Posts Tagged "MWF"

Melbourne Writers Festival: Last Night At The Festival Club

Last night’s free showcase at the Festival Bar was a great night to wrap up the Melbourne Writers Festival with the highlight being Angela Meyer and her SPUNC spectacular.

Whilst I mainly went for the SPUNC Spectacular, I enjoyed the other events last night as a relaxing wrap up to a great festival. Michael Nolan and Jane Sullivan opened the night with discussion and an audience Q&A but the audience were a little quiet, with only a few sticking up their hands.

I almost commented but was glad I waited when Michael gave away books to those who would stick up their hand next. I scored a short story collection by someone whose name I can’t remember but the publisher name, Difficult Women is a bit hard to forget.

What I commented on was how I liked China Mieville’s sessions the best and not because I’m in love with him, but that it managed to attract a younger audience. I think I saw people nodding along with me, which I think is a good sign.

Angela Meyer of the awesome literary blog, LiteraryMinded showcased various small press publishers and journals over three nights, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday night. They were all part of SPUNC or the Small Press Underground Networking Community.

Last night featured Page Seventeen, Vignette Press, Sketch Media, Going Down Swinging, Ford Street and Tactile Books.

I was especially interested in the first four as they were all journals and therefore all potential places to submit my work, but Page Seventeen and Vignette Press are definitely in my sites at the moment after last night.

I also got to speak to Angela Meyer face to face, instead of just commenting on Twitter and her blog. I think I probably do it better behind a computer screen and hope I didn’t make a total fool out of myself even if I might’ve appeared awkward.

Once again, I was recommended to go to the National Young Writers Festival in Newcastle. It sounds like more of a young writers networking place.

Poet Ezra Bix, Angie Hart and Zerafina Zera in the APRA Songwriter Speaks session, and the Bedroom Philosopher, Justin Heazlewood wrapped up the night in entertaining and hilarious fashion.

China Mieville at Melbourne Writers Festival

I was pretty stoked to get the opportunity for photo with China after the ‘Visions of the City’ session yesterday. Overall, he was an inspiring person to hear speak at all the sessions I went to and it’ll certainly help me hone my work.

Apologies though to China if I seemed like a bit of a fanboy type stalker because I seemed to be around wherever he was.

Melbourne Writers Festival: The City, More China Miéville and Overland

It’s like my festival is already over I’m broke and don’t have tickets to any more sessions despite me wanting to go to more next weekend. But these two days have been great. I’m sitting in a café now before heading off to a gig in Ferntree Gully, so thought I’d blog now.

I went to the “Visions of the City” session chaired by Overland’s Rjurik Davidson with China Miéville, Margo Lanagan and Jack Dann. China was clearly the most interesting person speaking in the session and it was good to see him attract a much younger crowd this time, as compared to all of the other sessions I’ve been to which had a much older crowd.

They discussed how the city featured in their work. Lanagan and Dan talked about how Melbourne features in both of their stories in the new edition of Overland. Miéville talked more about how the city features particularly in his new book, The City and The City.

Mieville’s fantastical writing seems to go against the grain of fantasy that is known for more feudal like settings. In an old interview in Overland, Miéville particularly emphasised going against this grain as a way of being progressive within the genre.

A large part of the discussion talked about dystopias and utopias and how they’re reflected. China made the point that dystopias in fiction aren’t like real dystopia’s because at the same time, the aesthetic of many dystopias in fiction are nice looking and appealing.

Questions from the audience brought up discussion about how Miéville saw eras in culture defined by sharp political events like how 9/11 shifted the political climate and earlier, Seattle, referring to the anti-capitalist demonstrations in 99.

I had my hand up but didn’t get to ask my question following from that discussion but after the session, I went up to him and asked whether he thought the Global Financial Crisis is one of those defining events and whether it’d shape fiction. He said most definitely but it was hard to predict right now. He did envision kind of financially motivated apocalyptic type stories, though which I found interesting.

I also got the guts to get a photo taken with him and will post that probably tomorrow as there’s no way to transfer to photo from my memory card in this café.

But once again, this session has made me think and I’m sure I’ve missed some important points but perhaps I might remember them again and raise them in future.

