Sunning it at the Egremont Writers Festival

There’s nothing like a writers festival to make you feel uneducated and poorly read. Quite apart from being unable to laugh at the subtle references to Proust or Kafka I am challenged, from day one, to draw a grammatical line in the sand by having to take sides on the Great Apostrophe Debate. Is it a Writer’s, or Writers’ Festival? I usually give up and leave the apostrophe out altogether. The MSWord grammar checker, BTW, wants it to be “Writer’s”.

Apart from this, writers festivals are not the preserve of the literary elite. They are one of the best ways to expand the range of books you read because there is nothing like hearing an author read from his or own book, or listening to them talk about why they write like they do.

This weekend I flew down to attend the last weekend of the Melbourne Writers Festival. I stayed with Fairlie and attended a total of nine sessions with Fairlie and, on Sunday, with Fairlie and Domestic Goddess. I was curious about how I would view this festival after four years away replacing it with the Sydney version. Fairlie has covered the sessions we attended in depth so here is my overall summary:

• The layout was much better than previous years. Setting up the bookshop in a marquee outside was a master stroke.


• The MWF is a much more intimate event than Sydney but has much less of a festival atmosphere. I wonder how this will change when it moves to Fed Square next year.


• It’s very tempting to buy the sausage sandwich for lunch but much kinder to your fellow attendees if you don’t.


• I’m sorry GossipPop but I just don’t get you. Perhaps if I read Kafka or Proust I would. But I doubt it.


• Alexis Wright has written Carpentaria in the voice of a male aboriginal elder; Adrian Hyland has written Diamond Dove in the voice of a 26yo female aboriginal woman and Gail Jones just has a squeaky voice. All seek to give voice to our indigenous people.


• Mark Crick wrote in 14 famous voices in Kafka’s Soup and did a great job at all of them.


• I thought there was going to be fisty cuffs on stage during the “Politics of Atheism” discussion between Val Noone and A C Grayling. But Grayling didn’t bite. Shame.


• The mob from Victoria University who were supposed to talk about creating identities in an online world had no idea what they were talking about.


• Visa Dockets are a perfectly rational source of notepaper. As are the backs of invitations to Quaker meetings.


• Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Robotham and Adrian Hyland all live surrounded by females and assume female personae in their books. AMS does, however, have a male cat.


• Katie Hickman was fascinating on the subject of Courtesans. She tells us that Lord William Melbourne, from whom Melbourne gets its name, is widely rumoured to have been the product of an affair between Lady Melbourne and Lord Egremont. So in a parallel universe we may in fact have attended the Egremont Writers Festival.
  

So what books did I think I might put on my TBR pile:

Courtesans by Katie Hickman
The Night Ferry by Michael Robotham
Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland
Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

And perhaps

Caravan Story by Wayne Macauley


and finally, only readers of Kafka will find this funny:

“All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in this blog”

Don’t get it? Don’t blame you. See the original quote here.