Mommy Dearest

Three things this week: we are very busy here at the festival office, I really loved Nikki Gemmell‘s new novel, and my mother has been staying with me.

Of The Book of Rapture Nikki Gemmell says “This one’s about a woman’s softening into accepting – and respecting – difference”. I love the passion of the novel and the protagonist. Her love for her children is bigger than anything.

Which brings me to my own mother, who has been paying her annual visit. She too is enormously loving. She is however the biggest drama magnet I’ve ever encountered. First we had the Mystery of the Missing Shirt. I told her it was windy and that she should peg carefully, but did she listen? It blew off the washing line and she went in search up and down the street, to no avail. After fretting all night over the loss of her favourite shirt, she set off once again at sunrise the following morning in search of the prodigal polyester.

“Neen, do you think it could have blown onto the roof of the shed?” she asked. “Well, stranger things have happened” I replied. So because she doesn’t like the stairs, I went up to have a look out the window, and lo and behold, there was the precious shirt on top of the shed. It was retrieved with the aid of a stool and long barbeque tongs. Mum was very happy.

But the very next day came the Great Bathroom Flood of 2009. “Neen, I can’t use the guest bathroom, can I use yours?” says Mum. “Why can’t you use the guest bathroom?” I ask with suspicion. “Because of all the water on the floor”. Hmmmm. Turns out the bathroom ‘mysteriously’ flooded that morning (12 hours previously) when she was showering, but she didn’t mop it up because she thought it would miraculously evaporate. Or something. So I stomp upstairs with the mop to find… a swamp. 15 minutes and many swear words later it is dry again.

Third in the trifecta was the Incident of the Elevator. We went to the lovely Sun Theatre in Yarraville, and after the film Mum decided she didn’t want to descend via the stairs but would prefer the elevator. So I went down the stairs and waited for her at the bottom. And waited. And waited a bit more. Just as I was about to go in search, she came giggling through the crowd.

She had gone into the old-fashioned lift which had a manual door, and when she realised she couldn’t read the buttons without her glasses, had started rummaging in her handbag for them. Before she could find the glasses the light went out and she was in total darkness. She couldn’t even tell if the lift was moving. Finally she managed to wrestle the door open again, and decided it was much safer to take the stairs after all.

Fun and games.

See you at the festival.

Nina
Development Manager

Crimes within Crimes

Is it just me or is Tom Rob Smith a hottie? I don’t mean to be pervy or anything, but check him out on YouTube talking about his debut novel from last year, Child 44. He’s written another one since then, The Secret Speech, and he’s still so young! I think he’s 30 at the most. (Too young for me anyway).

Child 44 is a thriller set in Stalinist Russia and based on the true story of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, also known as the Butcher of Rostov. Child 44 was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, it won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award for best thriller of 2008, and it has been translated into 17 languages. Not to mention that the film rights have been sold to Ridley Scott/Fox 2000!

The novel Tom Rob (or is that just Tom?) is promoting in his visit – all the way from London – to the festival is The Secret Speech. Again it’s gripping, cinematic (not surprising as he is also a screen-writer) filled with historical detail about the post-Stalin period in Russia and contains characters you can care about.

One festival session I will definitely be rushing to get a front-row seat for is Crimes Within Crimes . This session is where the lovely Tom Rob meets our very own Crime King Marshall Browne.

Marshall Browne is the author of thirteen books of fiction. Several of his detective novels and thrillers have been published in the US and other countries to critical acclaim. His novels are set in various places including historical Melbourne and Japan, but his two Franz Schmidt novels,  The Eye of the Abyss and The Iron Heart, are set in Hitler’s Germany. The Eye of the Abyss was a Gumshoe Award finalist, a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book, and one of The Australian’s Books of the Year. The Iron Heart is his latest novel.

In The Iron Heart Franz Schmidt arrives in Berlin in January 1939 to take up the position of Chief Auditor at the Reichsbank, the financial heart of the Third Reich. As he battles with political intrigue,  murder, power, and the Gestapo, Schmidt’s brief becomes clear. He must steal a copy of the Reich’s financing blueprint in an attempt to prevent the country’s march to war.

Tickets are still available to Crimes Within Crimes, which promises to be a fascinating discussion of how war and chaos can provide the perfect cover for other crimes. I recommend it for couples. Why? Because it has something for everyone: war and history, fascinating back-ground stories and characters, interesting settings and a little bit of eye candy too. Depending on your taste of course.

Nina
Development Manager

Criminal leanings

I love a good bit of crime fiction. The endings are always way more tidy and therefore satisfying than real life. The festival welcomes some of the world’s best crime writers and these sessions will be at the top of my list.

