Speakeasy

The last panel we were there for on Sunday afternoon was All The World’s A Stage: Australia’s Contribution, with Jack Hibberd (playwright), Hillary Bell (playwright), Morris Gleitzman (novelist) and Michael Gow (playwright, director, and Artistic Director of Queensland Theatre Company).

The main theme was the state of the Australian theatre industry, and where playwrights fit in the system. Hibberd discussed the DIY aspect of theatre; with a play, you can write a script, find some actors and get them interested, and hopefully rope in a sympathetic director. He admitted it wasn’t as easy as ‘presto, here’s a play’, but fringe was possible. He also commented that in London, major theatre companies actively scour the fringe scene for new works, whereas that doesn’t happen so much in Australia. Gow disagreed, claiming his staff source new work for Queensland Theatre Company all the time, as it revitalises the company while supporting new writers. During the discussion of the term ‘Australian theatre’, Gow also suggested that due to the far-flung nature of our population, it might be more relevant to discuss Sydney theatre, Melbourne theatre, Brisbane theatre, even Bendigo or Alice Springs theatre.

Morris Gleitzman went on to say theatre is economically closer to book publishing than film; it’s not as crucial to look for international audiences for a play, as it is for film. Gow added that films are so laden with debt by the time they’re released that they have to try for an international audience. Plays also don’t have the same number of people with an economic stake in the work, so it doesn’t get re-written as much as most films do. Bell continued this, adding that conservatism comes with committee; a poet can be in a room by themself and write anything they want, whereas a film is practically public property. She considers a play to be somewhere in the middle, as there are still actors and orchestra to pay, but it can still be edgy, still be the writer’s work.

As a sidenote to the film discussion, Gow added that auteur theory, where the director is the driving force behind a film’s style and reception, isn’t working in Australia because writer’s aren’t close enough to the centre of production. We need to learn to write good films before we worry about who’s directing them.

The inevitable question about how to get more people to go to the theatre came up, and all panelists agreed that the only way was to make it as cheap as going to the movies. If people could go to see Shakespeare for $15, more of them would. There was also some discussion of that other key issue, of the way theatre and all the arts are forced to justify themselves in commercial terms, to try and put a dollar value on their worth to society. When someone mentioned theatre and football in the same sentence, commenting that they were both part of our cultural framework, it did occur to me to wonder what the commercial gain of sport was, and what the dollar value of football’s contribution to society was. Anyway…

A main theme during the last part of the panel was that it would be great if we could take the piety out of theatre, and rub off some of its perceived elitism. Getting the kids into it would be a great start, and all panelists agreed that people shouldn’t be afraid to go see a play. It’s not just for swanky, arty people, and you don’t need cultural permission. Gow did finish with a great story about the production of Oedipus Rex, with Marcus Graham as Oedipus. Apparently, he was in the audience while a school group was there, and was sitting next to a girl who was texting a friend. He peeked at the phone, expecting her to be planning their post-theatre activities, but was surprised to find her texting "Oedipus is totally hot". He was encouraged by the fact that they were engaging with the play, discussing it in much the same way as early audiences would have chatted at the Globe. Later on in the play, when Oedipus’ true relationship to Jocasta was revealed, he caught her texting again: "This is totally gross, but if he was my son, I’d do him."

During the Falling Into Place: How Writers Find Their Genre panel, novelist Zachary Jane (The Lifeboat) commented that when she came to write, her style fit best into the genre she reads the most. She’s a fan of Jeanette Winterson and Haruki Murakami, and her publishers told her that her novel fit in a similar bracket. She also said she found the style that suited the way her thoughts went while experimenting with short stories, writing on aeroplanes and in airport lounges.

In the same session, Max Barry confessed he’d never consciously considered genre; his publishers told him at one point that he was writing science fiction, and then branded a later novel of his as young adult fiction. He decided to write what he wanted to read, and that genre was something publishers did, not something that needed to consciously appear in your writing. Although, he admitted, there do tend to be clear characteristics of particular genres; he just didn’t think it was something to worry about until after a novel was finished.

