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