Readings.com.au: Melbourne Writers Festival

WordPlay @ ArtPlay

2008-09-10T00:00:00Z

Wordplay at ArtPlay took place during the writers' festival and saw a variety of authors and illustrators (including Roland Harvey, pictured below) taking workshops and creative games with kids aged 7-12. Esther Van Doornum took these lovely pics of the Wordplaying down at Artplay on the banks of the Yarra at Birrarung Marr.

Andrew Davies in conversation with Jan Sardi: Session Review

2008-09-03T00:00:00Z

Andrew Davies will probably go down in history as the man who had the epoch-makingly brilliant idea of putting Mr. Darcy into a wet and thus clingily transparent blouse. But the blinding success of his version of Pride and Prejudice aside, he has also written the scripts for many of the great and memorable TV and film adaptations of the past decades: House of Cards, Middlemarch, The Line of Beauty, Bleak House, Tipping the Velvet, Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Tailor of Panama, to name only a few. He spoke to Australian screenwriter Jan Sardi (Shine) about the delicate art of adaptation and what it’s like to be the writer who channels Dickens and Austen for the contemporary world.

The session opened with the screening of a ‘teaser’, in every sense of the word, from the beginning of the BBC’s 2008 Sense and Sensibility (yet to be seen on free-to-air Australian television.) It’s a sexual seduction scene between a young girl and a man whose face isn’t revealed, and needless to say, it’s not a scene that’s written in Austen’s novel (Austen has the seduction happen well and truly offstage.) As an illustration of Davies’ method the clip showed his willingness to stretch, bend, and generally play fast and loose with the material supplied by even a novel as well-known and revered as this, to be a little bit saucy even when adapting Austen, in the interests of making a wonderful novel catch the attention of a television audience with itchy remote control fingers.

Jan Sardi asked just the right questions of Davies, drawing out his views and feelings about the novels he works with, his sense of exactly what his task is as an adaptor, and the cheerful confidence and aplomb with which he seems to make some extraordinarily difficult calls.

Before becoming a writer Davies taught English in schools and universities, and I got the sense that he still unashamedly thinks in terms of an educational mission – the basic value of opening up unfamiliar books for novice readers matters more to him than preserving all the superficially off-putting and remote dignity of books written hundreds of years ago in disused language.

It was extremely refreshing to hear him acknowledge the value of this unfashionable ideal, and he has done more than anyone alive to keep books like Middlemarch and Bleak House in front of readers. He spoke rather delightfully about his efforts to ensure Bleak House would be accessible to children. But, of course, when he talked in more detail about what he’s done with Sense and Sensibility (which I’ve seen on DVD) it grew complicated. He has made the two heroes more heroic and Willoughby more of “a shit”, feeling that without these changes the men are “seriously underwritten” and we don’t understand why the women are interested in them.

I think Davies is right that the novel has serious structural problems, but failure to clearly communicate what Marianne sees in Colonel Brandon isn’t one of them, because the novel says, as clear as crystal, that she doesn’t see much in him at all. This is a case of adapting storytelling to the demands and conditions of a new medium, but it’s also an example of a revision that softens away the radically unromantic quality of the original novel and that’s rather a wrench. The visual and emotional beauty of the series will certainly bring new readers to Sense and Sensibility but will they find the novel they were expecting?

Asked why he does so many classic novel adaptations rather than modern ones, Davies gave an answer I liked: he simply prefers them. The Line of Beauty, which Davies optioned on his own behalf, seems to have struck him as somewhat exceptional among modern novels in terms of having both strong plotting and psychologically interesting characters. In general, he suggested, modern fiction of the prize-winning, book-clubbing kind is thinly plotted, and airport novels have flimsy characters. The classics have both, and that’s why they have stuck around.

The session closed with Andrew Davies describing the delightfully Narnian beginning to the working day that he now enjoys, a recitation that must have struck envy into quite a few hearts of those in the audience. Having bought the Edwardian house adjoining his own to use as an office, to go to work in the morning Davies steps into the built-in wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom, passes through the clothes and through a hole knocked into the wall, and climbs out of the identical wardrobe next door. If a morning of writing goes well, he said, he hops back through the hole and goes back into bed.

Laura Carroll teaches in the English Program at La Trobe University.

Art and Motherhood: Session Review

2008-09-03T00:00:00Z

This session on ‘art and motherhood’ was ably chaired by poet Alicia Sometimes, who admitted that the very same morning, in a sleep deprived haze, she had poured boiling water on her toast. This introduction provoked much laughter and nodding from the predominantly female audience.

Rachel Power, author of The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood said that as a writer, her experience of becoming a mother intensified her need to express herself; however she was unprepared for the ‘sheer workload that comes with having children’. She also raised the question that plagues working mums, not just those involved in the arts, of how to keep your own needs at the forefront of your life.

The irrepressible comedian and writer Catherine Deveny said in no uncertain terms artist-mothers need to ‘…do the writing/creative act first, before the housework’. Poet Lisa Gorton also evoked laughter when she said she had written ‘an entire poem just about sleeping in.’ Singer-songwriter and mother of three (including twins) Clare Bowditch talked about the collaboration necessary between father/mother and extended family to support the creative act.

For more reading about artist mothers, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood has interviews with twenty-six artist/mothers in the fields of literary, visual and performing arts.