The second panel I went to on Sunday morning was about a terrible literary affliction, one that strikes many writers. Symptoms include guilt, performance anxiety, depression…

Jeffrey Eugenides moved to the other side of the world to escape the pressure. Donna Tartt reportedly had a nervous breakdown. Harper Lee became a recluse, and never wrote again. I am, of course, talking about Second Novel Syndrome; when, as the success of the writer’s first novel escalates, the pressure to produce a fantastic second novel gets so extreme the writer becomes unable to function. 

According to Ali Smith, the main problem is that the attention makes the writer more visible to themself - their writing style gets analysed, the critics weigh in - and self-consciousness isn’t exactly a good thing for writing. Part of writing is subtracting yourself from the process, and letting it happen naturally without being overly conscious of how.

The three panellists were Stefan Laszczuk (I Dream of Magda), William Kostakis (Loathing Lola), and Virginia Duigan (Days Like These, The Biographer), who had each either written or were in the process of writing their second novels. Laszczuk, whose second novel had just been released, thought it was harder to write the first book than the second. In fact, he worked so hard on the first one that he decided just to have fun on the second, and admitted he didn’t take it as seriously as he probably should have. His publishers weren’t interested, so he went off and wrote a third one, and finished up by saying the lesson he learned was that you have to take your second novel just as seriously as the first, and work just as hard on it.

According to Kostakis, who is currently writing not one but two books to follow-up on his first novel, the danger in self-awareness is that you wind up re-packaging the first novel, re-using what worked the first time until it’s just not funny anymore. He found constructive criticism more useful than praise, as it challenged him and gave him something to work on, and a complacent writer usually just betrays their readership. And when the panel discussed sequels, Kostakis mentioned how important it was to write novels that stand on their own; a novel and its sequel should be two complete wholes that add to but don’t rely on each other, or on the expectation of a third book.  

Before this panel began, I overheard an extremely interesting conversation. It began with the usual, ‘Hi, I was at your table at dinner last night. You might not remember; I think you’d had a few drinks.’ But the interesting part came after a few moments of polite conversation, when the man said to the woman ‘Buy a copy of the AWM and do a bit of research. Have a look around. Have you seen that book? It’s bloody good.’ I was on the verge of turning around and introducing myself when the conversation veered abruptly into a discussion of erotic literature, and I thought it might get a bit too awkward to admit I’d been listening.

After the blogging panel, I did manage to catch a tiny bit of the end of Public Lives: Putting Yourself On The Page, with David Stratton, Bruce Beresford, Kylie Kwong and Judith Lucy. Stratton was discussing his relationship with Margaret Pomerantz (totally platonic; he said they’re like an old married couple without the sex), and what it was like to leave SBS and be headhunted by the ABC.

Then an audience member asked Beresford whether it was true that he never watches his own films. He said he doesn’t; he sees them a thousand times in post-production, and couldn’t bear to watch them anymore. Stratton seemed faintly horrified; he invited Beresford back to his place to watch Driving Miss Daisy, prompting Judith Lucy to enquire whether they were dating.

After the session was over, I accidentally eavesdropped on the trio behind me. They were excitedly planning their own memoir, recounting their lives and experiences with cooking, designing things, and, I think, surfing (although I could have heard that wrong).

Bright and early Sunday morning, the first panel I went to was The Power of the Blog: Is Blogging Changing the Face of Journalism? I missed the beginning, so I don’t think I ever got the answer.

But there were some interesting comments. In response to a question about the legal issues surrounding blogs, Margaret Simons, an award-winning journalist whose latest book was The Content Makers and who writes media commentary for Crikey.com on a regular basis, briefly discussed defamation law in Australia. She said that the legal situation was basically the same for online as it was for hardcopy, and prompt and prominent apology could get you out of most trouble (well, Crikey would know).

George Megalogenis, a senior journalist with The Australian who maintained a blog during the election, considers today’s media very fragmented; back in the day when everyone read the same five or six newspapers, to a large extent everyone got the same message. Now, with blogging and internet resources and the thousands of different media that assault us all daily, everyone receives different messages, or different parts of the same message.

