Writers Festivals

Is the tide ebbing on Writers' Festivals?

Aren't they too feel good for their own health?

One tires of the relentless self-promotion which is their raison d'être. This is the source of their increasing vapidity.

KILLING IT SOFTLY

Do most people go to writers' festivals to hear the presenters talk about their children and grandchildren?

Samuel Wagan Watson and Helen Garner treated those of us at 'Writers as Readers', a session of the 2008 Sydney Writers' Festival, to family reflections during their presentations on the theme of 'major influences on their literary education'.

Watson's eleven year old son seems to be one such, along with the song 'Big Things from Little Things Grow' about which Watson got almost tearful. Watson is a poet. 

He also happily endorsed his son's callow homophobia.

The session was prefaced by a speech from Imre Salusinszky Chair of the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts who explained, at length, how the Australia Council was responding to the worries about declining numbers of Chairs of Australian Literature by contributing to one such Chair in Western Australia and by funding this session.

Somewhere amongst what was to follow Randolph Stowe was alluded to in the most general terms by Christos Tsiolkas and … as far as I can remember not one other Australian writer though Watson mentioned his Dad who was chucked out of the University of Queensland but is now important in that University's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit. It was hard to know which Watson was prouder of.

Tsiolkas has been influenced by … oh, everyone – Nabokov, Ingmar Bergman, Beckett, Kazantzakis, Kafka, Stanley Kramer as well as Stowe.

Garner was clearer: Cheever, Carver and Janet Malcolm.

The other presenter, Luke Davies, had been saved from the coldness and hardness of heroin abuse by reading some … was it Alaskan novel? about caribou and snow and caribou and snow drifts. And the Steinbeck of Cannery Row from which he treated us to a particularly mawkish moment.

Mary Kostakidis, the host, rounded things off by confessing she loved poetry and imploring Watson to tell her how to get the time to read some.

It was a free session.

Ian MacNeill