Bestselling books of the 2008 MWF

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The festival is over for another year and here is the complete list of bestselling books from the Readings Festival Bookshop that has been in the Atrium of Fed Square for the past ten days:

The Boat by Nam Le
American Journeys by Don Watson
On Rage by Germaine Greer
When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
Stray Dog Winter by David Francis
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
On Experience by David Malouf
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
The General: CHERUB Book 10 by Robert Muchamore

Authors of the 2nd Weekend

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The Atrium at Federation Square was regularly packed with queues of people waiting to get book signed by various authors outside the Readings bookshop.

Blanche d'Alpuget was signing copies of her little book with a big theme On Longing.

Michelle de Kretser and David Malouf attracted the longest signing queue all weekend.

Kate Atkinson signs her latest book.

Andy Griffiths was playing with the kids at Wordplay @ Artplay over the weekend.

Robert Muchamore @ MWF

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

UK author Robert Muchamore has been in Australia for the Melbourne Writers Festival and is now embarking on a nation-wide tour to promote The General - book number ten in the CHERUB series, massively popular with teenagers across the globe. I spoke to him just after his final session in the Schools Program at the MWF about the special CHERUB novella Dark Sun which was published in the UK as part of World Book Day earlier this year.

Have you seen many copies of Dark Sun brought in to be signed during the festival?

I’ve signed a fair few but there is a level of frustration with the kids because its not just on general sale and not every kid can get it. So what we’ll do – we have to wait a year after the book day thing has happened because that’s the deal we signed with them in Britain – but what I think we’ll do is have it as a PDF download on the website so every CHERUB fan will eventually just be able to download it and read it.

Is this your first trip to Australia?

I’ve been to Australia before. I’ve not done author events. I’ve got a sister who lives up in Queensland so I’ve been to visit her four or fives times over the years. But this is the first time I’ve done an author visit with a festival and signings.

How have you found the Melbourne fans?

They seem to be incredible. I’ve just done a signing down there [at Fed Square] and kid after kid was pulling out battered old [CHERUB] copies that they’ve all read 20 times and stuff like that which I think is fantastic.

Any thoughts on the writers’ festival itself?

It’s interesting because I did a radio interview yesterday and Rosemary was in the studio before I was and she was comparing it to the Edinburgh festival in Britain which they say is the biggest in the world. But I was at the Edinburgh festival two or three weeks ago and to be honest the size of the festival doesn’t matter. What matters is that you bring a good audience to the authors that you’ve got…With Melbourne you’ve just got a fantastic setting, everything is organised well, all the events seem to be sold out – or at the least very popular. It just seems incredible. And even if it’s not the biggest in the world, it’s certainly one of the best.

What the question from readers that you’ve come across the most here?

I think every single session we’ve had the ‘Will there be a CHERUB film released?’ and we’re hoping for 2010.

What kind of involvement will you have in the CHERUB film?

They did offer me a chance to write the script but at the time we actually sold the film rights the books hadn’t been out for as long and I still had another job and there was just no way that on top of writing the book and having the job I could do it. Probably if they offered me now I’d have a stab at writing the script. But the way it worked out and the timing of it, I just wouldn’t have been available to do it. So basically my involvement is I’ll just be a consultant if they want me to be a consultant.

Part of the inspiration for the CHERUB series was your previous job as a Private Investigator. Have you had other jobs that could have also inspired a collection of novels?

No, I’ve only really ever actually had two jobs in my life. The first one I worked in a camera shop when I was a teenager – as a Saturday job – and when I first left school that became a full-time job. And then I just got this very unusual job as a Private Investigator usually reserved for police officers. Basically they took me on as a teenager because they wanted a dog’s body: someone to take the post, answer the telephone, make their cups of coffee – and that was how I got into as a kind of office junior.

Do you think kids are drawn to the power that the kids in CHERUB have as spies?

With any children’s story the children have to be empowered in someway. I mean, if you actually wrote a book about a completely realistic teenager’s life – unless there’s some kind of heinous social drama like a mother being murdered or something like that – there’s actually not much going on: they get up, they go to school, they come home, they hang out with their mates, sometimes maybe they have a girlfriend or a fight at school, but I mean it isn’t that compelling. Most ordinary adult lives are not that compelling either. And with kids the only way you can really make the story interesting is if they’re much more empowered than kids in the real world.

Do you have a favourite CHERUB character?

Favourite CHERUB character is defintely Lauren – James’s sister – and the simple reason for that is that it’s good fun writing the scenes because they’ve got a sort of brother-sister chemistry between them where they tease each other or wind each other up and that’s just really good fun to write.

And finally do you have a favourite font to write in?

The font I use is, Adobe Garamond. But it has be Adobe Garamond not a fan one that comes from ebay.

Outside Kevin '08

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

Keep your eyes out for our darling Kev the courier - keeping the wheels turning and books transferring between our Carlton and Federation Square stores for the extent of the Festival. With a specially designed Readings Crumpler bag and bright orange flag, he is hard to miss!

Hamlet, Enid Blyton and Me - John Marsden with Mike Shuttleworth: Session Review

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

Looking at John Marsden, I imagine that if I were close enough, I would see remnants of chalk dust on his clothes. (Or maybe, in these modern times, smudges of whiteboard marker.) He looks exactly like the school teacher that he is: maroon cable-knit jumper worn loosely over a checked shirt; wispy grey hair; a shuffling, bear-like amble across the stage. His easy manner with the schoolchildren massed before him is borne of long habit. You can see their teacher custodians relax as he briefly takes over.