He also commented on the fact that newspapers are still a source for news, but they aren’t the same gateway they used to be. Blogs talk directly to their audience, unlike the opinion columnists of 10-20 years ago. And with the Kevin 07 internet campaign, the Labor party bypassed the papers and spoke directly to the electorate on a massive scale, in a way that hadn’t really been done before.

Mungo MacCallum, who was actually in the audience rather than on the panel, wondered whether the effect of blogs and the internet was on the body politic rather than journalism itself. He asked whether, since with the internet people can manage their own intake of news, blogs and opinion pieces, there was a risk that they would avoid information that challenges them, and only read things they already agreed with. None of the panellists could definitively answer this question, but Simons seemed to think that social networks were up to the task of circulating information and exposing people to different viewpoints. Megalogenis agreed that if people were without a social network, they could end up just agreeing with themselves their entire lives and never learn anything, but this was probably a symptom of a bigger social problem.

It has been a feature of several writers festivals recently, and The Empty Chair Campaign appeared again in Byron. Each of the panels had an empty chair, representing writers who were not present because they had been detained, disappeared, threatened or killed for their writing. During the panel’s introduction, the chairperson usually dedicated the empty chair to a specific writer, explaining their circumstances and plugging the valuable work of PEN International.

For more information, check out the Sydney PEN website.

After the early session, I caught a few minutes of the Creative Writing: Art, Craft or Science? panel. It came as absolutely no surprise to learn that some people prefer to plan their plot and have a rough idea where they want the story to go, and others prefer to just type away and go back later to tidy things up. We’ve talked about it here on this blog before; it’s an unresolvable issue that’s down to personal preference.

Then I headed over to the Talking the Talk: Getting Dialogue Right panel, only to find them wrapping things up. (I caught a snippet about using dialogue to frame exposition - having someone ask a question that exposes some key aspect of the plot, or having a professor character who goes off on expository tangents. I’d assume this only works if you’re clever, and could end up just as clumsy as most other types of exposition.)  

And I’m afraid we blew off most of the rest of the afternoon to go have fish and chips on the beach!

Later that evening, we headed into town for the Poetry Evening and announcement of the Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Competition. The evening started with readings from Yvette Holt, Martin Harrison and Cyril Wong (Cyril’s pieces were beautiful, and his reading earlier that day was popular, too). The three competition finalists - Max Ryan, Nathan Shepherdson and Jane Williams - read their entries, and there was an interval while the judges went off to deliberate.

After an extensive performance by a singer-songwriter who wasn’t even in the program (I think he was a friend of the organisers or something, and personally, I didn’t really appreciate his style), Cate Kennedy read some poetry she’s been working on, as well as a fantastic poem about Dostoevsky called St Petersburg (unfortunately, I can’t remember who the author was, but I’m trying to track it down). Jane Williams was awarded first prize in the Poetry Competition, and hip hop poet Morganics finished off the evening with an explosive performance that woke us up again before they sent us back out into the cold.

Now, I’m the first to admit that poetry isn’t really my thing, but the advantage of an event like this is that you get to hear the stuff spoken out loud, by the poets themselves, which is really the way it’s meant to be done. Words that seemed static on the page become much more intense, much more moving, with the reactions of the rest of the audience around you.

Our staff member Katherine kindly took notes for me on the panels she visited and discussions she saw. She’s got some great snapshots, so enjoy!

From Katherine:

Blue skies and sunshine – hurrah! The festival is on and everyone is trying to cram as much as possible into these two days. I did a bit of tent hopping, trying to catch as much as possible.

9.30am – listened to Susan Wyndham talking about writing the book A Life in His Hands – it’s a moving story and she discusses the implications of writing about real people. How, when it became apparent the story wouldn’t have a happy ending, she considered discarding the book.