Is Crime the Key? features the very funny and depressingly young Lisa Lutz, creator of the Spellman family of private detectives. Lisa Lutz is a sassy new addition to the humourous, character driven crime sub-genre, (is there an actual name for it? I don’t know) inhabited for many years now by Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich. Lisa converses with local crime author Garry Disher (his novels are set on the Mornington peninsula) and Indigenous novelist Philip McLaren and the talk will be of settings and how they shape crimes, criminals and novels about such things.

Briton Tom Rob Smith‘s sessions will also be fascinating. Speaking of the evocative nature of setting, his first novel Child 44 was set in the USSR, and reading it I literally felt chilly with all the descriptions of snow-covered landscapes. Luckily it had a gripping plot to keep my heart racing.

Who knew crime was this sassy? I hear you ask. Kerry Greenwood and PD Martin tell Lisa Lutz all about it. And these are just the sessions on the first day of the festival!

Check out Crimes within Crimes, Spotlight on Teresa Solana, and the Ned Kelly Awards. What could be nicer than to celebrate crime fiction?

In other news, our screening of Coraline at Cinema Nova on Tuesday was great fun, a full house, a chance to be scared (the kids in the audience certainly were) and an opportunity to listen to one of our favourites, Shaun Tan. Thank you to everyone who came along. The money raised goes towards the MWF Schools’ Program.

Nina
Development Manager

PS I vow not to stalk Lisa Lutz while she’s in town.

MWF’s Coraline fundraiser

In sponsorship and fundraising news this week, we see the winding up  of the very successful Danny Katz campaign – big thanks to all who donated – and the beginning of organising our next initiative, which is a film night.

This event will be held at Cinema Nova on Tuesday 21 July, we will be ready to sell tickets very soon, and will begin promoting the event through our e-news and website.

So far what I can tell you is that the film we have chosen is the dark fairytale Coraline. The film is based on the book by cult author Neil Gaiman, directed by stop-motion animation expert Henry Selick, and voiced by Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, among other luminaries.

The special treats attached to this event are an introduction to the film by award winning illustrator Shaun Tan, and a glass of lovely wine and a chance to mingle afterwards. For this we ask you to pay $25, and all proceeds from this event will go towards our 2009 Schools’ Program.

Stay tuned for more details and how/when to purchase tickets (they’ll be sold through our own box office) which will be in my blog next week and also on our website.

Start spreading the word to anyone who’d like to see Coraline before the rest of Melbourne gets the chance!
Nina
Development Manager

Just like Eurovision, but for authors

No talk of my ovaries this week, they are doing just fine if anyone’s interested.

I’ve just been checking off the long list of sponsors of the festival for the “Thank you” page of the program guide, and we have the support of such a wonderful variety of organisations I felt they deserved a special mention.

And we are so international. There’s the Melbourne International Film Festival, Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Melbourne International Arts Festival, which all feel the need to remind Melbourne that they are international. We think the fact that we are international is a given!

We have authors coming to the festival this year from Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Canada, the US, the UK and even New Zealand. Not all are European of course, but I’m still thinking Eurovision. Possibly sans outrageous costumes, although you never know.

The cultural organisations who assist the festival in bringing these authors to Melbourne include Alliance Francaise de Melbourne, Ambassade de France, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Australia-Japan Foundation, Consulate General of Canada (Sydney), Consulate General of Spain, Institute Ramon Llull, Consulate General of the United States of America (Melbourne), and the Goethe-Institut.

So many authors, so many books to read. I am in the middle of the first novel by Spanish author and translator Teresa Solana to be translated into English (by her husband Peter Bush), A Not so Perfect Crime. It’s a blend of satire and detective thriller, set in Barcelona and poking fun at Catalan politics and society. The characters are so vividly drawn I can see at least a couple of them on the Eurovision stage.

Both Teresa Solana and Peter Bush are coming all the way from Barcelona for the festival, and I can’t wait! Check out Teresa’s novel here.

Ciao ciao for now.

Nina
Development Manager

Oh my aching ovaries!

Too much information? I don’t believe there’s any such thing. And as the pain in my reproductive organs is making it difficult to concentrate, I can’t think of anything less self-indulgent to write about.

As my life is an open book (there’s the literary link!) I don’t mind telling you that I’m at the very beginning of IVF treatment. Hopefully the end result will be a healthy baby, but there’s a way to go first. I have been snorting and injecting since last Friday, and am all puffed up on hormones. Delightful.

So puffed up that I had to invest in some granny undies, as the regular variety were just not comfy anymore. (These ones are not actually that great either, and they are a truly hideous shade of apricot).