First, though, session chair Mike Shuttleworth (from the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature) introduces John and provides some background on his reinvented version of Hamlet. He tells us that Marsden has just spent seven years writing it, and reminds us that the original version of the story predated Shakespeare by 400 years – and just ten years before the Bard’s version, a playwright named Thomas Kidd wrote his own.

Marsden begins by telling us that stories always remind us of other stories, and we are all storytellers in our way. “What we call conversations are exchanges of stories.” He riffs into a strong of invented conversation stories, kid-style, including things like skateboards. “There are the big stories but there are also the thousands of little stories we carry within that are so easily forgotten.”

“Our memories shape us, define us. Our stories tell us who we are. And our stories are unique. Many cultures, like the Aboriginals, didn’t write down stories, but retold them.”

He reflects that the original story of Hamlet is lost, and perhaps oral story telling is in some ways better than the Western tradition of writing things down, because it’s not so easily lost as manuscripts or books (like those in the lost library of Persepolis).

“Writing is my preferred method of creative expression. Some people dance. Not me. If I did that, I’d fall off the stage.” The sea of school uniforms ripples with laughter in response.

He moves on to tell us about how he used to make up ghost stories when teaching at a bush school, approximately 20 years ago. “There’s something quite delightful about terrifying people, I find.” Years later, he revisited the school and found that his stories still existed – albeit in a different form. They survived as truth, as living legends. He marvelled as he listened to tales that he had invented, but didn’t let on about their origin.

“Stories are about interruptions to routine.” If you get up for breakfast and everyone is there, eating, that’s not a story, he explains. But if you get up and your family has disappeared, that’s an interruption to routine – and a story!

Hamlet is a series of interruptions to routine. First, his father dies. Second, his mother remarries. And third, his father reappears, urging him to avenge his death. “MAJOR interruption to routine.”

Stories are also about changes of status, Marsden continues. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes badly. “One of the great lessons in life is learning how changes of status work.” He points out that, as the author and someone older than his audience, he has a higher status. “And because I’m a male and it’s 2008. To some extent, that’s still the way things work.”

“We love it when people lose status.” This, he says, can easily happen. “In writing a book, understanding status is everything.”

Hamlet is a young man with high status who is threatened by the actions of his stepfather and trying to deal with a very high status father figure. Hamlet has three father figures (his father, Polonius, and his stepfather/uncle). He kills two of them. “Maybe Shakespeare had problems with his own father,” Marsden jokes.

We’re all engaged with status battles with our parents, teachers and siblings, he says. Boys are engaged with status battles with their fathers that “they must win”. That battle comes for every young man. It may be a game of chess or tennis, or a fight. “If the day comes and the boy loses, he’ll forever live in the shadow of his father.”

He sums up with a few choice words on the book: “Hamlet is about identity, love, sex and becoming who you want to be. It’s about dealing with memories that your parents have passed on to you. It’s about fathers and sons.”

It’s question time. I have to say that high school students seem (judging from the few Schools Program sessions I sat in on) to ask much smarter questions than the grown-ups do.

“What was your status battle with your father?”

A curious hush descends. Marsden pauses for just a fraction of a second before answering.

“It was over the fact that my father used to beat me quite often and I said ‘you’re not going to do that anymore’. I was about 14. It was one of the defining moments of my life.” Pause. “I hope nobody here has to go through anything like that.”

Love TV @ the Festival Club

2008-08-28T00:00:00Z

Augusten Burroughs was the star of Love TV last weekend and this weekend Love TV does it's thing again at the MWF Festival Club. Located in the Function Space at ACMI, the Festival Club is housing the post-daylight drinks and entertainment at this year's festival and Love TV is worth dropping by to see.

Love TV host Aphrodite interviews authors and festival guests from within the tiny Love TV tent and the footage is projected live onto the big screen in the Festival Club. It's a contradiction in style - an intimate, shoulder-rubbing interview, shared with the whole Festival Club - that should not be missed.

Tonight (Thursday) Matthew Condon and Anya Ulinich drop into the Love TV and on Friday night it's Mark Sarvas and Hannah Tinti, and Saturday night Elly Varrenti does the honours. Check out all the Festival Club details here.

Characters with Spine - Melina Marchetta & Rachel Cohn: Session Review

2008-08-28T00:00:00Z

Melina Marchetta and I had to contain our girlish fandom at sharing the stage with hip YA author, Rachel Cohn, all the way from the US of A, or more precisely the very cool NYC.

We’d already gushed over having to order her latest book in from the States because we couldn’t possibly wait for an Australian edition and ‘OMG wasn’t it amazing?’ (note to all publishers – publish it here please!) and I’d gotten slightly obsessed looking up her blog posts. Luckily she blogs, updates her site and partakes in an awful lot of ‘myspacing’ as writerly procrastination.

Delightfully, the love was being reciprocated: Rachel features the brand spanking new US edition of Melina’s On the Jellicoe Road on her webpage and I’ve even been offered the sofa bed in her undoubtedly cool rent-controlled Manhattan apartment.

A session on characters couldn’t have been more suited to these two. Most Aussie readers know Melina’s beautiful Francesca from Saving Francesca or Looking for Alibrandi’s Josie, and Rachel’s characters share the same raw honesty combined with sassiness.

