Power Grads
Simon Behenna
Hi, my name’s Simon Behenna, I’m a graduate of the Professional Writing degree in the School of Communication. I graduated about ten years ago now… no it couldn’t be that long, seven years ago. I chose the degree because UniSA was the only university at the time that was offering a creative writing component in its degrees, which really appealed to me. Fortuitously, as it turns out, there was also lots of technical writing that was involved within the degree, which I didn’t really want to do at the time but which has actually helped me earn my bread and butter ever since.
It gives you a broad range of courses that you can undertake which will appeal to a wide variety of people I think, but generally the creative ones that I chose give you a broad spectrum such as script writing, poetry, writing the short story and then you can move on of course to directed studies which give you much larger areas to write for. The School is also very good at supporting you and will encourage you to have your individual ideas and then provide the resources to actually realise the work that you want to do.
I followed up my undergraduate with an honours degree that explored using different styles of writing in order to engage different audiences and then basically moved straight into working at the university and I’ve been here ever since. I think that’s a good sign, the university’s a good employer and because I’ve still been here, it’s led on to undertaking further studies. So I’m now doing my doctorate, which is looking at ways of using different writing techniques, using new technology to engage different audiences.
So, my current job is as an executive officer to the Pro Vice Chancellor of the Magill campus. It’s a job that involves a lot of writing. There’s a lot of correspondence and speech writing, lots of data gathering, it’s basically a job to keep him informed which uses all of the writing techniques I guess that I was taught throughout the program. I’ve been doing that now for about two years and before that was working as a web editor when the university redesigned it’s website, I was writing all the text for that.
When I was studying, and I’m sure they still do it, we also used to do a lot of speaking at wider events. So, for example, we’d go to a pub and have a creative writing night there where you’d be encouraged to stand up on the microphone and read out one of your short stories, so it’s an excellent way of getting life experience and actually knowing what it’s like to be a writer, I guess, you’re out there in the real world.
There’s a terrific publication called Piping Shrike which is run by students, for the students in which you can get your writing published, whether it be short stories or poetry or whatever. It’s sold, so it goes out to industry, your parents can buy it, it’s a terrific way of getting your name out there and actually seeing your name and your work in print. So, it gives you a good start, and something excellent I guess to put on your resume when you graduate.
I had some short stories published in it. A couple of which I ended up using in my honours thesis. It was a particularly gruesome short story about a couple of… it was fiction… a couple of ducks that we’d killed in the back yard and cooked up and eaten. Then when I ended up doing my honours thesis it was about writing short stories around how people prepare their food. So, getting it from the paddock to the plate was what it was really about.