This year’s Byron Bay Writers Festival theme melded perfectly with the blue skies and unfettered nature of the sessions. As this was the last of the vibrant Jeni Caffin’s four events as Festival Director, I imagine she’d be stoked to be leaving on a pitch-perfect note.
After an unsuccessful move to Belongil Fields last year, it was good to get back to the Byron Bay Beach Resort, although it was mildly disorientating to be in a slightly different area – swung around ten degrees or so anticlockwise from the old entry point.
Now I’m thinking this may be my fifth – we’re talking 2007, 2006, definitely 2004, where I interviewed East Timor First Lady Kirsty Sword Gusmao and singer-songwriter James Griffin, and was it 2003 or ’02? So it was good to hear founding member Di Morrissey spill the beans on the fest’s raffish beginnings, 14 years ago, speaking at the launch party.
Uncanny for me was the way so many of my current quandaries popped up. What to do about your online profile? (It used to be Facebook was private, website was public. Then colleagues, family and friends all became 'friends' and my worlds collided – content began to swing in all directions and it simply got too hard. What to write and when?) Then the other tough question: should I write the book as fiction or nonfiction? And, what are you allowed to write about Aboriginal people in your life – who does the whole story belong to – do you have some rights as a participant? I’m thinking here of Philip Gwynne and his highly successful first novel, Deadly, Unna? ; the film script has brought on accusations of exploitation of the suffering of his childhood friends and their families for financial gain, making for one of the toughest times he can recall. Yet it was his life, too.
Mm.
Best laughs: well, there were lots, especially Tony Martin’s Melbourne: City of Lit vs Melbourne: Boganville. Best tanty: Madame Lash aka Gretel Pinniger vs biographer Sam Everingham. But that's not to say there wasn't a year's worth of ideas floating round – in fact lifetimes' worth.
I'm still buzzing after last Wednesday – being blessed with two most generous guests at a panel session (the Victorian Writers' Centre's 'Getting Your Poetry Out There'). I was lucky enough to host it representing of the Society of Editors (Vic) which copresented the session. Thanks, poet Peter Bakowski and publisher/poet Kevin Pearson from Black Pepper Publishing.