Melina said her ‘characters come calling’ and Rachel noted that for the protagonist of her Gingerbread series Cyd Charisse, ‘it was just a question of when she would come and kidnap my attention again’. So it seems that being ambushed by strong characters is a common way of getting started.

We talked a lot about taking characters into dark territory. Not that either of these gals has shied away from big topics before (suicide in Looking for Alibrandi; splintered families in Rachel’s Gingerbread and The Steps series; displacement for many of their characters) but their latest books, Rachel’s You Know Where to Find Me (the aforementioned had-to-be-ordered-from-the-US novel) and Melina’s 2007 On the Jellicoe Road really move into darksville. I had to take to bed to finish You Know Where to Find Me and Rachel admitted that writing it was her hardest task yet.

For Melina, her just-gone-to-the printer Finnikin of the Rock provided other challenges: a move into the realm of fantasy and a book classified as ‘crossover’ – those YA novels that cross over to adult audiences. We all agree that many YA books deserve an adult audience, as well as the critical acclaim and attention afforded ‘serious grown up authors’.

We didn’t get to the suggested theme of the session ‘Learn how to create characters that spring from the pages’ (the clock beat us), but I’m sure the audience left with many valuable tips for writing. There were questions on where you write (in a writers’ room with no internet connection for Rachel), the editing process (‘hard work but ultimately satisfying’ for Melina) and whether swearing in books is ok (‘Fuck yeah’ according to Rachel).

What we did get was a sense of the startlingly talented, strong and feisty women behind some of the best YA fiction around. And that’s my absolutely unbiased opinion.

The Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist movie, co-authored by Rachel with David Levithen, is out in Australia January 2009.

Nikki Anderson is a member of the festival’s Schools Programming Committee.

David Sedaris with Michael Williams: Session Review

2008-08-27T00:00:00Z

David Sedaris is not what you’d expect. He’s small and unobtrusive, with a high-pitched, Southern-tinged, curiously quiet voice. On the day of his big event at the Capitol Theatre, he wears a pale blue shirt tucked into beige trousers, with a lemon yellow tie. His writing may command attention, but his attire and demeanour enable him to melt into the crowd – so much so that before his event, the staff at the Readings book table turned with a jolt to find him seated beside us, diligently signing books and charming fan after fan. A queue already snaked out across the lobby, books cradled at their chests. No wonder we’d been so busy with customers for the past five or ten minutes!

A woman asked me if I thought he would sign the spoken-word CD she’d just bought. “Sure. Why not?” “So, will he be signing books?” “Um ... yes. That’s him.” I nodded just centimetres to my left. “Signing books.” “Oh!” She was just as taken aback as we had been. “That’s HIM?”

That unobtrusiveness is among Sedaris’s most valuable weapons – along with a discerning ear for the ridiculous in the ordinary and the ordinary in the ridiculous. He kicked off the session by reading a story from his latest book: about having a loudly crying giant of a man (mourning his mother’s death) seated next to him on a business-class transatlantic flight, leading to reflections about his childhood, the joys of first-class flying, and his own mother’s death.

“When the flight attendant sat that crying man next to you, were you delighted?” asked session chair Michael Williams. “Yes! I think it’s because I’m small and unthreatening and don’t look like I’m a complaining person. I’m a magnet for a lot of that stuff. Which is lucky for me.”

Asked whether he worries that the change in his everyday life to include experiences that few people will identify with (like flying first class) might become a problem for his writing, he quipped: “I might get to ride in first class, but I still have to be me. That’s the down side.”

Indeed, the audience at the Capitol didn’t seem to mind that the man who worked as a house cleaner when he began writing is now reflecting on the marvels of getting second helpings of caramel-covered sundaes on his transatlantic flights.

“I never thought I was more neurotic than anyone else,” he said. “Though I am generally plagued by doubt and guilt. If I’m reading in the US in a theatre, I generally like it to be dark so I can’t see people leaving. If I see a person leave, I think ‘he’s a doctor, there must be an accident’. If I see a lot of people leaving I think, ‘they’re all doctors, it must be a bus accident’. I just kind of focus on the negative.”

The longest piece in his new book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, is about his decision to quit smoking – a habit that had originally replaced his coterie of obsessive-compulsive tics. Why quit? Because only “the really bad hotels” allow smoking these days – and Sedaris’s popularity means that he spends a lot of his time travelling across America. He can do 30 towns in 30 days, he explained – but not in grungy freeway hotels.

Williams commented on the unusual length of the piece – almost a third of the book. “I thought, ‘if I’m going to quit, I can at least get 90 pages out of it. If I’m going to go through that much pain’.”

Sedaris finished by reading a fictional story from his forthcoming book, a collection of “animal fables”. These are fables like none you’ve ever heard – and they’re not really, as Sedaris admitted, fables in the literal sense. There is no real moral to them; rather, they’re amusing satirical vignettes of recognisable social ‘types’, in the guise of animals. The story of ‘The Cat and the Baboon’, which he read to his appreciative audience, casts ‘the baboon’ as a canny customer service expert – a kind of hairdresser who makes slyly targeted small talk with her feline customer (bitching about the filthy habits of dogs – despite the fact that Dog is actually a good friend and client).

“It’s a lazy way to get back into fiction,” Sedaris joked. “You don’t have to describe animals as you would people. Generally, most people have seen a cat.”

Extra Free MWF Events

2008-08-27T00:00:00Z

Two new, free events have been announced for this Thursday, August 28, in the Festival Club (Flinders St level of ACMI).