I’m going in for  a scan tomorrow to see if I’ve managed to grow eggs (not too many but just enough) and if so, when the ‘harvest’ will take place. I’ve always marvelled at the miracle of growing a human inside another human’s body, but this technological way of doing things is mind-blowing.

Trying to create a family this way makes we wonder how family trees will work in the future. I’ve been doing a bit of research, especially into my matriarchal line, and it’s very tricky. So far I’ve managed to go back as far as my great-great-great grandmother Esther Drusilla Grant who lived in England. But imagine trying to fit my generation onto a tree.

My brother was married and now has a new partner, 2 step-children and 2 daughters; my sister and her partner changed their names (long story) and have two boys who have slightly different surnames due to a glitch at the births, deaths and marriages office, and I’m hoping to have a child pretty much on my own.

If my great-great-great granddaughter one day tries to trace her ancestors, all I can say is good luck!

Nina
Development Manager

Swimming pool etiquette

In celebration of the Queen’s birthday I decided to treat myself to a night in a flash city hotel. There were plenty of deals to choose from, and the one I selected included valet parking, buffet breakfast and free in-house movies.

I was so excited as I drove my little car into the city on Sunday afternoon. Parking and check-in went smoothly, my room was quite nice, the room service menu seemed interesting (the first thing I always check) and the little toiletries were themed around a combination of vanilla and ylang ylang. How is that pronounced again?

Now, I love to swim. Laps and I go together like vegemite and fruit muffins (no, really), so I went to check out the facilities. OMG pictures on web sites can be misleading! The pool at this un-named hotel was small, square, in a low-ceilinged windowless room, and filled with kids. So not the lap-swimming opportunity I’d been dreaming of.

My disappointment prompted me to reminisce about other swimming pools I know. When I first moved to Melbourne and heard there was a public pool named after Harold Holt I wondered what kind of place I’d decided to call home! On a trip to Darwin many moons ago friends and I stayed at run-down uni accommodation that had been marked for demolition, and spent many hours in the pool in the tropical evening heat, scaring each other with the possibility of crocodiles joining us for a dip. And my dear departed favourite, the Footscray pool, was a daggy festival of humanity.

Aussie pools are great, but we are lucky. Other countries not only have lesser pools, but different and sometimes crazy pool etiquette. I remember trying to swim laps in a community pool in London, with old band-aids floating past me, and people’s feet in my face and hands clutching at my ankles and we all seethed up and down the pool, ingredients in a human soup. No different lanes for different speeds/abilities there!

At a hotel pool in Chicago I had a ridiculous conversation with the only other person using it at 6am over how we would manage to swim and not run into each other. I’m still not sure if I was supposed to be keeping right or left, but it just reinforced that I never want to drive in the US.

Perhaps the most bemusing experience was again in London, but this time at the very up-market, exclusive and traditional 100 year old RAC Club. A friend took me along to her club to use the steam room and the pool, which was indeed a lovely pool, all Grecian columns and mosaic tiles. Have you seen that Woody Allen film with Scarlett Johansson and our Hugh? It’s the pool in that where Scarlett is looking so fetching in her red bathers and she pretends to drown to attract Hugh’s attention.

So, I’m swimming from one end of the pool to the other, trying to work out what the system is, as there are no ropes or lane markings. But people are all over the place, and I have to keep looking in front of me to make sure I’m not about to have a head-on collision. So when I come to the end of a lap I ask a gentlemen who’s resting against the pool wall what the deal is. He says that some members of the club wanted to make rules about how best to ensure everyone’s safe enjoyment of the pool, but they were out-voted by others who said the pool had never had rules so why on earth should they bring them in now.

Swim safely!

Nina
Development Manager

PS The room service turned out to be poor. I’m so sick of bad sushi. If you’re not a trained sushi chef I say keep away from it.

Swine flu or just flu?

I have been at home on the couch for the past couple of days with some kind of illness. Aches and pains, fever, general malaise. Is it swine flu? I don’t know as I couldn’t bring myself to schlep down to the doc’s for a swab. I don’t believe I’ve been in contact with anyone who has been diagnosed as having swine flu, but they say it’s so contagious I could have breathed in the virus as I passed someone on the street who had it.

Anyhoo, I’m back at work now, feeling average, but not at death’s door. There’s a fine line between keeping your germs out of the workplace, and being a martyr to a sniffle. I’ve come back to so many emails and things to do that this will be a quick post, but can I just say that daytime television is truly awful? Those infomercials are offensive in their banality. Bad production values, terrible acting, condescending communications.

I tried to read, when I wasn’t sleeping, as there was absolutely nothing to watch on the telly. After zooming through a gripping crime novel called Malice by Lisa Jackson, I picked up David Malouf‘s Ransom, his first novel in more than 10 years. Ransom revisits Homer‘s Iliad, an exploration of male bonding, loyalty, family and war. The writing is delicate and beautiful and I am in awe, even though I have only read a couple of chapters so far.

