Happy Holidays from the team at Kill Your Darlings! In this, our last podcast for 2017, we bring you our recommendations for the holiday season. If your loved ones won’t like any of them (are you sure you want to spend time with them?) you could always give them Hera Lindsay Bird reading ‘Monica’, or Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman talking about Witch, Please. Whatever you’ve read/played/listened to/watched or consumed this year, we hope you’ve had a culturally great one. All the best till 2018! xox

Note: This episode contains some strong language.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app. Let us know what you think by rating and reviewing in your app of choice too!

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hello and welcome back to the last Kill Your Darlings Podcast of 2017. It’s been a year you may be glad to see the back of, but we hope you came across something interesting this year: a book you loved, a TV show that made you stay up all night, a podcast that made you look forward to your commute, or a film that had you transfixed. Whatever it was, now is the time to celebrate it.

We’re starting out with the last of our recordings from the Melbourne Writers Festival. I am drawing a bit of a long bow here, but I can say that all our guests today have used cultural touchstones to kick off their own work, whether critical or creative. We’ll talk to Hannah and Marcelle from Witch, Please and chat to the KYD crew about their highlights from the year that was.

But before that, here’s Hera Lindsay Bird reading her poem ‘Monica’.

Hera Lindsay Bird: Monica / Monica / Monica / Monica / Monica Geller off popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S / Is one of the worst characters in the history of television / She makes me want to wash my hands with hand sanitizer / She makes me want to stand in an abandoned Ukrainian parking lot / And scream her name at a bunch of dead crows / Nobody liked her, except for Chandler / He married her, and that brings me to my second point / What kind of a name for a show was F.R.I.E.N.D.S / When two of them were related / And the rest of them just fucked for ten seasons? / Maybe their fucking was secondary to their friendship / Or they all had enough emotional equilibrium / To be able to maintain a constant state of mutual-respect / Despite the fucking / Or conspicuous nonfucking / That was occurring in their lives / But I have to say / It just doesn’t seem emotionally realistic / Especially considering that / They were not the most self-aware of people / And to be able to maintain a friendship / Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy / Is enormously difficult / Especially when you take into consideration / What cunts they all were

I fell in love with a friend once / And we liked to congratulate each other what good friends we were / And how it was great that we could be such good friends, and still fuck / Until we stopped fucking / And then we weren’t such good friends anymore

I had a dream the other night / About this friend, and how we were walking / Through sunlight, many years ago / Dragged up from the vaults, like / Old military propaganda / You know the kind; young women leaving a factory / Arm in arm, while their fiancées / Are being handsomely shot to death in Prague / And even though this friend doesn’t love me anymore