Robert Gray: in conversation takes place at 1pm, with two of Australia's pre-eminent poets, Robert Gray and Chris Wallace-Crabbe talking about Robert's new memoir The Land I Came Through Last. Click here for more information.

Inside UK Publishing takes place at 2.30pm and will be of interest to anyone involved in writing or publishing and will be featuring publishing wunderkind David Shelley and one of his top-selling crime authors, Mark Billingham. Click here for more information.

David Rakoff: Session Review

2008-08-26T00:00:00Z

David Rakoff describes himself as “the opposite of fun, anti-fun, the kind of person who sucks the fun right out of the room”. But I reckon Rakoff is the best comic writer you’ve probably never heard of.

“Everything scares me,” he told the audience at BMW Edge, as river boats serenely cruised the glass wall at his back. “I am constantly vibrating with anxiety about everything in the world.”

Rakoff’s book Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a collection of bitingly funny essays that expertly skewer contemporary Western life while musing about topics like the cult of food or jumping the hurdles on the path to gaining American citizenship.

Born and raised in Canada, Rakoff has lived in New York since 1982, but only decided to become a US citizen after September 11. He is at pains to assure us that it wasn’t a surge of patriotism for his adopted country that prompted the move – rather, it was the fact that he saw “political aliens” increasingly being deported for relatively tame offences “like unpaid parking fines” under the new post-September 11 legislation. (Or perhaps, he concedes, a step up from that.)

“I didn’t tell my family until I got home from the citizenship ceremony. And then I framed it with the melancholy embrace of the inevitable.”

Interviewer Max Barry asked Rakoff about the fact that he’d had to officially agree to bear arms for his adoptive country as part of the citizenship test. Rakoff laughed in response. “They’re not going to ask a 45-year-old homo to bear arms. Dogs would be eating people in the streets before they’d call me! So it was fairly safe.”

Rakoff, like many writers, describes the process as “tremendously difficult” and says he loves having done it, rather doing it. He sums the experience up as “like pulling teeth from my dick”.

“It always begins badly. I have to turn off that editorial, naysaying aspect of my personality while I do it.”

Why do it then? “I love being listened to.” In his previous incarnation as an actor, that was one thing that really annoyed him about the job – the fact that nobody cared about your opinions. “You’re meat with eyes.” Another annoyance was the fact that he was stereotyped for two kinds of parts: “the stereotypical homo or the stereotypical Jew”. One of his roles, coincidentally, was highly literary – Gore Vidal in the film Capote.

And as for Rakoff’s literary influences? “I owe David Sedaris my entire career.” He recounted how, 15 years ago, he heard Sedaris on the radio and looked him up in the phone book (as you do). Discovering he lived on his street in New York, the then-publisher Rakoff wrote Sedaris a letter, saying that he was interested in publishing him, and suggesting they meet up. “I had no interest in publishing him,” he admits now. “I’d wanted to get out of publishing ever since I got into publishing.” But the pair became friends and went on to do theatre together. “He made it safe for the humorous personal essay.”

Rakoff, unlike his friend and mentor, does not mine his personal life for material. Sedaris, in an earlier session, said that he never does something in order to write about it, instead picking up on small things that happen to him, “making something out of nothing”. However, Rakoff is the opposite – finding things to write about and then doing them specifically for that purpose is exactly what he does. These adventures include white-water rafting in Patagonia (“I hated it”); watching a Playboy shoot (“pearls before swine”); and going backstage at a high-fashion show.

“My life is pretty inviolate. I don’t write about people I know, my family or my sex life. I don’t expose myself personally in that way. But when you write, you do expose yourself on the page. There’s nothing you can do about that.”

At the end of the session, Rakoff neatly passed the baton to Max Barry, urging the audience to read his novel Company, if they haven’t already. “It’s brilliant. I was shocked to learn that you haven’t actually been to the United States [where Max’s comic novel is set].”

Barry blushed. “Thank you very much for mentioning that. That wasn’t even arranged,” he quipped.

Phillipe Sands and Anna Funder: Session Review

2008-08-26T00:00:00Z

In legal and political circles, international law expert Philippe Sands is a very big deal indeed. His latest book, Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law, investigates how the Bush administration redefined torture in Guantanamo Bay. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, interviewed Sands onstage, in a fascinating conversation about how post-9/11 legislation – partially enabled by the public panic generated by the declaration of ‘war on terror’ – has subverted international laws set up to protect citizens.

“There is going to be no end to the war on terror,” said Sands. “It is going to go on for years and years.”

On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation - techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition.

In this book, Sands traces the effects of the Rumsfeld Memo and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.

Sands explained to the audience how the Bush administration had claimed that the torture memo had been a “bottom-up” initiative – that it had started off with the military in Guantanamo and Rumsfeld had simply signed off on what the military – who knew best, after all – had decided.

“The Pentagon is the largest corporation in the world,” scoffed Sands. “So, that’s like Hewlett Packard, for instance, facing the largest decision they’ve ever made – which this was – and asking their lowliest employee to sign off on it. It was counterintuitive.”

The torture memo essentially abandons the international definition of torture and redefines it as “pain which is equivalent to death or organ failure”. Anything below is permitted – and is not torture.

Most senior military lawyers, says Sands, now believe that those involved in the torture memo are war criminals. “There is a feeling of anger in the US military – their good name has been ruined.”

