hope participants will walk away with? I hope participants understand that they deserve to be heard and then feel empowered to do so with some of the tools I will help them develop. Everyone has a story, storytelling is part of what being human is and how we communicate and I believe poetry is one way we can tell those stories – I hope the participants walk away feeling the same way.

Jan 25, 10am-4pm, The Mullins Studio, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, 597 High St, Penrith, redroomcompany.org/education

Most things to do with kids get themselves in a tangle – so why not have some fun with it? The Festival First Night for 2012 will feature an installation that is one part interactive sculpture, one part performance, courtesy of experiential theatre creators, Polyglot. Simon Abrahams from the Tangle team tells us more…

What sparked the inspiration for Tangle? Polyglot’s Artistic Director Sue Giles was walking through a park in winter, looked up at some beautiful bare trees and thought to herself, “what if they were all connected by beautiful coloured elastic” and the idea just grew from there.  Polyglot loves making extraordinary giant artworks out of simple materials and we wanted to make something that would make people see places they look at everyday in new ways.

How important is interactivity to children’s entertainment? We believe that hands on art making is the most interesting for kids because it empowers them to make decisions which have a real impact.  Interactive work is so much for engaging, more fun, more powerful.

What will the kids be ‘creating’? The kids will make a giant messy, tangled spiders web out of thick multi-coloured elastic – they can get inside it and play within it – it’s like a messy scribble drawing but in three dimensions and you can get inside of it.  It’s very abstract but more fun than you can imagine.

What roles do they performers play? Inside the space are four performers who play the part of the Weavers – they are there to improvise routines and make sure everyone has as much fun as possible.  There’s also a live musician to bring the whole space to life.

And what is one thought you hope young and old alike will take away with them? That the only thing you need to have fun is imagination.

Jan 7 (as part of Festival First Night), 3-5.30pm, Hyde Park, Sydney, free, sydneyfestival.org.au/2012

The host of National Public Radio’s (NPR) This American Life, Ira Glass, is radio royalty. In January, he will regale a captive Australian audience for the first time as part of an Australia-wide tour and the Sydney Festival.

His mellow voice has been heard by millions for 16 sweet years as he guides listeners through an hour-long themed show.  Glass has single-handedly proven that video did not kill the radio star, instead people keep coming back for more heartfelt stories, blended with chuckles and sniffles. (DE)

Jan 11 (7pm and 9.30pm), Sydney Town Hall, $35-45, 1300 668 812, sydneyfestival.org.au

Pip Smith, the creative force behind the curiously named Penguin Plays Rough, describes it as, “a monthly evening of short stories told from a red velvet armchair inside a warehouse in St Peters.” She continues: “The stories are usually a bit weird, with a broad imaginative reach,” and whether funny, experimental, or deadly serious, they uniformly represent, “a cross-section of what’s being written in Sydney right now.” At the very least, it’s an excellent excuse to drink wine and witness the myriad wonders of words and the wild writers who wield them (whew!). Smith tells us more…

The next instalment invites various writers to ‘re-imagine’ cities – what inspired this idea? There is a lot of interest, out in the Internet Brain, in building sustainable cities for the future. But I’m also interested in what the imagination can build, and what writing can make real. Fiction has the ability to show us what could happen, to give us the ability to see alternative ways forward. Jules Verne dreamt up the submarine and television long before they became a reality – who knows, maybe five short romps into the far reaches of Nick Sun, Luke Ryan, Sonja Dechian, Elena Gomez and Annaliese Constable’s imaginations will give our town planers some good ideas.

What has been the strangest thing to occur at a PPR, and what is one thing you’d like to see happen? We’ve had a pole dancer, and free chocolate for everyone, and someone in a veil play the saucepan lids. Louis Nowra brought a Chihuahua once, which had free reign of the audience. Those things were certainly strange.

In terms of what I’d like to see happen – I’d like to see someone do something or write something I can’t even imagine, but that makes me realise, after it’s happened, that it had to happen, that there was no way my life could have carried on without that thing having happened. Like Luke Carman’s story about Seinfeld, having colonising ancestors and dolphin porn. That had to happen, you know what I mean?

Tell us a little about the publication … Well, it is a mammoth beast that weighs over 500gms, and is therefore rather expensive to post.

But that is because it has 320 recycled pages featuring 23 writers and 17 illustrators squished between two hardback covers all wrapped up in a hand-screenprinted dustjacket which folds out to be an illustration of all the stories in the one imagined landscape.

It also comes with a free app for iPad or iPhone, which features all the writers reading their stories either live at our event, or studio recorded and accompanied by one of 13 different composers.

It’s very beautiful. It was a labour of love. It can be found at all good independent bookstores. And would make the perfect Christmas present (…) (head to penguinplaysrough.com/buy-our-book/ for stockiest information!)

