Simmone Howell is an award-winning short story writer, screenwriter and small press publisher. Her short film Pity24 was awarded the 2004 AWGIE for Short Film Screenplay by the Australian Writers’ Guild. Simmone is a graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology writing course. Her own fiction has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and e-zines both in Australia and oversees. Simmone is in the final year of her literature degree at Deakin University in Melbourne. Notes From the Teenage Underground is Simmone’s debut novel.

My favourite art ‘thing’ is an installation called International Style and it’s by Callum Morton. It’s a small-scale replica of a famous modernist house by Mies van der Rohe. All the windows are covered up but you can hear the sounds of a party going on inside. Drinks and chat and music and then suddenly – gun shots! There is a scrambling and silence and then it all starts up again. I love the idea of the party as a social battlefield. I picture mink coats and highballs – and then everything beautiful coming undone.

Tracy Emin’s Why I never became a dancer …

Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field …

I wish I could have seen ex-Factory Superstar Brigid Berlin’s ‘performance art’ where she would sit onstage with a telephone, call up her mother and get her riled.

When I was thirteen I entered a Madonna look-a-like competition. You had to send a photo into the local radio station. I convinced my best friend to enter with me – she at least had blonde hair. I remember using black and white film to be arty – and I remember thinking that I had a chance - the fact that I had short dark hair and looked more like a Lebanese soccer kid didn’t cross my deluded mind. I wore a yellow mesh vest from Cherry Lane over a black bra that I pinched from my mother’s drawer, and a heavy wooden crucifix on a silver chain. Lots of lipstick and eyeliner. Muchos pout. Um, I didn’t win.