About
About the Site
Arts, humanity, and our living world: these are all topics I find of great interest. This blog has previously had a focus on comedy, because that was my chosen means to express my concerns about the state of our world and to help give people insight and resilience. I still use comedy in my storytelling. However rather than writing comedy that addresses human and environmental rights issues, I now write directly about these things using many narrative tools including comedy. I have simply reversed the emphasis. This is in part because I feel I have sufficiently developed my comic skills to shift my focus. In even larger part I feel the times require a bigger effort on my part to help make of the world a better place.
You can of course still find all my old articles on comedy here.
About This Katherine Person
I have always wanted to improve the state of our planet. As a child I thought very hard about how I would do that. Politics? Legislation and the wise application of funds to various projects and services can go a long way. However, if the people subject to a government are unenlightened, no amount of enlightened governing is going to sufficiently change things. Science and technology? The insights and tools these bring are important, but they are only as good as the people wielding them. Charity? Charity is palliative. It addresses people’s immediate needs, but usually isn’t far-reaching enough to overcome the source of our problems.
More than anything I felt people needed to change their values and priorities. With that shift people would have the will to make those changes that would most benefit all of humanity and all of life. A very good way to open people’s minds and open people’s hearts is the arts. This was not a popular conclusion with my family. Nor is it a popular conclusion with the rest of society. Most people only see arts value in a dollars and cents fashion: either it’s seen as worthless, or if you become rich and famous, it’s seen as a wise investment. Rarely do people recognise its tranformative power, even though great writers have repeatedly changed the world.
My PhD is in storytelling within digital media. I became excited by the possibilities of online publishing in the late eighties and early nineties. At that time I became part of the Project Xanadu research team. I also wrote Surf’s Up: Internet Australian Style, a book edited by Reed Books and later distributed by Random House. It did very well and went through three printings. After my degree I taught storytelling for computer game design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Victoria University for about seven years. I then decided to move on and started writing for stage and screen.
My proudest moment was having a chance to do some writing for Nickelodeon Cartoons through Monkey Stack animation. I so wish that job had gone further. I always wanted to help save the world in a Jim Henson Fraggle Rock kind of way. My most significant moments were when I received a five star review for my musical comedy Pop Mashup: Happy Birthday Doctor, and later received standing ovations and a full house for my production Heard of Elephants: a musical about elephant conservation.
I still do things related to politics, technology, social justice and environmental campaigning. Currently, my focus is on homelessness and the world young people are having to face. I am writing a musical about this subject which I hope to tell you more about soon. Stay tuned!
Special thanks to Ananda Sim for the photograph of myself.