The leadership in Britain, and possibly Australia, he says, were implicit in what happened – they turned a blind eye. There is now a major issue for the next US president. What will they do about this?

“I think it’s very, very difficult for a country to prosecute its own heads of state in that country. It doesn’t happen.” Even the Pinochet trial didn’t happen in Chile, Sands points out. “The US government will have to find some other way of dealing with these scenarios.”

Funder and Sands talked about the difficulty for lawyers who are asked by their political masters – particularly high-up political masters – to cross the legal and ethical line in order to rubber-stamp actions that are clearly wrong. “What do you do if you’re asked to cross the line?” reflected Sands. “I’m very, very clear on this. You don’t cross the line. A small coterie of lawyers acted in service of an executive in circumstances where they should have known better and should have done better and they have not. And it’s right to criticise them.”

Sands was also scathing about the US media’s role in allowing this to happen, reserving particular ire for the television program 24, and the role it played “in creating a culture in which violence and interrogation could happen” by portraying an environment in which these methods worked in extracting information from terrorists. He also cited Alan Dershowitz’s comment that “since torture’s going to happen anyway, let’s institutionalise it”.

“Many of the people I write about will never step foot outside the United States again,” he said.

“It is clear that the US response to 9/11 has been a failure. It has not worked. The system of rules it put in place 40 years ago, with the help of countries like Britain and Australia, have served it very well. As new powers (like China and India) emerge, the US will want those powers to be limited by this system.”

After the book signing, Readings snapped Sands chatting to another world-leading political thinker – John Pilger – who gave his own Big Ideas lecture the previous night.

Bestselling books of the first weekend

2008-08-25T00:00:00Z

A Melbourne author sits atop the list of bestselling books from the first weekend of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Nam Le is hot stuff right now, edging out both keynote speaker Ms Greer and festival darling Mr Sedaris.

The Boat - Nam Lee
On Rage - Germaine Greer
American Journeys - Don Watson
When You Are Engulfed in Flames - David Sedaris
Stray Dog Winter - David Francis
On Ecstasy - Barrie Kosky
Making Modern Melbourne - Jenny Lee
The Rug-Maker of Mazar-e-Sharif - Najaf Mazari
Don't Get Too Comfortable - David Rakoff
Life in Seven Mistakes - Susan Johnston

MWF Goss & Pics: Weekend #1

2008-08-25T00:00:00Z

Things we hear following the first weekend's activities at the MWF:

After his speech at the Capitol Theatre on Saturday evening, ex-PM Paul Keating dined with Australia's first (off-shore) lady Germaine Greer
Judith Lucy (debatably) upstaged David Sedaris in the comedy stakes during their joint-session with Nam Le as the straight man.
During the Q and A's at the David Rakoff event, one man began to ask 'This is a somewhat awkward question...' when Rakoff cut him off, giving out his hotel room number. It got a big laugh and who knows what other kind of response.
David Sedaris and partner Hugh decided to skip the expensive laundry fees at their hotel on the weekend and instead dropped into My Beautiful Laundrette on Brunswick Street where what would have been a $300 laundry bill back at the hotel, became a $7 operation.

We also had a stream of authors stopping by Readings in the Atrium for book signings on the weekend:

David Sedaris signed books before and after his main event with RRR's Michael Williams at the Capitol Theatre.
John Pilger was among the audience seeing Phillipe Sands and Anna Funder at the Capitol. He and Phillipe had a good chat after the event.
Bruce Petty, Andrew Weldon and Mark Knight following their 'Stop laughing, this is serious' session with Russ Radcliffe.

Debra Adelaide signing her book The Household Guide to Dying.

Helen Garner signs for fans following her packed session with Gary Cazalet.

Director and author of On Ecstasy Barrie Kosky

Nothing But The (Paul Keating ) Man: Session Review

2008-08-25T00:00:00Z

“This book made me hate Paul Keating,” said a customer, lingering near the Readings book table outside the Capitol Theatre. He was pointing to Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart.

I suspect that, for most of the packed crowd on the other side of the double doors, Don Watson’s book – and its portrait of the melancholy, artistic man who delivered the great, visionary speeches like the Redfern speech – is what made them love him. (As well as his famed witticisms, like comparing being attacked by John Hewson to “being flogged by wet lettuce”.)

When I popped my head into the theatre, what I heard was the speech of a marvellously shrewd and intelligent man who still thinks in terms of a grand plan for Australia’s future. The big picture as opposed to knee-jerk politics. But I have to admit, I expected the Placido Domingo of Australian politics, but heard Australia’s former Treasurer-cum-PM.

Luckily, I think there’s a book for each branch of Keating admirer. For the lovers of Keating’s social vision for Australian – the would-be architect of a Republic and Reconciliation – there is Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. For those with an appetite for policy detail and how Keating’s vision is still relevant today, there is Unfinished Business: Paul Keating’s Interrupted Revolution (David Love). And I’m sure there’s a vast middle ground for many, many readers who fall into both categories.

What did he say? Well, a scattershot random sample:

Keating talked about the coming eclipse of American power, and the move from two superpowers (US and USSR) to one (the US), and back to two again. “We are now heading towards a bipolar world heavily influenced by two countries: the US and China.” He went on to say that “Russia will not be in the same league as the US and China but will have the capacity for nuclear weapons and will be influential.”

