Storyteller, runner and maybe soon-to-be published author Imogen Short has a few things to say about women, work and pivoting. Elizabeth Kerr reports
Tucked in the corner of a Landmark café, Pui O resident Imogen Short is dressed for the lingering heat: shorts, linen shirt. She looks more sporty and athletic than literary and creative today. Though, she can, of course, be both, as evidenced by her recent gold place finish in trail running at the Gay Games. Her visiting twin sister Jess, who she claims is the stronger runner, took silver. As luck would have it the timer clocked her bib first as they crossed the finish line together. “It’s the only way I could beat her.”
That kind of sums up Imogen. She has no trouble balancing her serious and irreverent sides, or perhaps it’s a matter of being able to take a breath for a sanitymaintaining chuckle. As the co-creator and co-writer of the web series Pivot (on YouTube) she needed those on a regular basis. After landing an arts grant, Imogen and her co-founder and director in Three Wise Sheep Productions (www.threewisesheepproductions.com), Niamh Donohoe, came up with Pivot as an exploration of the double standards and infuriating expectations women in the corporate sphere face in the so-called post-#MeToo era. They mined interviews with women finance pros in New York, Sydney, London and Hong Kong for scenarios like quiet comments being met with a manful “stop yelling” – as a start.
“It wasn’t even satire at one point. It was just painful,” Imogen recalls. “And so many of the interviews started with: ‘I don’t think I have anything to tell you.’ So we’d just talk, and you wind up with your head in your hands wondering how this [stuff] happened.”
Imogen knows whereof she speaks. The Bristol native thinks of herself as a writer first and foremost, albeit one that took a 12-year detour through finance comms in London, Sydney and Hong Kong. She moved to Sydney 12 years ago with Jess, where she was later offered a regional role that took her to Hong Kong. Imogen made a familiar choice: try a couple of years.
“That was seven years ago now,” she says. She’s since switched to the creative side of things, focusing on storytelling for businesses and leaders, which outside of business is a passion as a mechanism for connecting people. “For me, story is what creates empathy and understanding between humans, so it’s important that more people are empowered to tell their story, especially women.”
To that end Imogen’s restarting Kaleidoscope (find them on LinkedIn), the women’s networking group she cofounded that wrestles with big ideas over breakfast. She’s also shopping around her first novel, The Flux, which she started in Sydney and backburnered until covid. “This is the story for a lot of people I imagine. I thought I’d write my novel. But then we ended up writing Pivot instead. Once we’d finished that I was just in love with the whole process, it energised me for writing in a way I hadn’t felt for years.” Imogen was energised enough to bang out 120,000 words. “It’s too long for a debut novel,” she chuckles again, mentioning the drama of finding an agent has just started. Imogen will self-publish if she must, but she’s less than enamoured by the self-promotion that comes with it. “Welcome… to me!” She declares, followed by an eye-roll. “I’ve only applied to 15 so far. It’s going to be a long journey.”
The Flux is an apocalyptic genre mash-up told from the point-of-view of four different women, each of whom Imogen admits represents some part of her personality. It’s also a philosophical mediation about women in various kinds of dystopian-inspired agony. “I want people to feel the agony and hope of these women. They’re suddenly thrust together in this terrible new reality and need to find a way to survive and support each other, which is the whole message. There’s so much divisiveness out there that it sometimes feels like we’ve forgotten what makes us human.” Margaret Atwood’s influence is obvious, but so is Natalie Alderman’s feminist sci-fi (The Power) and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies.
In some ways The Flux spun off Pivot, itself an extension of Three Wise Sheep’s self-funded short film Sweetcorn, a festival-circuit hit that dove into concepts of authenticity in the workplace. “I personally never felt like I could be authentic in that milieu, especially as a gay woman,” Imogen states. “So many of us step into this charade, and I think it’s fascinating that we do and no one thinks it’s weird. No one stands up and says: ‘Why am I dressed like this and using language I don’t use anywhere else in my life?’” That inauthenticity is one of the reasons Imogen agreed to be the subject of a documentary about the Gay Games. With sport one of the few consistently safe spaces for LGBTQ+ women, getting involved was important. “Coming from a place where I was painfully shy about my personal life to a documentary crew was a bit odd,” Imogen admits. “But it’s necessary that we share our stories with each other – it’s how we connect and, I think, feel less alone in this crazy world.”
Imogen acknowledges the struggle of creators to bring their own authenticity to the screen while making sure that people feel represented in the story. Pivot can’t hit all the bases, but it can take aim at Australia’s lack of gender progress. “If it becomes a story about everything then it becomes a story about nothing. Pivot had to be about women first. That’s where we’re starting and it’s exciting to think where we might go next.”
If all that makes it sound like Imogen is some kind of grim crusader, remember she’s quick to laugh, and she indeed has a life. Trail running has recently taken on more significance; Hyrox races loom on the late-November horizon. And she and her fiancée, content designer Lucy, have been happily ensconced in Pui O for three years now. They moved to the village after being forced out of their Wanchai flat of six years. By their dog.
“We decided to adopt a dog. But not just any dog, the most nervous, anxious dog you’ve ever seen. We called him Zeus because we hoped he’d grow into his name,” she recalls. Zeus hated Wanchai, and the couple was forced to carry him down the stairs twice a day for a taxi ride to Tamar Park. “It wasn’t sustainable and he hated it. We visited friends in Pui O and I have never seen anything like it: new dog. So we moved to Lantau within about three months.”
Imogen’s not really a city person, and since she decided to focus on trail running, Lantau has become even more appealing. She and Lucy are in it for the long haul. “Where else have you got an airport, the city, the beach and mountains all within the space of 40 minutes? We’ve since renovated our place so it feels like home,” she finishes. “And we got another dog.”