Miro is a filmmaker, filmmaking teacher and a poet whose memoir of a counterculture New Zealand adolescence, In the Time of the Manaroans (Victoria Univeristy Press, 2020) has received critical rave reviews. As a writer-director she has made the feature films Being Venice (2012)—which enjoyed a boutique theatrical release in New Zealand—and the cult hit Floodhouse (2004). She has script edited award-winning Australian feature films The Rocket (2013), The Weather Diaries (2020) and Girl in a Mirror (2005).
She regularly publishes prose-poetry in Australasian journals and anthologies, and her chapbook Small-time spectre (2010) was published by the New Zealand press named after a bog, Kilmog. Her poem ‘Spider silk’ won second equal in the Val Vallis Award in 2016. She was awarded a Creative Doctorate of Arts (Screenwriting) from the Writing and Research Centre, Western Sydney University the same year. You can read or view her work at: https://www.mirobilbrough.com
Of her residency project, Miro has this to say…
“Beyond good and bad conduct there is a field. I will meet you there.”
Between 2013-16 I wrote a feature film screenplay whose theme was inspired by the above translation of 13th century Sufi poet Rumi. Joyriding reached a late-stage draft sufficient to begin financing but I refrained. The story I wanted to tell was compromised by my ability to bend screenplay and cinematic narrative conventions to its truths. I was writing the story of an emotional affair between a boy who wishes to be older and a woman who wishes to be younger, and I needed a more radical and supple form to hold the consciousness of its female protagonist—and to outstep reader expectations.
I have come to realise that the story I wish to tell is better suited auto fiction or the novelistic essay hybrid: a form that invites the kind of reflexive, wandering and sometimes fragmentary narration Nathalie Léger, Maggie Nelson and Rachel Cusk’s books pioneer.