Author Archives: Rosemary
All Our Workshops are Now ON SALE!
Bookings are open for the Melbourne Writers Festival Workshop Program. The Festival celebrates the fact that we’re a city of readers and writers, by offering audiences a fantastic range of workshops, masterclasses and seminars with our visiting authors. When bringing writers from around the world (and around Australia), it seems unwise not to utilise their knowledge and thus our program of Workshops & Seminars has been developed to develop our local talents.
Workshops are for all-comers, no matter what their level of experience, while masterclasses are for those with some record of publishing success. More details will be found on the MWF website. Masterclasses and workshops are limited to just 14 participants so those classes tend to book out very quickly.
This year’s workshops include:
Tom Rob Smith (UK) on Commerce & Creativity
Lisa Lutz (US) on Giving Voice to Unique Characters
Kate De Goldi (NZ) on Writing Fiction for Children
Wells Tower (Canada) on Writing Short Stories
Jessa Crispin (US) on Being a Critic During the Death of Print
Wayson Choy (Canada) on The Secrets of Memoir Writing – Truth or Consequences?
Our masterclasses include:
John Boyne (UK) on Historical Fiction
M J Hyland (UK) on How to Write Good Fiction – From First Draft to Last
Philip Hensher (UK) on Building Character
Our seminars include:
Aspects of the Novel, with Philip Hensher (UK) & Wayson Choy (Canada)
Aspects of Fantasy with Margo Lanagan (NSW)
Aspects of History with Glen David Gold (US) & Alexander Waugh (UK)
Aspects of Thrillers & Mysteries with Jewell Rhodes (US) and Tom Rob Smith (UK)
Finally, to give an insight into the world of publishing, the festival runs The Whole Shebang, our intensive day-long workshop for emerging writers. This is a very popular day and features conversations on the author–editor relationship, grant writing, ways to get published and how to create you own success, in addition to presentations from all the key organisations. This day is an essential starting point for all those wanting to begin their writing career.
Details and bookings for the 2009 MWF Professional Development Sessions.
Wrapping up one week to start another…
Taking a break at the end of another weekend slog. This is the part of the process where I have to dot my ‘i’s and cross my ‘t’s – go through every panel (all 308 of them) and make sure there is balance and energy and a good chair. I’ve had an email conversation today with Michael McGirr who most people will remember for his gentle and witty memoir about travelling with his mother, Things You Get For Free. Michael will join us at the festival to talk about his new book, The Lost Art of Sleep which continues his personal journey while exploring all things sleep related. Warmly engaging, erudite and delightfully personal – it won’t help cure your insomnia but it will certainly explain it. I got a buzz as one of his interviewees is Geraldine Moses, a Brisbane doctor and old school friend. He also remembers one of my Brisbane Writers Festivals with great warmth because his twins were conceived there!
It is thrilling when the right combination of panellists come together. And sometimes in a way that is surprising. Yesterday I was following up a lead for a speaker on trauma for a panel, After the bushfires and the psychologist I was pursuing also turned out to be not just a child Holocaust survivor but he had studied and written about children who survived the Holocaust too. So I immediately asked him to do a session with Judge Thomas Buergenthal.
There is also frustration – my beautiful combinations morph from one combination to another as potential chairs reply “moving to Sydney”, “will be overseas” and then – another pot of gold in my in-box. This time Paddy O’Reilly gets back to me from Tokyo saying yes, she’d love to interview Hitomi Kanehara. Paddy’s first novel, The Factory, was written in Japan on an Asialink grant and she is a great fan of Hitomi’s work. I’ve been pursuing Hitomi for awhile as I’m intrigued by her novels. She is a media superstar in Japan and still only in her mid-20s. She is bringing her husband and small baby with her which explains why travel has been off the menu for a while. (Heidi Julavits is travelling with her baby too – we need a creche!). Hitomi wrote her first novel before she was even 20 and it won the most prominent Japanese literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, in 2004. One of the judges, celebrated writer Ryu Murakami, said her book was ‘easily the top choice, receiving the highest marks of any work since I became a member of the selection panel’. The original Japanese edition of Snakes and Earrings has since topped bestseller lists and sold over a million copies, and translated into 28 languages. Snakes and Earrings is, in the best Japanese tradition, a dark tale of sex and violence.
Speaking of sex and violence, our Danny Katz donation campaign has been wildly successful which is a shame – I was looking forward to Danny & Shane Maloney doing a nude reading in a paddling pool full of gravy. The media have picked up on Danny’s fabulous letter (see it on our website if you haven’t already) giving the campaign extra life. If a few more people donate we will reach our goal by the end of June (the end of the financial year for those looking for a good tax-deduction).
We hand the program to The Age this Friday so as we tick off panels we lock them away in template documents which eventually become the printed program. We are radically changing the way the program looks this year, We’ve made many improvements to its readability over the last few years but people new to the festival are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of events and authors. So we want to find a way of presenting the masses of print-heavy information in a clearer, more graphic fashion. With more cross-referencing and using the website as a repository for more detailed information like author biographies. It has been an interesting experiment involving many designers, many templates, many focus groups, many dead ends and we think we’ve come up with something splendid. The Age have also agreed to increase the size of the program from 24 to 28 pages which will make a vast difference.
Back to work – I still have half a dozen invitations to chair panels to send out tonight before I go home and check on my increasingly independent children.