He criticised America for ignoring one of the lessons of history – that the victor should be magnanimous with the conquered (referring to post-Cold War Russia). Instead, America has conducted itself as unrivalled powers have done throughout time. He said it was unwise to have ringed Russia with NATO countries, and that Russia is the only country in the world with the capacity to seriously main the US or Western Europe.

The biggest threat to the world today is the continued presence of nuclear weapons, he observed. “Most nuclear weapons states are now making new nuclear weapons.”

Downer and Howard, he said, dropped the anti-nuclear-proliferation policy document produced by the Keating government “like a hotcake, as a stunt of the previous government” because they didn’t want to take it to the US, “like I would have”.

“It was a foundation document for de-nuking the world and remains so.”

Nothing In Common - Susan Johnson talking with Louise Adler: Session Review

2008-08-25T00:00:00Z

Susan Johnson has been on the Australian literary scene for a long time. She is the author of six novels and one memoir (A Better Woman) and the editor of two collections. She wrote poetry as a teenager, then moved into the world of a working journalist (for the now-defunct Nation Review), where she found herself doing a different kind of – ultimately unsatisfying – writing. “Journalism was all about the surface, the supposedly real events in life. But I kept thinking that I wanted to get behind the stories.” It was, she concedes, good training in the art of observation.

Her first Australia Council grant of $8000 gave her the confidence to quit her job and move to full-time writing.

“I studied my favourite books and unpicked them to see how they work,” she recalled. One of those books was Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip. Susan’s first book, Messages from Chaos, failed to be shortlisted for the Vogel, which she entered – but was greeted with much acclaim. “It was seen as a kind of Sex in the City capturing of modern womanhood,” observed chair Louise Adler, a professed fan of all of Susan’s work. (“Your novels seem to have reflected what’s been going on in my stage of life.”)

Writers, said Susan, are born rather than made. For instance, you need a certain temperament to be a writer. “I think all writers by nature are introverts.”

“Most writers are temperamentally suited to sitting in a windowless room for long periods. These days, writers are expected to be performing seals. Like Salman going to parties with gorgeous models.”

Susan’s latest book, Life in Seven Mistakes, is a deeply affecting, blackly comic novel about a baby-boomer artist, Elizabeth, forced to spend Christmas with her dysfunctional family on the Gold Coast. Her “worst nightmare would be to be trapped forever in a room with her family”: blustering former business bigwig dad, Bob; uptight faded beauty and domestic goddess mum, Nance; her brother Robbo, turning into his dad; his wife Katie, driven as mad as Elizabeth by the Barton clan; their anorexic daughter; Elizabeth’s resentful husband, Neil; her three children, each with different fathers. Absent is heroin addict Nick, the black sheep of the family – only present in the form of a shadowy pall that hangs over the clan. As they bicker and bitch; sulk and sigh; sink into decades-old dynamics, we learn the story of how this family has evolved in tune with the massive social changes of their times. Running parallel to the current story is the romance of Bob and Nance in the 1950s, starting from the beginning, rich in ideals.

“The Bartons represent the birth of modern Australia,” said Susan. “The Snowy River scheme [which Bob worked on as a young man] is such a metaphor for the birth of modern Australia, too.”She talked about how the Snowy River scheme was a part of the beginnings of multiculturalism.

“Baby boomers are the first generation in history who think self-definition is a birthright. It’s like that Loreal ad. ‘Because you’re worth it.’ It’s such a baby-boomer thing to say.” Susan talked about how she wanted to explore what happens when baby boomers come up against the issue of what to do about their aging parents, and when they need to make decisions that might not be in their own self-interest.

“You’re going to get a whole generation that will come a cropper. I wanted to dramatise that whole issue of the moral obligation to our parents or otherwise.” Susan, who lives in London, while her parents are still in Queensland, says that this issue is one that is resonant for her right now. “I feel torn about living so far away.”

“That responsibility to your children is another big issue for me. I wonder, have I made my boys’ lives harder by moving to London? I personally think and imagine much easier when I’m removed from a place. The experience of being an expatriate has made my writing life much easier. But that’s me, not my family.”

She also talked about her phenomenonally successful memoir, A Better Woman, about her experience of dealing with a rare injury sustained in a traumatic birth, one most often experienced in Third World countries. “I felt like a real freak. And a failure.” She had been contracted to write a kind of “manual to motherhood” for Random House, but ended up writing a heartfelt, brutally honest memoir of her experience instead, recording the near-breakdown of her marriage and her post-natal depression.

“Suddenly, I had all these women contacting me from all over the world, who also had this rare condition. I also had letters from women who hadn’t been injured during birth, but had found new motherhood really hard, for their own reasons. It’s one of those central myths of our society the myth of the selfless mother.”

She reflected that the myth of the good-enough mother and the good-enough daughter (the latter of which is central to Life in Seven Mistakes) are both stereotypes of femaleness that many women struggle with.

Returning to the theme of what makes a writer, she mused that a lot of writers have experienced themselves as different growing up, and come to think of themselves as outsiders in some way. “They share the experience of growing up communing most deeply with an interior world.”

“A friend of mine has a different theory,” she said, “that all writers are bonkers in some way, they’re a bit mad.”

Mining the Personal - Sedaris, Le and Lucy: Session Review

2008-08-24T00:00:00Z

It was a tough scenario at yesterday's 'Getting Personal' session for writer Nam Le. Paired with two comic writers, both seasoned and much-loved performers, making an impression with the audience must have seemed a challenging task – despite his international acclaim and buckets of sales for his short story collection The Boat. “David [Sedaris] and Judith [Lucy] are professional comedians and I hope you’ll bear that in mind,” he began.

