Sydney Writers’ Festival is one of my favourite weeks of the year – a time for musing. This year’s festival in May was no exception. I had a great time!

Jamming

ABC TV’s Monique Schafter was MC for Spineless Wonders’ Little Fictions – a fabulous live show at Knox Street Bar Chippendale. Actors Eleni Schumacher, Felix Johnson and Ella Watson-Russell performed 12 stories augmented by music and soundscapes by Tom Hogan. I relished Cassandra Atherton’s sensual ‘White Noise’, Richard Holt’s humorous ‘Oblong’, Ryan O’Neill’s heartbreaking ‘My English Homework’, and Jen Craig’s genius pieces  ‘jamming’ (with music by ‘) and ‘Invisible Writing’. A dozen stories: no duds.

A sublime touch

Steven Carroll’s magnificent conversation with Spectrum’s Melanie Kembrey touched on the writer’s eye view that relishes the ‘simultaneity of time – past, present and future all merging’; Carroll”s late Edwardian sensibility as a novelist in which ‘the shadows are always long across a green lawn’; the ‘touch of the sublime’ he wanted to bring to the lives of ordinary suburban people like Vic and Rita in his Glenroy novels ( The Year of the Beast, published in January, is sixth and last in the series); and much more.

The library phoenix

The unsolved mystery of one of the most catastrophic library fires in history sparked Susan Orlean’s curiosity and she spent six years eavesdropping on a cast of colourful characters in the Los Angeles Public Library to write The Library Book. ‘A library softens solitude,’ Orlean says, ‘[it’s] a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone’. The 1986 fire destroyed or damaged more than half a million books. This book is a phoenix that rose from the ash.

Shreds

Caro Llewellyn went from directing the Sydney Writers’ Festival to working in New York as director of the PEN World Voices Festival where she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Diving into Glass is her memoir of this experience and her father’s courage and activism as a polio sufferer in a wheelchair. She worked with Salman Rushdie and befriended Philip Roth and can’t listen to tapes her father made before he died because it would ‘tear me to shreds to hear his voice’ . A moving session.

A giant felled

‘Axe-fall, echo and silence*. Les Murray has died.’ I carried these lines from Mark Scott’s Facebook post around the festival with a sizable sadness that the Australian poet whose work placed him among the most admired writers in the English language was dead. I read his poems during festival breaks. Midsummer Ice: ‘a splintered horizon rife with zero pearls’. The Cows on Killing Day: ‘Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.’ Vale Les. *From Murray’s poem Noonday Axeman. See also his Collected Poems from Black Inc.

Top five from the festival was first published in the South Sydney Herald in June 2019. Image: Monique Schafter, credit: Stephen Webb