The write stuff – Melbourne Writer’s Festival
Oh, boy…I’m just coming down to earth after my fabulous weekend at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
My Sydney friend M, and I rashly made a pact earlier in the year that she would come to the Melbourne Writers Festival for a weekend, and I would then go up for a weekend to next year’s Sydney one. So, we booked in plans for the first leg, and then after everything was finalised, realised the weekend in question contained Fathers’ Day. Ooops.
However, M’s husband and The Poolboy were very good-natured about it, and absolutely relished the opportunity to spend the whole weekend in sole-charge of their delightful children.
So, to the Festival itself.
We had a manageable, yet comprehensive schedule. Five sessions on Saturday and another four on Sunday. I have been attending sessions at the MWF for about eight years now, and I’ve discovered the best method for choosing sessions is to take a slightly random approach. I pick one session that really appeals, and then build the rest of the program based on what fits around it time-wise. As a result, we had a somewhat eclectic group of sessions to attend, namely:
Saturday
The politics of atheism
A spotlight on Alexis Wright
Glittering in the half-light
Literature a la mode – Kafka’s Soup
Making a fiction of yourself
Sunday
Literary drag
Style Council
Mediacrity
I’ve seen it all in a small town
There were some unexpected gems and a couple of disappointments among them.
The Saturday session I had built our program around was the one titled “Making a fiction of yourself,” and was described in the program as:
You can be whoever you want in cyberspace: create a sexy avatar, stretch the truth on a dating site, put your best self forward on MySpace – lose yourself in the electronic masquerade.
As bloggers, M and I were expecting this to be a really interesting and rigorous exploration of issues including authenticity of identity in cyberspace, the unedited nature of writing on the internet, the relationship between the reader and the writer, particularly with relation to interactivity. But it wasn’t. It was dull and, in my opinion, missed the whole point.
Unexpected gems included Katie Hickman’s “Glittering in the Half-Light” – a discussion about her book Courtesans, which charts the lives of five 19th century courtesans. I think I heard her say the book is currently out-of-print, but it’s definitely one I’ll be looking out for at the library. I could have listened to Hickman talk (in her plummy English accent) about the intrigues and dramas of these glamorous companions/prostitutes for much longer.
Mark Crick’s session about his book Kafka’s Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes was another highlight. The book contains 14 recipes, each written in the style of a famous writer – Homer, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, The Marquis de Sade, Marcel Proust, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Irvine Welsh and Harold Pinter.
Actors Jane Clifton and Frank Gallagher read the recipes representing Virginia Woolf and Irvine Welsh respectively. The chocolate cake a la Irvine Welsh was, as would be expected of the style of the author of Trainspotting, outrageously black and sick in nature while Virginia Woolf’s cherry clafoutis recipe was as poetic a stream-of-consciousness as you’d find in Mrs Dalloway.
Hearing Alexis Wright speak about her Miles Franklin Award-winning novel, Carpenteria was interesting, but I felt I would have had a far greater appreciation if I had actually read the book first (one for the TBR pile). A highlight of this session for me, was spying M taking notes on a Visa docket due to a lack of paper in her handbag. Of course, I could have offered her a sheet from my well-stocked notebook, but it was much more fun to watch her scrawl tiny notes in the spaces between the card number, the amount and the date!
The session titled, “Literary Drag”, included charming author of (among other novels) the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series of books, Alexander McCall Smith. He was amusing, and is clearly a consummate writers festivals performer, prefacing each of his answers to questions from the audience with a thoughtful pause and an emphatic, “That is a very interesting question.” Which we lapped up.
He was ably supported in that session by fellow panelists; Adrian Hyland and Michael Robotham. What each panelist had in common was that they have written novels from the point-of-view of a female character (and in each case, a female from a different cultural background from their own). As McCall Smith pointed out, you wouldn’t expect a reverse session on women writers writing male characters – but despite the awkwardness of this topic, the session was very entertaining and prompted me to add a few more titles to my TBR list.
I just had to do the author-signing thing and lined up to get my (battered and tatty) copy of No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency signedby McCall Smith. He was just as charming up close. (Am I starting to sound like a groupie?)
Between sessions, we scarfed down coffees and a quick lunch, and perused the on-site Readings Festival bookshop.
All up, a fantastic way to spend a weekend. Great company, and some interesting and mind-expanding sessions.