The audience for the sold-out session were rewarded with what I think is one of the best author events I’ve seen, at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival or elsewhere, with 29-year-old non-comedian Nam Le holding the audience very much in thrall, despite his wry disclaimer.

And the other two? Well, they’re professional comedians.

“I guess this panel was made for me,” began David Sedaris, telling how, after beginning as a fiction writer, he “kind of sewed some diary pieces together” for a radio broadcast on NPR and suddenly found himself writing the comic non-fiction he is renowned for worldwide. “It never occurred to me that I would do that.”

He said: “The stories I wrote were the kinds of things that, if people asked me what I’d been doing, that’s what I would tell them.” He went on to cite some examples from his brilliant current book When You Are Engulfed in Flames, including the time he found himself sitting in his underpants in a doctor’s waiting room in France, surrounded by clothed people, because he didn’t quite understand the nurse’s instructions and was too shy to ask her to explain. At that moment, he said, he knew that he would write about this.

He told us about an incident with a taxidermist in England, who, when David casually mentioned that he has a human skeleton at home, began revealing all the disturbing objects he had collected – including the head of a teenager in a jar. “I was writing the story in my mind,” he recalled. “I found myself thinking, ‘I wonder how many pages this will be.’ I guess that’s what I live for. Those little moments that I can make hay of.”

Judith Lucy talked about how she came to write The Lucy Family Alphabet, the story of her weird parents: a dad who advised her to get a breast reduction because “let’s face it, you’re all out of proportion”. A mother who put her on a diet when she was eight and was afraid of showers. (She told Judith that the shower in their house didn’t work – which she believed until she was fifteen – and the family bathed by sponging themselves at the bathroom sink.)

“I’ve been exploiting my personal life for twenty years,” she said. “And let’s face it, when it came to material, Mum and Dad were a goldmine.”

A relative commented, after seeing her stand-up show, that Judith must really hate her parents. This is what prompted Judith (who doesn’t hate them), to write this book, “my attempt at writing about my parents as two-dimensional people”. Her quirky approach, an “A-Z reference to all things Lucy” was determined by the fact that the things she wanted to write about didn’t really form a story so much as a string of anecdotes and reflections. “There was no real story to the fact that dad wore a lot of make-up. Somewhere between Bert Newton and a flight attendant.”

She concluded: “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll marvel at the fact that I’m still trying to squeeze cash out of my dead parents.”

“I hate coming after Judith,” said Nam. It was his one joke, before he settled into the serious business of using the personal in fiction. He told a story about how, on car trips, his brother would say things like “some people are stupid” and “some people stink”, and when he complained, would say “I didn’t say YOU. I said ‘some people’.”

“That’s what fiction gives you,” he continued. “That instant, futile sense of immunity. You can mine your own life and then say ‘it’s just fiction’. I’d argue that non-fiction is also fiction. All of us, whether we’re writing fiction or non-fiction are, in a fundamental sense, fabricating. We’re all making things up.”

He went on to talk about how we act as writers and readers when we know it’s all made up. “We’re guilty of privileging something when we think it’s loaded with meaning.” There’s a con, he reflected, that we think we can get to know a writer through their work, achieve intimacy through them with their work. But a writer will always choose how they present their experience on the page, in fiction or non-fiction.

“As a writer, you can’t escape the thought, ‘what are people going to think about me?’” That’s why, he said, memoirs are often self-deprecating. “Fiction gives you the licence to be offensive or politically incorrect. It also gives you the responsibility to dig deep into the odious parts of yourself and not worry about what people are going to think of you because you do have that defence: It’s only fiction.”

The opening story in Nam’s book, ‘Love and Honour and Compassion and Pity’, is about a writer called Nam who is completing a short story for the Iowa Workshop, grew up in Australia, and left a law career to pursue his writing. All facts that mirror the trajectory of the real Nam Le. In the story, Nam, battling writer’s block, cynically decides to write an ‘ethnic story’, and writes up the story of his visiting father’s experience of surviving the My Lai massacre. His father’s reaction is unexpected and shocking.

Nam spoke about his attraction to playing with that line between real life and fiction – and the expectations of the reader. “I do feel that there are many lines that mark out what is taboo – we’ve crossed so many lines in literature, but the line between fiction and biography still feels dangerous ... If it feels hard, it’s probably worthwhile. If, while you’re writing it, you wonder ‘do I dare to write this?’, you’re probably onto something.”

Germaine rages as Augusten entertains

2008-08-23T00:00:00Z

If we're looking for verbs to describe last night's keynote speakers at the launch of the MWF, then Germaine raged, whilst Augusten entertained.

OK, so Germaine herself didn't exactly rage as such but she did talk about the Aboriginal rage that is the centrepiece of her latest book On Rage and gave Chloe Hooper's recent account of the Palm Island controversy - The Tall Man - a glowing endorsement. And as always she took time after her time on stage to sign books and talk to fans in the foyer.

Augusten - in conversation with Jennifer Byrne - was a different beast and a fascinating one at that. He riffed about his family, his childhood and his time in rehab, jumping about on stage at times to physically illustrate stories. Augusten also remarked on the James Frey incident telling the audience that complete honesty in memoir writing was important to him and that his reader's could expect 100% truthfulness in his non-fiction writing.