The Emerging Writers’ Festival has been such a fun, nice experience. I know — ‘fun’? ‘Nice’? Have I learned nothing? But it has been both fun and nice. There’s nothing I like more than hanging out in a building with hundreds of other people who like things that I like. I just need to organise a Feminist Ice-Cream Lovers Convention and my life will be sorted.
Wednesday night, after I finished running the City Library Creative Writing workshop, I went down to the Empress with Maddie for The Serious Business of Being Funny with Josh Earl, Sammy J and Claire Hooper. I think having festival sessions in a pub is a great idea; I consider being able to eat crispy wedges with aioli, sweet chilli and sour cream (yes, three condiments) during any activity a plus. Maddie knows Josh, and he greeted us by asking, ‘So you’re here to see my first ever show, are you?’ Turns out all the comedians were bravely revisiting their first ever comedy shows. It was as awkward as expected, with Claire Hooper mentioning that she wore pigtails and a homemade Australian flag t-shirt at every show in her first year of performing. Josh’s set involved some cringetastic break-up material and very questionable song lyrics wherein someone is punched with a part of the anatomy that is usually reserved for other functions. Sammy J’s set was remarkably hilarious for a first outing, and included a musical tribute to Flagstaff station. Afterwards there was a little bit of chat about techniques and because I’m not a comedy writer I drifted in and out a bit, but people seemed to be having a good time.
Joke of the night went to Sammy J with this pearler: ‘I baked humble pie, but I must have got the recipe wrong because it was awesome.’ Yes, I’m a nerd.
Thursday night was the only one of Angela Meyer‘s 15 Minutes of Fame mini-launches I managed to get to. Tiggy Johnson spoke about her short story collection, Svetlana or Otherwise, and Hoa Pham spruiked the Asian-Australian journal Peril, whose next issue is themed ‘Why Are People So Unkind?’ Jenny Blackford was launching her historical novel about slaves and pythia, the Greek priestesses at Delphi, and Helen Ross read from her fun book of children’s poetry.
Phew. And then there was today.
After picking up our treasure-laden showbags (Overland and The Big Issue and The Griffith Review and Wet Ink, oh my — I took photos but no bluetooth on this laptop, alas), Maddie and I caught the very end of the Seven Enviable Lines session, where Kathryn Heyman was encouraging a packed room to get it wrong, play and be ludicrous in writing.
Just Write Dammit featured Tiggy Johnson, Victoria Carless, Andrew Hutchinson and PD Martin. I don’t identify as a writer (see Peril‘s interview with Nam Le on this), though I seek to engage with the written word in many ways. But it is easier to relate to the dilemmas and processes of people just embarking on their writing careers than it is to relate to, say, Helen Garner. Andrew Hutchinson: very funnily, head in hands, ‘What if my publisher finds out that I can’t write?’ The tools in the authors’ arsenals were quite varied: Hutchinson, Chekhov-like, likes to write between midnight and 4am, while PD Martin likes the hellish writing boot camp of the ’10k day’. Note: when I Googled Victoria Carless, I turned up a cairns.com.au news story about her entitled ‘Carless whispers’. Gold.
The packed Furious Horses session proved the cult appeal of Christopher Currie’s masochistic but evidently very useful story-a-day blog. I say ‘evidently useful’ because he reports that the exercise gave him army-like discipline with writing, and his novel manuscript has now been picked up by Text Publishing. I’ve never seen such a question-to-audience-member ratio. The audience were enthralled. I particularly liked his tip of using Wikipedia random articles as inspiration.
Truth and Honesty in Writing was a really well curated panel. Dale Campisi was an interactive, lively chair for Lisa Dempster, Krissy Kneen, David Mence and Scott-Patrick Campbell. Loved Campbell’s Henrik Vibskov pants. David Mence stole the show with his down-the-rabbit-hole experience of honouring truth to History (with a capital H), the play as a medium, and himself while researching and writing the story of Victoria’s first large-scale massacre of Aborigines.
Then, The Revolution Will be Downloaded, where Angela Meyer took this picture of the audience to reveal the power of Twitter. (I was outside the camera’s embrace, thankfully.) I was feeling a bit faint, since my cold-bloodedness made me feel over-warm in a room where most people still had their coats on. Yes, I’m a lizard. So I felt a bit woozy during this panel. But great to see three engaged, enthusiastic, female culture-vultures on this panel, including Angela, Hoa and freelance writereditorbloggerpublicspeaker Rachel Hills, who encouraged emerging writers to have a consolidated online presence to make it easy for potential employers and like-minded people to find them. Not forgetting James Stuart, whose interactive poem-world The Homeless Gods defies definition, which is both liberating and frustrating, I imagine.
The Pitch came last, with editors from near and far (well, mostly near) basically begging fledgling wordsmiths to please please read the submission guidelines. Oh, except for Trespass Magazine, which doesn’t have any submission guidelines at all. But also to please please submit. Some baby journals were represented, like Stop, Drop and Roll, some of the old guard, like Meanjin and Overland, and some unexpected publications, like Tango, baby of City Library Street Press-beloved Bernard Caleo.
Check out the time of this post, people. That is dedicated literary event blogging. If you made it to the end, or anywhere even near the middle of this post, I congratulate you. Now I am going to drink chrysanthemum tea, peruse Etsy for handmade perfume, and listen to Veckatimest yet another time. Then bed, because back to Melbourne Town Hall tomorrow morning for round two, and Fitzroy for book club afterwards.
