Festival Withdrawal

And we come to it at last – my final post for the festival. I can no longer pretend this is still an “on the ground” blog - that wonderful weekend in August is well and truly behind me now.

Being part of the Writers in Action class, hearing the stories and the laughter, the nerves, the wonder, I know the Bendigo Writers Festival left a deep impression on all of us.

For me, it meant shaking Raimond Gaita’s hand and laughing with Mandy Sayer; it meant sitting beside Sophie Masson to hear my old primary school librarian, Lyn White, speak about publishing. 

The festival was sleeping through alarms in a cosy hotel just 5 minutes away from my first seminar. It was squeezing into the same little Italian café every afternoon for coffee, dashing through the car park, meeting Jane Curtis from the ABC. Or else setting up camera shots, coercing a kind, grey haired man to impersonate an author for a moment or two, drinking free wine and stealing sandwiches.

I did more in one month than I had thought possible in my old sleepy state. I helped write a documentary for Channel 31. I had a story published on ABC Open and featured on Radio National. I reconnected with an old mentor and family friend.

Now, I keep two things by my desk. A photo of Liam Davison from all those years ago. And my festival pass, slung over the little silver lamp. This has been more than a subject and more than a trip to Bendigo. I have been woken up. 

For too long, the twin tensions of environmental activism and writing have tugged at my attention, each vying for more room in my life. The festival has given me back something of myself, a dream I had as a kid, of walking in a library and seeing a novel with my name on it up there on the shelf, of writing every day of my life.

Still, I keep thinking of something Raimond Gaita said:

Always, even in the most appalling circumstances, there have been a handful of people who redeemed humanity through their courage and integrity.

I remember that was when he put his essay aside, when he stopped reciting and really looked at us all. He spoke of his daughters, of their activism. He asked how we face the world as it stands today, in the grip of a climate crisis unlike anything we've ever seen before. 

Humanity is not something fixed or secure, he said. But always something we are called to rise to. Now, more than ever, we are being called. 

400,000 people marched all around the world this week for real action on their future. Sunday morning in Melbourne, I joined one of the earliest of the rallies, standing hungover and groggy under the sun at the steps of the State Library. My phone was dead. My work colleagues were scattered around me somewhere like ants in a kitchen. But, I remembered Raimond's words then and felt the truth of them.

I’m still not sure exactly how I will unite these two forces in me, but I feel now, more than ever, that they are connected in some way. After all, they are both what wake me up in the morning, what drive me to near madness; they can make me speak too fast for most sane humans to understand and forget to call Mum. They are in my DNA. 

And, finally, for the first time since I've been a starry eyed teenager, I think I can actually do them both.

Now, in closing, let me leave you with this helpful little guide....

The Five Stages of Festival Withdrawal

1. Denial

"Well, sure, the official weekend is over, but I've been down to the Thank You dinner and I still have my premium pass so..."

2. Depression

"I miss Raimond."

3. Anger

"I don't even care if they never have another festival!"

4. Bargaining

"If I baked brownies in the shape of wombats, how open do you think Jackie French would be to a quick pop in visit?"

5. Acceptance (of a kind)

"It's probably too early to buy my pass for next year, isn't it?"

Don't worry. It's only mildly contagious.

Everyone loves Raimond

We become like we love, said Plato. At least, Raimond Gaita said he did and when you’re sitting in a room, listening to his voice echo off the walls, following the swing of those eyes between the next table over and yours, it's best to take his word for it.

I read Romulus My Father, like a lot of people, in Year 11 Literature, before I had any idea of what losing people meant. I read The Philosopher’s Dog a few years after that, when I did.

Hearing Raimond speak, in a private La Trobe University seminar, was by far one of the most exciting moments for me at the Bendigo Writers Festival. I watched everyone pick clean the buffet of gourmet sandwiches, but there was a shaking in my shoulders; it had spread from my gut, and I was too nervous to eat. (Making this perhaps one of three times in my entire life that I had willingly passed up free food.)

Raimond came in without much pomp or ceremony, grabbing a glass of water, shrugging out of a jacket, and lingering around near our table to speak with the organizers. (I definitely wasn’t eating anything.) He began by reading to us from one of his latest essays, a piece in his usual hybrid: part memoir and part philosophy. It was about love.

Sharing what we love is the most basic human pleasure, He said. Love always asks to celebrate what it loves.

He spoke of the two men who had shared with him their passions: Hora, his father’s best friend, and then later on, a favourite university professor. There is nothing finer for a teacher to do than that, he said. To put in the way of their students the finest, most beautiful things possible.

It occurred to me then that this entire subject, anchored here as it was at the Bendigo Writers Festival, was doing just that. It was a celebration, an opportunity of some kind. We were surrounded by authors and editors and critics and really enthusiastic readers, we were being shown every day what it was they loved and why they loved it. 

The existence of love in one person - be it love for literature or art or beauty – can awaken it in another, Raimond said.

For me, it became a revival of love rather than a fresh infection. As far back as I can remember, probably since Lyn White slapped down Harry Potter on my desk in Grade One; or back further still, to those nights learning to read with my sister on the couch; since then, I have wanted to write stories.

To be at the Bendigo Writers Festival was to celebrate that love, whether it was for writing or for reading, for the world pressed between two pages or backlit by a Kobo screen. We all sat in that room with Raimond to share in it, we all came to Bendigo to enjoy it.

And I walk away from the experience now more alive with this love than ever before. 

I only wish I hadn't left my copy of Romulus My Father at home in Melbourne.

Sitting beside giants

#A few of my thoughts from the festival. Later discovered jotted down on the margin of a wine stained note book.

I am sitting beside Sophie Masson and trying not to get a mocha moustache.

