Kate Hennessy is a freelance writer and editor.
I first read Kate's work in about 2009, when we were both contributors to the Australian music website Mess+Noise, where she was a critic and feature writer whose work I admired greatly from afar, since she was based in Sydney. It wasn't until 2016 that we met for the first time, at the Rock & Roll Writers Festival in Brisbane, where we were both guest speakers. In the intervening years since I first saw her byline, Kate has worked as a music and arts critic for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian Australia and The Quietus, among others, as well as travel writing for a range of Australian and overseas publications. Outside of freelancing, she works in corporate writing and editing, and teaches courses on music journalism and professional business writing.
It was the latter skillset that brought Kate to Brisbane in mid-May, and we met at her hotel room so I could ask her a few questions over a bottle of white wine. Our conversation touches on how she learned to make boring things interesting while working for a corporate writing agency; why she decided to become a freelancer as she approached the age of 30, and how it turned out to be a perfect fit for her; why she received hate mail from a musician after writing about his band in The Sydney Morning Herald; why the supply-and-demand in the travel writing business is worse than in music journalism, and why she thinks live music is like sex.
Kate Hennessy's music and arts criticism appears in The Guardian, ABC Arts, Fairfax, Australian Book Review, Noisey, Limelight, Mess+Noise and UK magazines The Wire and The Quietus. Kate talks about arts on ABC TV and has spoken at Vivid Ideas, Darwin Writers' Festival, the Rock & Roll Writers' Festival, Bigsound and at live events for Sydney's FBi Radio. Kate is an Australian Music Prize judge, a founding member of feminist collective LISTEN and a teacher of five years at the Australian Writers’ Centre. She developed a masterclass for The Guardian called 'How To Be A Music Journalist', offered in Sydney and Melbourne, and as a festival workshop at Hobart's Dark Mofo festival. Kate's travel journalism has taken her to Africa, Papua New Guinea, Turkey, Solomon Islands, Germany, Peru, Taiwan and remote Indigenous communities in Australia. She has a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Creative Writing major) from Wollongong University and won a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a double major in Political Science and History.
Show notes and links to what was discussed in this episode: http://penmanshippodcast.com/episode-30-kate-hennessy/
Kate Hennessy on Twitter: @smallestroom
Penmanship on Twitter: @PenmanshipAU
