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

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

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

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