Celebrating Life

Welcome to my website which Perth poet and friend Karen Murphy helped me establish. On this website I will share with you my work as a poet, singer, and freelance journalist. You will discover some of my best published poetry and I will be able to show you video and audio recordings from my performances as a jazz and soul/funk/pop cover singer. On this site you will also find some of my published freelance journalist work which includes CD, live music, film, and theatre reviews, interviews with celebrities including the Hilltop Hoods, The Cat Empire, and Guy Sebastian which I will upload from time to time. On this main page I will keep you updated on the latest news from my life that I hope will interest you or your friends.

For most people, birthdays are either a time of celebration and joy, where we celebrate life and our achievements so far as well as our aspirations for the future, or they are a time of regret and sorrow at lost opportunities, mortality, and ageing. Whether we choose to view our birthday through either lens often depends on our outlook on life or where we are at in our lives when our birthday arrives. For some people, birthdays, like New Year’s Eve, represent a time for reflection or a time for the annual celebratory party. For others, it is merely another day in the year.

For me, it is all those things but it is never just another day in the year and I will never let my birthday be just another day in the year. Our birthday represents our one special day in the year when we can celebrate our lives with our friends and family without feeling egotistical and they can be, like Christmas in the western world, a enjoyable time for celebration and partying when, if we are lucky, we receive presents whether bought or handmade. For me, an unwavering believer in the magic that exists in our world, birthdays are also the one powerful day in the year when we can make a wish.

I will not tell you my wish (for, as we know, wishes like mysteries cease to exist once revealed) but I will tell you that as the week draws closer to my 22nd birthday, I have had an exciting array of experiences and news to share with you. I’ve sent the in-person interview I did with Damien Leith last week to Drum Perth yesterday, enjoyed a Jake’s Book Club meeting last night discussing Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw with high school friend Hanna Scott and musician friend Marcus Macadi, and will be interviewed this afternoon by a Community Newspaper reporter to help promote my involvement in WA Poets Inc’s Perth Poetry Festival this year (the photographer’s coming on Thursday). I’ve also been preparing for my solo jazz gig at the Creative Connections Art and Poetry Exhibitions at City Farm for this Saturday where I will perform such classics as Nat King Cole/Natalie Cole’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and George Benson/Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love Of All”.

In terms of my professional life, tomorrow I start a new job as an Administrative Officer for the School of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at The University of Western Australia and I am looking forward to using the education and learning theory I gained from studying this year at Edith Cowan University as well as my developing knowledge with the digital world while fulfilling that role. In terms of my personal life, I am very grateful for the fact that my girlfriend Maneera de Mel has become such an important and supportive part of my life. We met around the time of my twenty-first birthday last year; a testament to the fact that birthdays can be very lucky times as well. In addition, this week the film Sparkle, starring my favourite RNB singer Whitney Houston, will be released so I’m listening to this awesome upbeat song from the film because its mood reflects mine right now.

Signing off from my first post on my brand new first-ever professional website,

Your friend,

Jake Dennis