Portrait: DBC Pierre by Beowulf Sheehan

© Beowulf Sheehan / Melbourne Writers Festival

Portrait of DBC Pierre taken by New York-based photographer Beowulf Sheehan.

Picto-memento post: Dog’s Tales at the Toff

It was dark. Stories and memories were shared. Images remain.

DBC Pierre warned us not to go drinking with lizards and snakes (before shedding his own skin).

Carmel Bird and her grandson shared some fun buns, surrounded by guns.

Josephine Rowe and her father were talking about birds and weren’t talking about birds.

Kalinda Ashton’s shopgirl character was perhaps misinterpreting the signs.

Tiffany Murray discovered music and father figures.

David Carruthers was thrust into a position of fear and responsibility.

And, because of a crush, Elif Batuman judged a unique contest and sat with a canoe.

Many ways to be Uuman (a festival diary post)

The festival adrenaline kicked in for me yesterday afternoon. First up, I had my Q&A session with global chameleon Mohezin Tejani. Mo and I had a session together at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali last year (you can enter to win a trip to this at the festival bookshop, Readings). Mo’s life is amazing – from his exile from Uganda during Idi Amin’s reign of terror; to his humanitarian work around the globe; his exhilarating and his terrifying experiences, such as climbing Kilimanjaro and being caught in a tsunami; and his curious and continuing evolution as an adventurer who calls the globe his home. His book A Chameleon’s Tale places the reader and all their five senses alongside Mo in different cultures, in different places and times around the world.

I was running late for one of the sessions I was most looking forward to, a celebration of Albert Camus, and GOD DAMNIT I was locked out, as the venue was at capacity. I cried into my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus then decided to stop waiting outside the door as with a ‘leap’ of hope, and stay lucid. I pushed a boulder back up the escalator.

Which brought me to the launch of DBC Pierre‘s Lights Out in Wonderland at the gorgeous little red-lit Chaise Lounge on Queen Street. I haven’t read Booker-prize-winner Pierre as of yet, but his new book sounds both strange and necessary. We stood around for a while sipping free booze and munching cashews, and just as I thought I’d have to leave to go line up for the Keynote, the book was launched by Pierre’s long-time friend Roger Pike, a winemaker (Marius Wines, McLaren Vale) who is also a character in the book. The speech was so moving – talking about their shady pasts, their long friendship with its inevitable gaps and anagram games which have resurfaced in the book and the name of the Pike’s next wine. Pike had tears in his eyes at the end, and of course, this got me going.

Pierre took the microphone and thanked the small crowd and said, with such genuine gratitude: ‘All that is exaggerated in fiction about comradeship you have today made me feel’.

I had to run off, but I’ve made a note to get the book ASAP and add it to the teetering ‘tower of hope’.

The Age Book of the Year Awards were announced at the first Keynote. The winners were:

Nonfiction: Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth
Poetry: Pirate Rain by Jennifer Maiden
Fiction: Lovesong by Alex Miller

Overall: Lovesong by Alex Miller

For those of you who read me over at LiteraryMinded you’ll know I am so very pleased for Alex!

Alex was one of the authors then reading in the Eight Ways to Be Human Keynote Address. The others included Brenda Walker, who read a beautiful section (one of my favourite parts) from Reading By Moonlight about her father’s actions when their house flooded, when she was a child. Barry Dickins (whom I have nicknamed the Philip Seymour Hoffman of Australian poetry) read from his memoir of depression and treatment Unparalleled Sorrows – a day out on the streets from the ‘unalive’ clinic, a visit from his father (so vividly described). I’d still like to get my hands on this one.

Cate Kennedy was her usual delightful and warm self, speaking of her daughter’s joy in improvising language, in creating meaning, and Cate’s resistance to boxing her in (to ‘proper’ language categories) just yet. I think my favourite speaker, though, was Jostein Gaarder – not specifically for what he said, but the way he said it. I don’t mean his accent – I’m part Norwegian and have traveled there and am very familiar with the accent (it’s really a comfort), but throwing his hands up in the air, orating so loud that certain audience members around me flinched. He spoke of reciprocity, doing good unto others – but carrying that generationally. Doing good for the next generation. ‘Our time has no more central importance than all the epochs that will come after,’ he said, forcefully and animatedly.

The second Keynote was of course, God, as he was called by the chair Sue Turnbull. Anyway, being the first person in the hall, sitting up the back, I got a got look at the cult of Joss Whedon. Fans strutted in, geeks in coats and lace, with boots and fan shirts, pockets of blue and orange hair. The energy was quite infectious. God strolled in on stage and there were squeals and whoops. Whedon was smart, passionate and funny, and very encouraging to the crowd, telling them everyone can ‘make it’ nowadays. What he meant was, everyone can gain an audience through independent means. Whedon was refreshingly immodest – saying he believed from the beginning he’d make shows with cult followings, because that kept him going. But ‘it wasn’t until I started writing television that I discovered I was a writer’, Whedon said. Buffy was one of the shows in the ’90s that became part of a kind of revolution in TV as a storytelling medium. Whedon loves writing for TV, it’s ‘living with a story for years and years, in a collaborative fashion’. And Whedon admitted, as Buffy took off at the same time as the web, its success was ‘definitely related to the internet’. Whedon interacted, early on, with online fan communities. Whedon and the crowd lamented the end of Firefly and there were such sad whimpers when Whedon says he still thinks of the Firefly episodes he could have made.

Whedon doesn’t set out to write to a particular theme, issue, or to create a franchise, but he walks around with the story a bit, then gets the good bits down, filling in some of the exegetical stuff later. The theme of corporate monopolisation runs through his work, and this just occurs, he says, as it is an issue he’s concerned with. ‘The culture of the giant company is here and it’s destroying the fabric of our society’. Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog was a totally independent venture. And it’s heaps of fun.

Now it’s Saturday and I’m about to rush off to the festival again… See you there!