I am standing behind Blanche D’Alpuget. She has nice hair.

I am shaking Jackie French’s hand.

I am making a total ass of myself.

Such has been the level of my fan-girling this weekend. The Bendigo Writers Festival offered that unique opportunity of bringing them before me, into my breathing space, into my state: these great unknowable literary icons of my bookshelf, and then expecting sensible conversation in return.

I probably would have been less nervous meeting film stars. After all, these people are from the ranks I actually aspire to join one day – published authors, poets, journalists.

Oh God, Mandy Sayer just laughed at my joke.

Thank God for the open bar.

Unlocked

She wore a red dress that cast smudged shadows on the floor whenever she paced back and forth. She paced a lot. There was almost a pattern to it, to her revolution around that small, grey chair in the centre of the room, as if she would make that the focus of our attention and not herself. She said she had come here to share secrets.

I had come here twenty minutes late, half winded from the mad dash across the overflowing car park and then the stairs of the Old Fire Station. She hadn’t looked at me as I came barrelling in, with one mortified apology waiting on my lips. Instead, I was left to grope around wildly for a seat, wrestle out my notebook. There was steel in her voice, and soft edges. She spoke of a man named Martindale and his research into the brainwaves of “creatives.” I knocked over the water jug on our table and watched it run in one unbroken line down towards Andrew and Michael. She should have thrown me out.

That she didn’t, this award winning authoress who had agreed to give us a private workshop, that she let me blow in with all my chaos and rudeness, was probably the best thing that happened to me over the weekend. Because the woman in red was Sue Woofle and she had come here to teach us how to write.

It was Day Two of the festival. I had already been to a handful of sessions engineered around the mechanics of writing by now, including a fantastic workshop run by ABC Open Producer, Jane Curtis. This is was not like any of them.

Sue was smaller than I’d expected – at least at first. She seemed to inflate in size as the session drew on; with the air she took from the room, with her slow pacing. It was impossible not to trust her almost immediately. That was surprising too. 

“Really, for me, plot is just suspense.” She said, somewhere towards the end. “Leave it for last.”

She spoke that way a lot, in gentle, melodic progressions, in step with her feet on the carpet. Sometimes, she didn’t speak at all but waited while we wrote or stared or began to fall asleep. She had prompts for us, word association games and one slow unfinished story she recited like a lullaby or a poem. She always waited for us to finish.

It wasn’t quite like meditation, what she was asking of us, but it was close. She called it “loose construing”, writing in the lull, in a changed state of brain activity. That same slippery freedom we let our minds wander down just before falling asleep, or while enjoying a hot shower a little too much.

She had been taught the trick as a child, she said. A friend of the family had told her to stare at the branches of a tree, longer than she wanted to, until she could see the shapes they cut out against the sky, until she wasn’t thinking of branches at all but something else, something unbidden and strange and utterly surprising. That was the thought to cherish, she said. That was the mind’s answer.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop thinking of trees. Somewhere in those first flushed minutes, I had been staring at the floor in shame, watching the light falling in the room. It came slicing down behind the black legs of the table and there in the grey green mess of the carpet they became the burnt towers of a forest. I was still staring when she asked the room to write about carpet. What word associations did it kick up? I grinned. It was the tingle of understanding in a dream, like an electric current. I had my pen. My paper was somehow miraculously less soaked through than the rest of my unfortunate table’s. I scribbled down the words “forest” and "shadows" with almost indecent enthusiasm. 

That was my first watered down experience of the lull she spoke of. The next came just fifty minutes later, in the silence spinning out behind a story she told us, deliberately unfinished. Here it is, as best I remember it....

You have been walking for some time in the forest, a long way from your house by the beach. You come to a river you know well. It spills out into the ocean further down but here it is calm and still. As you bend to the river's edge, you hear music rising from the trees on the other side, too faint to recognize but beautiful. It is the most wonderful music you have ever heard. You look around and see there is a boat in the water, as if waiting for you. The music is too far away. You get in the boat and begin to row towards it. 

What you need to look for, Sue said, once you have broken out of that dreaming state, is recurrences. What have you been preoccupied with? What was your mind trying to say in all that bad grammar (no offence) and strange syntax?

Looking back over my awkward scribblings from the workshop, the recurrences are starkly obvious:

It is my father’s voice – the singing. It is the wind playing tricks. It is my father’s voice singing. I have walked here before; can see our footsteps in the muddy sand. I can see them drowning there. I’ve forgotten where I am supposed to be but I can still hear the music. It is like the river has come rushing through the trees. It is only the wind. But, it is singing with my father’s voice. And I have been here before. Dark water like tar. I cannot hear what he is saying. It is only the wind playing tricks. It is only the years between.

There is almost nothing here I would craft into story, but the experience of writing it, in a kind of rhythmic loop with the breath in my lungs, was invaluable. As a writer, my fiercest battle is always with the editor on my shoulder, with the tapping on my knuckles telling me that sentence sounded wrong, that thought isn't clever, that word isn't right. I don't remember this having always been a problem for me. As a teenager, I would write for hours, uninhibited, wildly, and, understandably, I produced a lot of drivel. But, there was usually something shining in there too, something worth saving. Lately, my work is sandwich pressed onto the page, already constructed. It is static and snowed under. I must shovel it aside to get to what I've been trying to say, if I can still remember. 

This passage may not be any good. Indeed, at times, it barely even makes sense. But, it is free and, right now, I think that makes it better than half of what I've had published. 

I may not always be able to write in the lull. I may not have banished the editor from my shoulder forever. But, after Sue Woolfe's Unlocking Creativity workshop, I know I at least stand a fighting chance. 

For that, I have to thank Sue herself....And apologize at last for being so dreadfully late.