10.15am – Poets with Punch. A great session chaired by Peter Bishop with Morganics, Cyril Wong and Yvette Holt. The poets first read their work and then discussed it. Wonderful to see such different styles. Morganics is a hip-hop poet and his energy and strong social commentary are uplifting. Cyril Wong’s poems about being gay, about HIV and about love in general were lyrically beautiful and his reading was gentle and moving. Yvette Holt was earthy and present and audiences instantly warmed to her.

11.00 – All in the Family. A strange session and I didn’t get to see all of it. The panellists were encouraged to give lengthy readings and discussions of their work, which made it feel a little disjointed. I was able to hear Debra Adelaide and Deborah Robertson and was sad to miss Julia Leigh and Charlotte Wood.

11.30am – The Porn Report. Interesting discussion on the ethics of pornography and Alan McKee’s survey of porn users. Emily Maguire was passionate in her feminist stance and, although she said she was porn-neutral, she hated the derogatory tag lines that accompany images on porn sites, where women seem to always be referred to as bitches, sluts and whores. There didn’t seem to be a meeting place for Emily and Alan, with Alan stating that mainstream pornography doesn’t belittle or degrade women and Emily being adamant that the readily available, free porn on the internet does.

12.30 – Talking the Talk: Getting the Dialogue Right. Panel with Michael Gow, Max Barry, Judy Nunn and Virginia Duigan. Basic message – if you know your characters well enough and they are individual enough, then the dialogue will come. Judy Nunn found writing dialogue easy, as did Michael Gow. The theory was that this came from their time spent as actors. Max Barry hates writing dialogue and finds it the hardest part of writing. Virginia Duigan felt that the characters did it for her, when she got to that stage. All panellists admitted to being eavesdroppers!

3.15pm – Special Session. Chloe Hooper in conversation with Kerry O’Brien. Fascinating talk about Chloe’s experience writing The Tall Man and her time on Palm Island and how it has changed her. Chloe said that she hoped there would be some benefit to her bearing witness. She found it hard to talk about Senior Sergeant Henley. With regard to Australian politics and reconciliation, she spoke out about the evils in the thinking ‘we’ll deny you a past while we expect you to take full responsibility for your present’. The story got under her skin and consumed her – she couldn’t put it aside. She was almost finished writing her second novel when she was compelled to leave it on side and write The Tall Man instead. "Going back to the novel will be like getting into a warm bath after being in the sea," she said. Chloe seemed awkward on stage, uncomfortable being interviewed, but the story she told was gripping and her conviction was impressive. She said she felt fortunate to have been able to write The Tall Man – it had stretched her in all sort of ways.

[Note: Another person I spoke to about this panel said Kerry O’Brien tried to get Chloe to polarise the argument, to make a black-and-white statement about who was right and who was wrong, and she admirably refused to simplify the situation and demonise anyone.]

4.00pm – Special Session. Nam Le and Cate Kennedy on short stories. (This interview will hopefully be available to listen to on the Byron Bay Writers Festival website.)

Nam Le gave a wonderful car analogy for writing stories. He said it was like driving at night time – you can’t see your destination, you can only see 20 metres ahead, whatever is illuminated by your headlights. He said he has to grope around to find his story – he can tell if he’s gone off track by the way the voltage leaves it – but he doesn’t know what he has to do to go back on track. He has to pull over and muddle around and try different things and take different tracks, until he’s back on the road again.

Both Nam and Cate read from their stories and they were mind-blowingly brilliant. Cate mentioned that, although almost all the stories in ‘Dark Roots’ had won prizes, every one of them was rejected two or three times before winning something. She said it’s all about placement. Keep sending out. The timing might not be right when you first send it. Nam and Cate have both been judges and they said that judging is very subjective (as we all know) and that there tends to be a zeitgeist of subject matter. And if your story is the eighth story on a certain theme, then they are likely to dismiss it – because of the ‘oh no, not another story about xyz’ reaction.

Cate said that the lessons she’s learnt from rejection are ‘Perseverance, Humility and Perspective’. (The perspective being that this is a creation of yours that has been rejected – it’s not a personal rejection – it’s just something you’ve created. And, in a whole world view, it’s tiny. Don’t stress about it, keep writing and keep submitting.)

