If you’ve been following certain types on Twitter this week, you’ll have noticed quite a lot of traffic bearing the #ewf11 hashtag.
It’s the hashtag for the Emerging Writers Festival, on now in Melbourne. The festival, based at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, has been running for eight years. From humble beginnings as a one-day zine fair, the event has grown into a week-long program of 52 events and 190 writers and speakers, with an expected audience of 10,000. Indeed, such has been the buzz that 2011 has all the hallmarks of a breakthrough year, as the festival establishes itself as a key date on Australia’s literary calendar.
According to the festival’s energetic director Lisa Dempster, it’s a festival of writers for other writers: “We’re really about getting writers talking to other writers about writing — 95% of our audience are writers.”
Also happening this June is National Young Writers Month, which kicked off on Wednesday. A separate event to the Emerging Writers Festival, it is rolling out, largely online, throughout the month of June.
“There’s an explosion of literary creativity, and the ways we are thinking about what is literature are broadening constantly,” Dempster continues. “We’ve got a discussion up online now which is getting a lot of responses about Cities of Literature, and what that should mean. Is that capital-L literature in traditional forms, promoting the novel, or should we be activating everybody in our society to be thinking more deeply about culture, and literature, and writing?”
Despite its apparent success, the Emerging Writers Festival runs on the smell of an oily rag. There are no full-time staff and funding is not secured for next year.
“One of the things I am concentrating on is reducing our reliance on government funding,” Dempster responds.
Karen Pickering — who co-ordinated Melbourne’s recent “SlutWalk” against sexual assault — is a writer and the incoming editor of the Emerging Writers Festival Reader. “It’s the best Emerging Writers Festival I’ve been involved with, there’s a really really good energy,” Pickering told Crikey.
Pickering is an example of a new type of writer, more interested in writing for performance and social media than in publishing monographs made out of dead tress. She estimates she writes thousands of words a day on Twitter, Facebook and various blogs.
“So much of what I write never ends up being ‘published’, because it’s never meant for publication,” she explained “I write scripts and I write things that I’m going to perform for radio or panels.”
“I write because I want to share ideas and want to have discussions with people about things that I care about.”
Like Dempster, Pickering is interested in expanding the definition of a “writer” beyond literary fiction and the traditional novel.
“Writing is happening in places where you don’t think about it. Beyond the pages of a book there’s a lot of writing going on: people are writing for TV and film and social media, they’re writing policy papers for government.”
In a time of wrenching structural change in the publishing industry, no one is more aware of the changing landscape than writers trying to make a living from their craft.
“And that’s one of the reasons why the EWF is reaching a critical mass,” argued Dempster. “Now more than ever, writers are empowered to manage their own careers. One of the discussions we had was ‘are we living in a post-publishing world?’”
Nice article, Ben. But one would have hoped that an article on writing would display a correct use of quotation marks.
Correct? As prescribed by whom, exactly? The Academie anglais? I hate to break it to you, but there is no such thing as ‘correct’ when it comes to English usage, bar your prejudices. Evn dis sentntnz be validd, mon ami, because you understand it, and as such it has obviously achieved its purpose. There are, however, some cultural mores against being a tool, which you would do well to bear in mind.
Now I’m unsure if comments are even required for this post, which I found as always well-written and punctuated.
I’m not sure about the idea of an emerging writers’ festival – it seems to cater more to people who want to be writers, rather than those who want to write. And while, yes, the media and forms of writing have grown beyond the novel since Cervantes, I’m also not sure if they’re comparable. Thousands of words on twitter, blurted out without thought or editing are hardly literature – they’re words. And all this talk of “festivals of ideas” leaves me as cold as the “novels of ideas” championed by university writing courses, all tangled up in obfuscatory literary theory and their own fundamentals. It reminds me a bit of Jonathon Franzen’s lament in The Harper’s Essay about the “unfettered testimony of the self,” like the kind of painful statement-question at every literary event which begins “As a writer myself…”
People have always written in a variety of forms – Graham Greene’s work as a film critic informed his fiction as much as his fiction informed his screenplays. But talking about “new forms” and “aesthetics” only reveal the shallow post-mod nonsense that values form over meaning and gimmick over substance (mainly, I think, because so much theory is basically nonsense). When was the last time you read and really loved a novel of ideas? And when did a university writing course produce the kind of public intellectual or literary talent they assert can only come from such new forms or an understanding of critical theory (this is a genuine question because I can’t think of any)? Still, I do like Kate Pickering’s comment about how so much of what she writes never gets published – although I thought that was what you called drafting. And at the end of it all, writing is a lonely pursuit, and hanging about other writers doesn’t allow much time for writing. And I say this as an emerging writer myself.
I hope this doesn’t offend you as much as the last post, Ben! I was reminded of this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/23/mediamonkey
Wonder how Pagemasters – or you – would deal with it?