What kind of feedback do you get from writers who take part? They generally say they’re amazed by the attentiveness of the audience. We have a really supportive regular crowd who respond in all the right ways in all the right places and never snigger behind their hands if the stories aren’t to their taste.

And … what’s up next for PPR? We are deep in our imaginary laboratories brewing up the next big project, which will make itself a reality sometime next year. It will be free, and big, and inventive, and worth it.

Dec 17, 8pm, 4 Lackey St, St Peters, entry by donation, penguinplaysrough.com

Around 400 people will be boozing and hollering at the world’s newest sport on December 17 with Australia’s second ever Barcraft… What’s Barcraft, you say? It’s a new event at the Paragon Hotel in Circular Quay which brings a heap of e-sports enthusiasts together to watch professional video games in a bar. The game scheduled for the bigscreen showdown is Starcraft, hence Barcraft.

If you’re still scratching your head, there’s only one way to find out for sure what’s going on … (NJ)

Dec 17, Paragon Hotel, 1 Loftus St, Sydney, 9241 3522, hotelparagon.com.au

Die-hard theatre fans are salivating over the rare and thrilling opportunity to see giant of modern playwriting, Sir Tom Stoppard, discuss his life and work in conversation with Jonathan Biggins at the Sydney Opera House on December 17. The nonchalantly cool British dramatist is one of the most internationally performed of his generation, with his plays frequently revived around the world. Stoppard’s prolific body of work is an eclectic mix, from plays about Soviet dissidents to landscape gardening, combining humour and wit with titillating takes on themes of human rights, freedom of expression and political freedom.

The man catapulted into modern theatre with the immensely popular Rosenctratz and Guilderstern Are Dead 40 years ago, then went on to write masterpieces such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul and The Real Thing. He is well known for his work for the screen, having co-written scripts for Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love and for Brazil. Still very much in action, Stoppard is currently shooting a television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Paradise End, the tale of a love triangle involving an English aristocrat.   

This will be a fantastic chance to see the 74-year-old dramatic god discuss his creative process, his life, what has inspired him over the years and how he sees the world. (MH)

Dec 17, 3pm, Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point, $35, 9250 7111, sydneyoperahouse.com

We all know them. Those too-good-to-be-true images, airbrushed till air is practically the only thing real left in them. One day in 2000 photographer and writer Anthea Paul decided enough was enough, and the bestselling book Girlosophy: A Soul Survival Kit was born. Eight books later and the crusade is still going strong, with Isabel Lucas, Tina Turner and even Britney Spears enlisting their name to the cause. Ahead of the launch, Paul drops us a line…

Why did you decide to start Girlosophy? I started it when I was living in New York when it became clear to me that an alternative voice for girls was needed, one that wasn’t based around looks or how to ‘get the guy’! Girlosophy is more about personal experiences, travel and creativity. It’s for and about girls who are out there doing cool stuff.
What can we expect to see within the pages of the new book? Lots of beautiful and intriguing photographs, some inspiring words and maybe some ideas to get the creative juices flowing…
And what has been the best thing you’ve achieved with the project so far? I think bringing together this collaboration of amazing photographers. Our work complements each other’s really well, so it created this gorgeous narrative that is like a meditation on paper, it literally transforms and transports.

WIN! A double pass to the launch party featuring performances by Ngaratya and Bridezilla on November 18th at Global Gallery (5 Comber St, Paddington) plus a copy of the book, Inspire – simply email win@alternativemediagroup.com by midday, Friday Nov 18! The book will be available from girlosophy.com and selected retailers…

Well Sydney, it’s that time of year again. After stifling that first inevitable groan at how early the Christmas decorations have gone up at your local shops this year, you can hardly help realising that, actually, Christmas is kind of soon. And this year, there’s no excuse for bad presents. Forget socks and bath salts, your Santa Sack will be brimming with seasonal joy after a trip to the PYD Design Markets this month. The Waterloo space will play host to hundreds of treats, from homewares to art, jewellery to children’s ware, and furniture to fashion. If you’re after extra brownie points, why not stick around and learn how to create the perfect Christmas macaroons from an expert – Masterchef cook-off winner Vincent Gadan, who’ll be showing off his skills at midday on Saturday, Nov 26th. Featuring designers such as bRainbow, I am Flo, Red and Ruby, Mango Frooty, Sollis Jewellery, Ampersand and Evolex by Luxmy Furniture, you’re sure to find something to make Santa proud. To add a bit of boogey to your eggnog, DJ Ollus will be also be there, spinning some festive tunes while you chow down on a gourmet sausage sizzle. Tis the season to be jolly after all, and doing your shopping at these homegrown markets seems a jolly good start.

Nov 26-27, 10am-5pm, PYD Building, 197 Young St Waterloo, free, pyd.com.au