Goodnight!
Rosemary
Festival Director
Nearly finished
Whilst Louise and her Tim-Tam-eating volunteers were spending their weekend stuffing envelopes to get Steve’s school program out in the mail today (yahoo!), I was blockaded in my office for a marathon long weekend of plotting and planning. And the result? The program is stunning. Can I say that about my own program? I think I can because the program’s strength is, of course, the writers who are taking part. And, this year more than in the past, I’ve had a gold-mine of new talent from which to choose. Fabulous young writers from Australia and elsewhere who are writing with breath-taking energy and originality. Many will be featured in this year’s festival – Steven Amsterdam, Reif Larsen, Wells Tower, Andrew Westoll, Petina Gappah and Evie Wyld are some of those bold young voices you’ll be hearing. In the last three years the MWF has seen debut authors blitz the festival’s best-seller list – Alice Pung and Nam Le both out-sold their more experienced colleagues and the festival is developing a reputation for being the best place to find new talent.
There has been a recent campaign to save Salt Publishing, a UK poetry publishing house which was started by John Kinsella and has many Australian poets on its list. The campaign “buy just one book” will save the press from its financial doom through the power of one. After you’ve bought one book from Salt turn your collective financial power to supporting debut writers. Next time you are in Readings make sure you include “just one debut author” in your take-home books. Be there at the beginning when a new career takes off. Be responsible for launching the great writers of the next generation. Get some zing into your life with the freshness of their writing. Impress your friends with your prescience and recommend a debut author as your bookclub ‘read’. Get hooked.
Rosemary
Fesitval Director
Too many diversions…
My four dimensional jigsaw – the program – is still waiting for me to finish it. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Diversions yesterday included meeting the charming new Cultural Attache from the Spanish Embassy in Canberra to discuss Spanish authors for 2010 and the publicity manager from Fremantle Press – also to discuss 2010. Seems a long way off. Also met with the Melbourne Community Foundation CEO to talk about ways of ensuring the long term financial stability of the festival. Fortunately we seem to be weathering the GFC well – our sponsorship and donations for this year have actually grown and exceeded last year. I suspect that reflects our move to Federation Square and moving centre-stage – higher profile, a bigger festival, more international guests, more media coverage (especially television) and higher attendance figures. Today, no diversions so have to finalise program. That’s a promise.
Rosemary
Fesitval Director
Panic
This will be a very short blog today as I am about a month behind in my programming. I’m trying to put together the program which is like trying to assemble a four-dimensional jigsaw. I try to achieve balance by marrying experienced authors with new authors. I also want balance in the topics and genres we cover, in the representation of the publishing houses with whom we work and in author gender. Then I have to work around authors’ availability and all sorts of restrictions like Friday prayers and Saturday Sabbath. When it works it is fantastic but there is a lot of tearing-of-hair and kicking-the-cat before the program is put to bed.
Rosemary
Festival Director
Monday thoughts
Melbourne in autumn makes my heart sing. I come to work past the Domain, the War Memorial barely visible through the mist and the trees in full autumnal glory. Then I get to my office which is much less romantic. Boxes of books & manuscripts make it look like we are packed up ready to go somewhere. No such luck.
Fabulous news yesterday about Christos Tsiolkas winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009 for The Slap. Normally author photos are reserved, reflective and passive so I loved the photo of Christos in The Age – he was full of life, action and joy. It was a pleasure just to look at him enjoying his win. The Slap is a disturbing book in that it lays open all our prejudices and conditioning. Set in contemporary Melbourne it is a ‘must read’. I gobbled it up over one weekend and I can highly recommend it for bookclubs – you’ll never stop arguing once you read The Slap. We are thrilled that Christos is coming to the festival after too long an absence.
Steve Grimwade and I decided that we should get new PR photos this year (mine was 6 years old) and we ended up looking like good cop/bad cop. Steve’s photos are all austere and severe whilst mine are, unsurprisingly, blowsy. Always optimistic I’m sure that my photos are going to make me look gorgeous, 25 and model-slim. Oddly enough they don’t. Given the poor material she had to work with (and I’m talking about myself here, not Steve) Ponch Hawkes has done wonders.
Rosemary
Festival Director
Krissy Kneen
On Sunday I finished reading a fabulous book, Affection by Krissy Kneen. Couldn’t wait to get to work on Monday and send her an invitation to take part in the festival and have just had her response, “Hell yes!” So am very happy. Affection won’t be published until August (Text) – so add it to your must-read list. Its subtitle describes it as a memoir of love, sex and intimacy and it is definitely R-rated. As I read my proof copy on a plane, the man reading over my shoulder beside me had great trouble concentrating on Top Gear.
Krissy is well known for some excellent docos she wrote and directed for SBS and the ABC – one of which was about her unusual family which features again in Affection. Krissy’s writing is poetic and heartbreaking and I was moved by her painfully true recollections of childhood and, later, that too-wide gap between dream and reality that we all paper over with self-delusion.
I knew Krissy when I lived in Brisbane – she works at Avid Reader, one of Brisbane’s best independent bookshops. She is not the only writer on staff – Avid Reader is an incubator of talent. Everyone who works there is busy writing and being published – I’m surprised they find time to sell books. Watch out for Christopher Currie, another excellent Avid writer.
Rosemary
MWF Festival Director
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 