Lee Bemrose
About Me
Apparently I am a writer. I say apparently because although I left school at 16 years of age and didn't attend university, study journalism or editing, have never been taught how to interview people and write features, and although I've never studied theatre or creative writing, I seem to have a few runs on the board.
After landing a job as a lowly paid dance music mag editor 10 years ago, I moved on from interviewing DJs to interviewing a wide variety of performing artists - actors, directors, dancers, comedians, singers, musicians, puppeteers, extreme skiiers, mime artists... you name it, I've asked them questions for a wide variety of magazines. People like comedian Bill Bailey, performance artist Laurie Anderson, Bad Seed Warren Ellis, dead comedians Bill Hicks, Peter Sellers, Richard Prior, Lenny Bruce and John Belushi. Okay, so these last ones were more fiction that actual interviews. It was fun though. That was for Australian Penthouse. I offered to interview some of my favourite dead comedians, and the research for that involved a weekend of watching their stuff so that I could answer my questions in their voice. Sweet job.
Like most writers, I've always been a bit of a writer. I was writing (bad) horror stories as a kid and have been noodling away ever since with varying degrees of success. I managed to get a few short stories published in short story anthologies, appeared on a couple of competition shortlists and picked up a national short story award. Les Murray knocked back one of my stories for Quadrant, so I knocked back his knock back, explaining to him why he had made the wrong choice and would he like to reconsider. He wrote back and seemed amused and said no, try him with another story. I did. He accepted it and I had work published in Quadrant.
Another story made it into Southerly, an issue in book form that was launched at the Sydney Writers Festival. Surrounded by so many academics and successful writers, I felt quite the fraud.
Obviously I have always worked at real jobs, and these have been all over the place. I managed to get a job as an editor of a dance music mag after writing some clubbing reviews for them. This was funny because I had never even worked in an office before. Steep learning curve, and an introduction to the world of interviewing people and pretending to be knowledgable about topics I really knew very little about. I got away with that and it was at that time I found a proper outlet for my humour writing. I started writing as Grumpy, a writing name I have only recently retired, but I wrote as Grumpy for about 10 years, having my own humour column in Tsunami mag that whole time. Unfortunately Tsunami went online, then folded altogether and I was briefly left without a Grumpy outlet.
But I hit up a couple of online magazines and was welcomed on board to Soot, Warhol's Children and Yawp. Currently I contribute theatre stuff to Australian Stage.
I have also done the occasional corporate job for various websites. I'd prefer to just write my random humour and ask creative types about why they do what they do, but if there's payment attached to writing, I'll probably do it. Call me - I'm a writing whoo-or.