Top picks for Emerging Writers' Festival
The Emerging Writers’ Festival kicks off tonight with an electrifying new line-up of writers, events and venues trailed across the Melbourne CBD. To help you navigate this jam-packed-with-goodness program, we’ve asked some of the festival’s guests to share their top picks.
Luke Ryan, author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo:
Is there any festival on Earth as unlikely as the Emerging Writers’ Festival? A fully-packed, 11-day bacchanal of writing, wisdom and whimsy dedicated solely to people who spend their days trying to concoct meaning out of a painstakingly mixed slurry of words and punctuation. It’s almost more than we deserve. But that’s a lot of programmed material to sift through, so to help you out here’s a grab bag of four events I’m particularly looking forward to:
Mixtape Memoirs: Mixtape Memoirs makes its triumphant return with a host of local literary and lyrical types choosing a song around the theme of ‘Love + Lust’ and telling us how it shaped their romantic lives. Expect outrageous amounts of sentiment and the occasional power ballad.
Emerging Q&A: Let’s admit it. Bogged down in political grandstanding and empty tit-for-tat, these days the real Q&A is about as entertaining and useful as thrush. Thankfully the EWF crew have cobbled together a line-up of our finest young political minds to serve as an antidote to all that mush. Hosted by the inestimable Bhakthi Puvanenthiran, this is pretty much guaranteed to be the one event that the whole festival can’t stop talking about.
Amazing Babes: Does what it says on the tin, really. Excellent women writers talking about the women who have inspired them. There will also be the second ever set from Canberra-based literary grunge-girl supergroup Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. And it’s happening at a pub. Seriously, why haven’t you bought tickets yet?
No Lights, No Literature: No lights, no mobile phones, no holding back. Four anonymous festival guests unleash their darkest, most cynical thoughts on the literary world without fear of repercussion or out-of-context tweets. Could be amazing, could just be a bit weird. Only one way to find out.
Michele Lee, author of Banana Girl:
EWF is here! Oh gawd! I haven’t been since the mid-noughties! I’ve grown up and this festival’s grown up too, and rather splendidly. I first attended to do a reading of the first play I wrote when I came to Melbourne. It was, to put it kindly, a work in progress. But I can now say those things about my playwriting work because – oh look at me – I’m now referring to myself as an ‘early career’ playwright, ooh, and I am back in the EWF rather as an emerging ‘memoirist’. But labels aside, you can take a girl out of a theatre for a literary festival but you can’t take the theatre out of the girl…
So, yes, with a big ol’ theatre inside me (the pokey independent kind with a makeshift lighting rig) my pick of the EWF is #Three Jerks, a performative reading exploring a high-profile rape case in Sydney from 2000. The guys who have made this show – SWEATSHOP – are from the Western suburbs of Sydney and are the sort of people that give that populous urban corridor gritty arts cred. Not to mention the astronomically talented Roslyn Oades has directed this reading. Very, very looking forward to going. Very, very want to see how the men in SWEATSHOP will position themselves in this story.
But there are enough festivals with theatre shows, right, so do theatre shows need highlighting? The EWF is a literary festival dammit. To this end I will also duly plug the weekend of panels I am in, the National Writers’ Conference. Go along to Sex, Drugs and Rock-and-Roll. Liam Pieper is in it and he is very funny.
Laura Jean McKay , author of Holiday in Cambodia
The EWF is all about sensory deprivation this year, testing the boundaries of words and writing festivals themselves in a program that is, frankly, blowing my senses.
For the ears we have Like a Writing Desk – a listening party for Aden Rolf’s new radio play, also featured on Radio National. There’s also No Lights, No Literature, an expose of the writing world so juicy it will be presented in the dark and in a tweet-free zone. Speaking of darkness, the Writing Night School series explores the underbelly of writing the likes of travel writing with Tom Doig and poetry with Bonnie Cassidy. Filibust deprives Nick Keys the ability to sit down during his durational performance, while over in Footscray it gets all ‘West Side Story’ as Right Now and West Writers Group Represent!
I am also very excited by the darlings that will be killed off by the Emerging Editors program with sessions on careers in the book industry and Indigenous editing. As part of this event, black&write! celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing, editing and publishing in a brilliant line-up that showcases what happens when Magabala books goes digital. On the same day, the all-star Festival Ambassadors will beat the audience with rulers … wait … no … they’ll share the ‘5x5 Rules of Writing’ as part of the National Writers’ Conference. I’m personally thrilled about cutting humans out of the picture by talking The Early Words: About the Animals with Aden Rolf and Rebecca Giggs.
And I can’t end this by depriving myself of the three key ingredients for any great festival: Sex, Drugs and Rock-and-Roll. This panel (which is also part of the National Writers’ Conference) promises to rock our sexy drug socks. I’ll ‘see’ you there!
Michael Mohammed Ahmad, author of The Tribe:
At this year’s National Writers’ Conference two of my closest colleagues will be in the Control Room for a discussion on developing local voices. Many of you probably already know Luke Carman, author of An Elegant Young Man. If you had the honour of hearing him speak at one of last year’s EWF panel discussions then he probably left a mark and you’ve already planned to come and listen to him again. This is a very worthy reason to attend this event, but there’s also another good reason you should attend: a young man from Cabramatta named Stephen Pham.
At 22, Stephen is one of the most promising writers I have encountered since I first began sourcing writers 10 years ago. Stephen’s creative writing follows from ours, critically and ferociously, as a means for social and political justice. Unlike most writers I meet, Luke and Stephen are comfortable just being confused. Their conversation will be something memorable. Seriously, don’t miss it…
Briohny Doyle, co-winner of the inaugural Express Media/Scribe Nonfiction prize for Young Writers:
The best thing about this festival is the chance see the stuff that would never show up on the programs of the mainstream writers’ festivals. I’m looking forward to Nick Key’s durational performance Filibust, inspired by political oration and sampling Kanye West and Paul Keating, and Translation Nation, the live translating event with audience Q&A promises to give us a rare insight into the intriguing process of translating literature.
For a wild card event, I’ll be heading to the launch of Galactic Words, a digital writing installation that promises to be ‘immersive’ and ‘tactile’, adjectives that make me feel both excited and a little afraid.
Tom Doig, author of Moron to Moron: Two Men, Two Bikes, One Mongolian Misadventure:
I’m sooooo excited by No Lights, No Literature! It’s possibly the coolest panel idea ever. The whole thing takes place in pitch darkness, and the panellists are top-secret (but perhaps you’ll recognise their voices – or will they speak through vocoders?). I’m hoping some sensational anonymous mud gets slung through the gloom! It’s on tomorrow night and it’s free, so hurry up and book your ticket.
Next week, the Filmme Fatales: Winterland Wonderland Dance Party sounds amazing. It’s a disco party at Rooftop Cinema – brave move in May! – featuring a massive mash-up of famous cinematic dance sequences, plus a zine fair. With burgers. What more could you want?
On a more literary note, I’m looking forward to hearing three of my favourite writers discuss the complex relationship humans have with animals in The Early Words: About the Animals. (This is the morning after the Filmme Fatales party, so there may be some hangover action.) Aden Rolfe, Laura Jean McKay and Rebecca Giggs are a fearsomely bright line-up, so if you miss this you’re a dingbat. Worth getting out of bed early for, especially since there appears to be free breakfast provided!
