InaGuddle: Sydney Writers' Festival 2023

After a late night at day one of the festival, I had a later start on Thursday 25 May 2023. I only bought tickets for two sessions today, with the plan to get rush tickets in between and see where the day takes me. I ended up seeing six wonderful sessions and having a fulfilling day.

In Praise of Difficult Women

This sold-out session was all about women who do not adhere to expectations of their gender.

The panel featured authors Anne Casey-Hardy (Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls) and Fiona Kelly McGregor (Iris), interviewed by Sophie Cunningham (This Devastating Fever). There was a discussion about the title of the session and agreement that the women themselves were not difficult, but the context in which they found themselves was and that these women did not conform to gender expectations.

Anne Casey-Hardy's book is a series of short stories in which 'every girl is doing something slightly shady'. She described many of the short stories and the reason she wrote them. Hardy also listed some of the writers she admired including Edgar Allen Poe, Daphne Du Maurier and Tegan Bennett Daylight. Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls sounds really interesting and I will seek out a copy of the book.

I am familiar with Fiona Kelly McGregor's book Iris and look forward to reading it. The novel is a fictionalised story of a real person, set in 1932-37 when women could not have bank accounts or own property. Iris Webber made her living busking with an accordion. She teamed up with Maisie and had a bond of friendship and had to hide that they were queer. Iris went to work for sly-grogger Kate Leigh, a woman I am familiar with as she is featured in author Karlyn Robinson's book Remarkable Women of the Central West (2021). I was interested to learn that McGregor is planning at least one more book about Webber which will cover her later years.

After the session I met panel chair Sophie Cunningham and she signed a copy of This Devastating Fever for me.

Brigitta Olubas: Life and Work of Shirley Hazzard

I stopped by the Curiosity Stage to listen to a presentation by biographer Brigitta Olubas, Professor of English at the University of NSW, talk about her book Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (2022).

While I have a copy of The Great Fire (2003) and have heard of The Transit of Venus (1980), I am not really familiar with Shirley Hazzard so it was great to listen to Olubas talk about her. Hazzard was born in Sydney in 1931 and had an unhappy childhood. Her father was a diplomat and in 1951 moved to New York City where a twenty year old Shirley took up a job at the United Nations as a typist. She was a terrible stenographer, but began writing stories. The UN sent her to Naples in 1956 where she fell in love with the city and with Europe - a stark contrast to her parochial upbringing in Australia.

Despite the vast amount of research Olubas had done on her subject, she had not intended to write a biography. But when Shirley Hazzard died in 2016 Olubas was concerned that no one else would, so she decided to write it and ensure that Hazzard's writing life was documented.

Beginnings: New Australian Fiction

Throughout the festival, the Curiosity Stage featured a short segment called Beginnings in which authors would come to the stage to read for five minutes from their work. I ended up attending the Beginnings sessions on and off over the next few days as there were many excellent authors featured.

This one was on New Australian Fiction and features Kate Scott, Shirley Le, James McKenzie Watson, Robbie Arnott, Fiona McFarlane and Tim Flannery. These were great and I was particularly moved by Arnott's reading from Limberlost.

George Monbiot: Regenesis

I bought rush tickets to hear George Monbiot (live from UK) interviewed by Rebecca Huntley about his book Regenesis. I had never heard of Monbiot and did not know what this session was about, but I am so glad I went as it was fascinating.

Monbiot spoke about the harm farming is doing to the environment and called for a 're-wilding' of the landscape. He explained that farming is destroying habitats leading to wildlife reductions, species extinction and water pollution. He explained that people are not taught systems theory and do not understand the global food supply is at risk because we have created a non-resilient system.

Monbiot explained that we need to have six elements to create a resilient system:

Diversity - currently 4 companies control 90% of global grain trade)
Asynchronicity - different things happening at different times, seasonal varieties
Redundancy - spare capacity to absorb shocks
Modularity - separated compartments (e.g. different container ports)
Circuit breakers - regulatory constraints
Back Up Systems - can we default to other ways of doing things if something goes down - for example one of the key shipping choke points.

He argued that the biggest problem is the production of beef and the move towards pasture-fed meat which uses more land for less food. He said a plant-based diet would be preferable but it won't happen through moral persuasion. But he was hopeful through the use of substitute meat products. I am a life-long vegetarian so am already living a plant-based lifestyle but his presentation made me think about the sources of my produce and the need to ensure it is not air-freighted.

Stella Prize Winner: Sarah Holland-Batt

I then attended a session in which Beejay Silcox interviewed Sarah Holland-Batt about her Stella Prize winning poetry collection The Jaguar. Holland-Batt spoke lovingly of her father and her childhood memories. He was diagnosed with Parkinsons and dementia and about ten years after his diagnoses she started to write poems.

Holland-Batt spoke about how poetry 'is about not saying things, and in turn saying something profound'. She likes how poetry is written in lines and there is a sense of surprise as lines lead into one another. She said that when she pulled the collection together she didn't want to write about death and dying, but rather a celebration of living.

During the session Holland-Batt read several poems from the collection. I was so moved by the poems that I bought a copy after the session.

Richard Fidler and Peter Frankopan

My last session for the day featured authors Richard Fidler (The Book of Roads and Kingdoms) and Peter Frankopan (Silk Roads) in conversation about historical non-fiction and their love of all things Byzantine with historian Anna Clark.

Clark started the session by asking what was the first time they recalled living through history. Frankopan, growing up in the UK, spoke about the 1979 Iran Revolution and the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca. This was followed by the 1980s fear of nuclear holocaust. Fidler was in Australia and he recalled the nuclear tensions and the collapse of the Soviet States. This made me think about what my earliest recollection of living through history is. I was in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s and I recall the Air India terrorist attack in 1985 which killed over 300 people (mostly Canadians), the Ethiopian Civil War and the Live Aid concerts (1985), and Reagan's 'War on Drugs'. I also remember being terrified by 'acid rain' in the early 1980s.

Clark asked the authors about their works and how they chose to look globally rather than focus on a national angle. Frankopan spoke about how history is often fragmented and the stories are often siloed into specialised areas. He saw the need to connect these silos together and write expansive stories beyond borders.

Fidler spoke about the need to tell stories well, drawing on oral traditions as well as documents but understanding that written history is often privileged. Frankopan agreed and spoke about how histories are very metropolitan and that there is a need to look at other disciplines like archeology to learn about the past.

This was a really interesting session. I purchased a copy of Frankopan's book The Silk Roads (2015) and he signed it for me.

Book signings

I engaged in some strategic book signing today, attending signing sessions for authors I will see later in the week to balance out the load of books I need to carry around each day and to better manage my program.

For example, I am seeing Geraldine Brooks on Day Three but brought in some books for her to sign today. She signed an almost thirty-year-old copy of The Nine Parts of Desire (1994) that I have had since I was a the University of Toronto, and a copy of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel March (2015). I also met author Jane Harper and had a photo with her (as I did at the festival in 2019).

Books signed by authors today:

Jane Harper - Exiles (2022)
Sophie Cunningham - This Devastating Fever (2022)
Peter Frankopan - The Silk Roads (2015)
Geraldine Books - The Nine Parts of Desire (1994)
Geraldine Brooks - March (2015)

InaGuddle

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Tuesday 30 May 2023

Sydney Writers' Festival 2023 - Day Two