Q: What exactly happens at a writers festival?
A: Lots of writers (and readers) congregate to discuss books, ideas, politics, social issues, to laugh about jokes about their parents/failed marriages/characters, to fend off questions from over eager fans, to sign their books, to flog their books and to be DEEP - Deeply Engaging Even (a bit) Pretentious.
Saturday Sessions - 28 Feb 2009 at the University of Western Australia
The morning after the Coldplay concert I somehow managed to get out of bed and be at the Dolphin Theatre by 9.30am. Impressive feat for a Saturday morning!
Mining the Personal
Susan Duncan, Colette Livermore and Graeme Blundell
A little bit too personal? I wondered about the ramifications of using your own life as writing material, can it have legal consequences when you compare a Holy Order to a cult? Or when you write about your past marriages and have a not-so-civil relationship with your ex? Humour can mask a lot of emotions. Either way I was mostly impressed by Susan Duncan as she spoke about how she shared her writing with her mother and gave frank confessions to the crowd about the reality of looking after your ageing parents.
Friends, Lovers, Family
Sarah Jones, Alice Nelson, Tracy Ryan and Jenny Pattrick
Probably featuring one too many writers, this session looked at the relationships of fictional characters. Less was said about the books and more was directly about the characters (who I knew little about). I thought Jones was the most engaging of the four, as she was very outgoing and friendly. She said, "The crux moment in a relationship is when you ask; who ARE you? Which really means who am I in relation to you?"
I asked the panel to what extent do the relationships form the identities of the characters? Jones remarked that it was crucial, particularly with her character which almost lived in a "fantasy" relationship with her partner. Pattrick commented that obviously all characters changed dramatically throughout the course of the novel as characters can only exist in relation to other characters and are defined by their relationships.
Pattrick's novel Grace Notes is a series of love letters between two older persons and she is a lovely kiwi writer who has just received a fellowship to live in the South of France to write her next book. Poor her!
Fingers on the Pulse
Tristan Bancks, Barry Jonsberg, Justine Larbalestier
Young adults writers perhaps have a tougher audience to appeal to. Tweens and teens can be fickle in their reading habits such as reading the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer even if they hated the first book. A different set of issues face YA writers like censorship in school libraries and silly rules like school librarians accepting the use of "OMG" but not "Oh My God!"
What was interesting though that none of them purposefully set out to be YA writers, they just wanted to write and their work happened to fit in the YA genre. Either way they talked about their writing process and Bancks, a former Home and Away actor, showed off his writing journal - pages and pages of handwritten notes and cut outs of photos and character flash cards for quick ideas. Jonsberg, whose book is called The Dog Who Dumped On My Doona, writes without planning but does aim to write a minimum of 2,000 words a day. My aim is 500 words day, but I hope to build up to 2,000!
Kassie kindly bought me (and my Dad) Patriot Act by this writer who we may or may not have a bit of a crush on.
Sunday Sessions (not that kind of Sunday sesh!) - 1 March 2009
Family fun day at the festival is an odd mix of literary figures and their middle aged fans and children's writers and their pint-sized readers cavorting with clowns, Stuart Little and fairies.
Writing About Race
This extremely popular session was utterly hilarious, with quick witted comments from both the readers and writers and, brutally honest social observations about living in Western society as a racial minority. Ahmad had the audience in stitches with his short excerpts from Unimagined ranging from how he desperately wanted to be like James Bond (minus the martinis and women) and was banned from eating pork by his parents but had no idea why (Oh it's because of my religion!).
I was looking forward to Pung speak, she's a young Chinese-Cambodian writer with a lot of spark. She talked about breaking the stereotype of the repressed, quiet migrant who came to Australia on a boat and the use of humour in her writing helping to do this.
But James McBride mainly stole the show, having just stepped off a plane from New York City and was charming yet profound.
"I look forward to the day where we're simply seen as writers, not minority writers," said McBride. McBride is well-known for his book The Colour of Water, is African American and not surprisingly rather opinionated on a range of issues and US foreign policy.
I bought Growing Up Asian in Australia edited by Pung and got it signed. She was very friendly, genuinely excited to be in Perth for the festival and gave me a few gems of advice.
On Brevity
Cate Kennedy, Robert Drewe, Julia Leigh
Short stories are a very precise form of fiction. According to the writers in this session; short stories always feature a small explosion, a point of illumination which usually occurs towards the end. The readings in this session were so intense that at one point the lights in the lecture theatre blacked out, causing Kennedy to cry out; "There's my point of illumination!"
I really enjoyed Drewe's reading of his story The Rip, having read Our Sunshine a few years back, I think Drewe is an amazing storyteller with such vivid imagery in his work.
All in all, this is my fourth time at the Perth Writers Festival which seemed to have less international authors this year and more homegrown writers. It does get bigger each year, and this may be the geek in me talking, I really do enjoy the lively debate, meeting writers and chatting to the other attendees who are captivated by the art of writing and its ability to let us leave the real world behind, if only for a weekend.
Books I Want To Read:
- Unpolished Gems by Alice Pung
- The Colour of Water by James McBride
- Unimagined by Imran Ahmad
- The Rip by Robert Drewe
- Red Dress Walking by Sarah Jones
Podcasts of some of the sessions are available on the ABC website.
I really wish I was going to the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival on 7-11 October 2009.
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