– Katherine

Having driven down on Saturday morning, I’m afraid I missed a few interesting-looking panels. Katherine caught a bunch of them; check out her post here.

At around 11:30, I caught the panel on pornography, with Alan McKee, Emily Maguire and Kam Raslan, chaired by Karen Brooks. They were discussing porn and it’s place in modern culture, and whether it’s really as demeaning/offensive/liberating as various socio-political groups would have us believe. I caught a few very interesting snippets of information, none of which are entirely relevant to this blog, but which I thought you might be interested in anyway.

Apparently, according to Alan McKee’s The Porn Report (co-written by Kath Albury and Catharine Lumby), in Australia 80% of porn users are men and 20% are women. There’s also a difference between good and bad porn (beyond morality and censorship), and most mainstream porn users ascribe this to production values and whether or not everyone looks like they’re having fun. Amatuer porn is apparently booming - random people in their bedrooms with a webcam, I assume - and the only type or genre of porn that was really hard to find online was child pornography. McKee also mentioned a woman he talked to who really liked porn, and mentioned that no matter what other people thought of her viewing habits, her boyfriends were never disappointed! The survey also found attitudes towards women were worse as the subject got older, more religious, and more politically conservative (gee, that’s a surprise).

Emily Macguire, author of Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power and Identity, had quite a bit to say about how women in porn were simultaneously desired and hated. They look and act the way their viewers want them to, but then they’re often laughed at and described in the most derrogatory terms. She also discussed raunch culture, and how this is supposedly a post-feminist movement, celebrating female sexuality etc. etc. However, given that a large part of raunch culture is selling stuff, it doesn’t have all that much to do with feminism at all. When the inevitable question of porn vs art came up, Macguire suggested a definition might be that porn is made specifically to arouse, whereas art is usually made with any number of intentions but might arouse as a side-effect. Regarding the recent Bill Henson issue, she found it extremely troubling that the commentary in the media seemed to give the impression that it was the photograph itself, and by extension the girl’s body, that was ‘revolting’, rather than the people aroused by the image. 

Kam Raslan is a Malaysian writer and film director who’s known for monstering various authoritarian governments across the world. In Malaysia, he says, porn and sex don’t officially exist, so there’s no official government regulation or policy on the whole situation (it is illegal to be a gay man, but there are no laws against gay women, so that’s something). He’s noticed a pattern among authoritarian governments, that when their rule is precarious they tend to leave certain areas of life, like sex and consumerism, alone. When they’re more confident, they’ll start meddling. Also, when it comes to porn, a trend across the world is that people want to watch people like themselves; Malays generally want to watch Malays, rather than plastic Californians. But Raslan said there’s no one-size-fits all model in the way porn is consumed across different countries.  

Finally, just so you know the legalities of the situation, it is technically illegal to sell pornography and X-rated material anywhere in Australia (except the ACT, I think). However, it’s not illegal to buy it. Most police will turn a blind eye until someone complains; the only exception is child porn, which is totally illegal across all states and territories.

Well, not quite. But it rained hard in Byron on Friday, so hard that the festival site got flooded and the entire day had to be cancelled! Some of the evening events were still held in town, and the ABC Radio sessions were moved from their tent into the restaurant, but the rest of the panels and In Conversations were unfortunately called off.

And it was freezing! Dark, pouring with rain, and all around a very disappointing day.

I know some people have called Northern Rivers Writers Centre asking for refunds for their missing day, and were probably fairly frustrated when they were told they couldn’t have one. But I spoke to one of the festival coordinators later on, and she told me all their funds - ticket sales, sponsorship - are funnelled straight into the festival infrastructure, and if they refunded everything, the festival would cease to exist. As it is, most of their guests and panellists don’t get fees for their appearences. A lot of non-profit organisations operate this way; budgets are tight, and they simply don’t have the financial padding to refund tickets if you change your mind or something happens to disrupt a planned event. So perhaps it’s best to consider Friday’s ticket price a donation to ensure next year’s festival, and leave it that?