Author: Jack Heath
Day four – Hamilton. I’m blogging a sentence at a time in between stuffing things into my suitcase so I can check out and go to the venue.
Yesterday’s highlight questions included:
“Were you in the army?”
“Uh, no.”
“Navy?”
And this gem:
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Author: Sarah LEstrange
Ramona Koval and Kim Stanley Robinson
Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was on the Book Show today with Ramona. Listen here.
Book Show Blogger wrote this about his session at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
He is here for Aussiecon 4 World Science Fiction Convention.
Author: Simmone Howell
On the road between Portland and Hamilton, late afternoon with the rain sheeting down and everything outside the window green and spring, I had a moment where I thought ‘I have no home’. I could go forever like this, pushing through to the new, sampling the idiosyncrasies of small towns and leaving things behind in hotel rooms. It helps that Patrick is driving (beautifully). The workshops at Portland were well-attended – though nothing will outstrip Geelong where attendance was free and so massive – but I think the grey sky might have made me melancholy. Or perhaps it was because it was the middle of the week. Wednesday. The hump. Well, we’re over it now.
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Author: Penni Russon
Today is my first workshop and the numbers are bigger than expected – 30 students from three schools. I am a little worried about holding their attention but when Patrick the tour manager checks on us they are gratifyingly silent, scribbling furiously. The results of their labour are moving and surprising, for me and their teachers. They are building characters out of words, literally filling in the features on blank die-cut figures. In the place of hair one girl writes: her mind is filled with cropped thoughts. Another girl’s ears listen for birdsong. A boy writes a beautiful piece about a girl who is almost an adult and builds her body from a song: the first verse of Stairway to Heaven. It’s a poetic piece of appropriation. We are, after all, the sum of our influences.
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Author: Jack Heath
I’m sitting in the third hotel of my three-day (so far) tour. It’s raining outside, which someone said was very common here in Portland, Victoria, but I think they might be thinking of Portland, Oregon.
Hotel rooms are always fun on the first night. You decide which side of the enormous, squishy bed you want to sleep on. You switch on the TV and flick through all the cable channels you don’t get at home. You run a bath and read in it for a while. But by day three, it’s always just a place to dump your stuff.
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Author: Sarah LEstrange
Rachel Webster's favourite book
Rachel Webster, Doug Hilton and Tim Flannery were guests of the Book Show’s latest Reading on Vocation event at the Wheeler Centre.
They each selected their top 5 books. Tim Flannery’s is here.
Rachel Webster is Professor of Physics at Melbourne University. She has a special interest in the Formation and Evolution in the Extragalactic Universe. She became the second female professor of physics in Australia and this year was included on the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.
Books Chosen:
Author: Simmone Howell
Simmone Howell is on the MWF regional writers' tour
At the zine workshop the yoofs called my op shop books stinky and then hacked into them with gusto
The fake Bukowski poem went in but the ’sensitive’ list poem was scorn-and-sniggered
Every sketch in ‘How to Draw’ was signed with the initials WTF
I felt giddy as a girl tore a page out of The Pearl and Burning Bright to make a ‘redactive’ poem
Someone had already written in the margins ‘Good Description’
The most hacked-into book was Earth & Space, a science/social studies textbook (1984)
I was particularly pleased that one student made a cover from a postcard of Kentish Oasthouses
We got a lot done in the hour
Later I spent some of my per diem on a gentle exfoliating facial cleanser
For visuals (of the zines not the cleanser) see here
Author: Penni Russon
At 6 the alarm on my iPhone wakes me – quacking ducks. I make myself breakfast of a toasted seedy roll with vegemite and a cup of tea. I quietly let myself out of the house to a Melbourne morning, cool and grey-swept skies but yes, there are signs everywhere that these are the last days of winter. I catch a tram andas always the rhythm makes me think in stocatto. I tweet that I am on the tram. Twitter is there to catch those moments in my life in which the mundane and the poetic intersect. I am vaguely obsessed with the odd collison of ephemera and permanence that takes place on the Internet.
I get to the rendezvous point. I find the other writers and Luke our bookseller and panel chair and Patrick, the tour manager. We acquire coffees, sign forms, consider dissolving into the commuting crowds with our week’s worth of per diem. But no.
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Author: Anna Barnes
I first found out about the renaissance of storytelling a couple of years ago while at a music festival in England. One of the most popular tents at the festival was dedicated to the performance of aural storytelling. I was amazed. To me storytelling is connected almost exclusively with childhood, big bear and John Waters. But nowadays, those kids who watched Jemima and crew weave their narrative magic on Playschool are getting up and telling stories of their own.
One of the most popular of the storytelling initiatives is The Moth in New York. The Moth is a storytelling organisation that holds hugely popular events in which professional storytellers such as Salman Rushdie and Malcolm Gladwell can share the stage with fresh faces. (Check out Gladwell’s storytelling session here.) The Moth inspired the weekly storytelling night Dog’s Tales which is held at St Kilda’s Dog Arts Hub.
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Author: Foz Meadows
In retrospect, the hyphen in the title of Mark Manolopoulos’s panel at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on modern religion should have set off warning bells. Despite my love of language – and particularly new language – slightly altering the spelling of an existing word in a bid to try and distinguish its role in the user’s pet ideology has been a bugbear of mine ever since I first saw the word ‘womyn’ on a flyer at university. English lexicography has never shied away from the innovative, the outrageous, the clever or the subversive: any argument which rests on such a feeble linguistic twist to support even part of its doctrine, therefore, cannot help but feel underwhelming. The fact that Manolopoulos spent the bulk of his session reading out loud from a paper, rather than conversing with MC Peter Clarke – who looked first startled, then bored, and finally resigned – did not endear him to me; even so, I could have forgiven him, if what he said had made any sense. But for all his slow talk of rationality, “thinking people” and the eventual why of the hyphen (divine gender parity, in a nutshell) there was extraordinaly little substance to his theory of god-dess. If asked to describe it in five words or less, my unhesitating answer would be as follows: well-intentioned, harmless, and wrong.
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