Melbourne Writers Festival: China Miéville And Tom Cho

I took the day off work to say to see China Miéville and Tom Cho on the first day of the Melbourne Writer’s festival at Federation Square. Festivals are always inspiring and they manage to raise questions and such, and today was no exception

The Morning Read
The morning session featured reading from three authors, China Miéville, Petra White, and Irfan Yusuf as well as some time for questions and chat. China read some bits from a WIP that was about, from what I could gather, the first union set up in hell. His writing was great and it was interesting to hear it read aloud.

Irfan Yusuf has weird politics that I can’t seem to pin down, being an ex-Liberal, but the reading from his book reasonably highlighted racism in Australia and was semi-interesting.

When questions came, I was able to ask China a question about how writing balances with his political activism, and whether he sees it as part of his politics. His answer to the audience was kind of straight forward, that he didn’t see writing as changing the world, but speaking to him after, he was able to elaborate to say that he did see writing as a political act but of course no replacement to actual political action.

Fable, Fantasy And The New Short Story
Tom Cho was in a session with Singaporean writer Cyril Wong where they both spoke about their short story collections and as a short story writer, I found this really interesting. A large part of Cyril’s presentation talked about how his writing identifies him as gay and how he set out not to define himself as Singaporean, or as part of this “East v West” divide.

Tom’s presentation raised some questions for me regarding short stories and such as he discussed the concept of Mary Sue, a kind of perfect protagonist that author uses to live their fantasies. Whilst an author that is clearly intervening into the story is seen as wrong generally amongst writer’s circles, I think these rules shouldn’t be hard and fast and I’m quite attracted to this idea of living certain fantasies through my characters and can see how this wouldn’t just be interesting to the writer.

Overall, Tom’s presentation was entertaining and humorous as well as informative.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to ask a question about them regarding the status of the short story and short story collection at the moment, considering it’s known that publishers generally won’t touch short fiction collections unless it’s written by someone already famous.

I wanted to ask a question about the role of small press and self-publishing in releasing collections even without the aim of selling big.

The Future Of Fiction
The last session I saw was with China Miéville again and Steven Amsterdam regarding the future of fiction and each approached it from a different angle.

Steven talked about the changes technology is making in the publishing industry, and as the sound wasn’t too good, it was hard to make out what he was saying, but from I got out of it, it was a fairly apocalyptic (but reasonable) prediction that the publishing industry is heading into a sort of crisis.

China talked about the future of fiction in terms of how genres, movements and literature are changing. He had some interesting points including that he thinks tropes like zombies and vampires have outlived their time. He also liked movements of literature, creating their own rules of genre and such.

Question time brought up discussion about the Kindle (which China hates and called Amazon a union busting company), eBooks, the internet and the publishing industry. China said he didn’t want to place a bet anyway on which way the industry was going and said that it’s be pretty turbulent in these times and it’ll take a few years to get a sense of where publishing is going.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the guts to take photos of any famous authors or in the sessions if I was allowed, but perhaps I’ll have for you tomorrow when I go to see China Miéville again.

Melbourne Writers Festival Program Launch

I boarded the old school city circle tram on the corner of La Trobe and Swantson Street at 10.31 this morning for the launch of the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival program.

It was a bit of an unconventional way to launch something, which I loved, and I enjoyed the crowd and inclusive atmosphere as listened to the MC speak about the festival to the passengers – including unsuspecting tourists that didn’t know what all the fuss was about.

I tweeted pics and updates along the way to Fed Square on my new BlackBerry Storm (apologies about the quality of some.) Yes, I’ve upgraded my geekage level!

Walking to The Atrium at Fed Square for the more official proceedings, it felt friendly inviting as we all walked together, writers, spectators and even festival directors and such.

I’m excited about this year’s festival and will be attending a few sessions including quite possibly the opening night as well as being very excited to hear socialist and dark fantasy writer, China Miéville.

The Melbourne Writers Festival goes from 21st to the 30th of August. You can find more information about it at http://www.mwf.com.au. Also, I will be blogging and tweeting about the events I attend this year so stay tuned!