But enough from me, I must get back to work. Look out for that hilarious letter from Danny Katz, which is now on our web site too, and give whatever you can to help make the 2009 festival the best ever.

Nina
Development Manager

Dogs in literature and in life

Dogs are the best people.  I whole-heartedly agree with The Fauves on that one. It is now 11 days since I had to have my beloved canine companion Betty put to sleep. She was 14 years old and had a range of health issues, so as everyone keeps telling me it was the kindest thing to do, but it was still the most awful decision I have ever had to make.

Betty came to live with me when she was 6 weeks old, a little strawberry blonde cocker spaniel with razor-sharp baby teeth and the idea that the carpet was the place to wee rather than the lawn. We had so many adventures together over the years; air travel for beach holidays in WA, a road trip to Byron Bay (we stopped overnight in Dubbo and I smuggled her into my hotel room through the window), countless laps around The Tan (where she was once patted by Cathy Freeman and once photographed by The Age), Albert Park Lake and many other smaller parks and blocks all over Melbourne.

The house is quiet and empty and lonely without her. But I’m trying to accentuate the positives. I bought a new rug which will remain free of dog hair and ‘accidents’. I no longer have to dash home between work and going out, to walk and feed her, so I’ve been going out straight from work, which feels strangely liberated.

I still get very teary whenever I think of her. My sister advised me against reading (or watching) Marley & Me by John Grogan, and I’m sure I couldn’t handle it right now. But her advice made me consider famous dogs, and more specifically, dogs in literature.  I could think of a few – Timmy the dog in Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, Buck in Call of the Wild by Jack London, Cerberus the hell-hound of Hades –  but when my list stopped there I decided to google the subject and found Wikipedia’s list of dogs in literature for your enjoyment.

Luckily I haven’t had much time during work hours to be sad as it’s been far too busy. Deals are being done all over the place as we get closer to program guide deadline. The guide will be in The Age on Friday 17 July, so look out for it. But first we have to lock in authors, juggle session times and venues, write biographies and other text, source photos and in my case, confirm all sponsors, trusts and foundations, and major donors.

Despite the economic down-turn, people and companies are still prepared to be generous, and we welcome several new supporters for the 2009 festival. These include the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust which has given a grant for us to take the Schools’ Program on the road to regional Victoria during the festival; The Smith Family, who are sponsoring a session in which authors discuss their paths out of disadvantage to literary success in a promotion of the importance of literacy and fostering an early love of literature;  and The Castan Centre for Human Rights Law (Monash University) in partnership with law firm Holding Redlich who are sponsoring the appearance of human rights lawyer and author Thomas Buergenthal at the festival.

But wait, there’s more: Qantas, JWT (currently working on our ad campaign which is very exciting, gorgeous and clever), the Italian Institute of Culture together with Crown Coffee, Australian Ethical Investment, CAE, Kangarilla Wines and The Finkel Foundation. Whew.

Until next week.

Nina
Development Manager

Danny Katz needs help!

The day began strangely. First, I saw an elderly woman practicing her pole-dancing at the bus stop. Second, I saw a man urinating in full view of rush-hour traffic on Footscray Rd (then had to poke my own eyes out). Third, I was nearly crushed by a Safmarine shipping container on a truck turning onto Footscray Rd and almost not taking the corner. I do love Safmarine shipping containers – they are my favourites – and if ever I see one I know it is going to be a good day.

With Danny Katz’s help, 30 June will be a good day. Danny, Melbourne’s much beloved author and columnist, seemed like the perfect person to be the ‘face’ of the festival’s end-of-financial-year fund-raising appeal. I asked him, he said yes, and then he wrote the most hilarious appeal letter I’ve ever read.

If you have ever had anything to do with the festival, and if we have your name and address, you’ll be on the list, so check your mail box in a couple of weeks for the “Danny Katz needs help” appeal letter. And then if you are amused, please make a donation (to the festival, not to Danny)! There are so many reasons to do so, but I’ll let Danny list them for you, he’s so much funnier than me.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading. Namely, Kerry Greenwood’s latest Phryne (pronounced Fry-Knee I believe) Fisher mystery, Murder on a Midsummer Night. I always enjoy these novels, for the fabulosity of Phryne as a character, the strong sense of place and time that Ms Greenwood is so good at conjuring, and the way they are so ‘Melbourne’.

That segues nicely into the other book I’m reading, Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion, also set in Melbourne. I’m really enjoying it, despite the unpleasant characters, of whom there’s only one I like. Can you guess which one?

Nina
Development Manager