#bwf2016

My research assignment has been well informed by blogging.

Neil Gaiman suggests that it is only by imagining that things can be different that we can actually enact change. The A.B. Original song is an example of this imperative.

“Everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it might be easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, in this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn’t quite work, they described things that didn’t yet exist to people who laughed at them. And then, in time, they succeeded. Political movements, personal movements, all begin with people imagining another way of existing.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/08/03/neil-gaiman-view-from-the-cheap-seats-reading/

The Life is Strange review I posted here after several failed attempts to post it to the Steam site as an official review. I’d taken the time to write it and wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Interestingly, I found while reading up on the game that the majority of the budget was spent on the story. Writing comes in all shapes and sizes, and each variety and method is important. I have always been convinced of the potential art form that exists within video games.

The Bendigo Writers Festival featured representatives from a diverse range of writing. Songwriters, poets, journalists, crossword creators, academics, playwrights, writers for screen, storytellers, illustrators, translators, editors and speechwriters are all represented. Funnily enough, the festival’s main draw card (Julian Assange) is best known for publishing work written by others.

I mentioned in a previous post that the festival seems to exist within an inherently political world space. The thing that I find interesting is that a large number of the presentations didn’t seem to focus specifically on the writers’ writing. The festival is called the Bendigo Writers Festival, not Writing, and this realisation has made me see what is actually being celebrated.

A festival shares its root with the word festive, which a google search defines as “cheerful and jovially celebratory” as well as relating to a festival. The festival in Bendigo in August was a celebration, and it celebrated writers. The focus was not on their craft so much as it was on the writers themselves. Who are they? Why do they write? What interests them? What motivates them? Why are they the people that they are?

The celebrity aspect (once again, the root of that word implies celebration) of the festival is seen as cause for celebration. Celebrity also shares its root with the word celestial, which is why we also call some stars. Celebrities inspire us, and in a digital world, one can view them as easily as if they were to simply look up into the night sky. Perhaps they are more visible in a city with enough light pollution. We look up into the sky (or across at a screen) in wonder and awe, we marvel at their achievements and place of honour and we get a kick out of gossiping about Brangelinas.

A friend of mine when I was studying at Bundoora was doing her PHD in history and loved to get into heated academic debates. I remember she once said to me that man is a political being. I have heard it said more commonly that man is a social creature, but these two ideas are not mutually exclusive. The festival is a political world, but it is a social world as well. So much of the information we glean from the festival is gathered outside of the lecture halls. We converse with our peers after the events, we compare notes and opinions on the subjects discussed and we follow a paper trail of sorts which guides us inevitably back to the literature.

For centuries since the invention of the printing press, books (and later newspapers) were how information was absorbed. It is a tradition that is as prevalent, though not as old, as oral transmission of history. The printing press changed communication in a way that can perhaps be underestimated, leading to a sharp increase in literacy as the cost of the mass production of literature decreased. This huge change did not destroy oral traditions, but it changed them. We are seeing a similar change now with the beginning digital age. Books will not become obsolete, but our relationship with the written word is already shifting.

I am supposed to be writing about my own engagement with the Bendigo Writers Festival. I feel compelled to write something true, something authentic and personal. I do not want to simply write something general about festivals or how the Bendigo festival fits the general mould or breaks convention. This has resulted in my last few posts being fairly superficial, but this was not out of a reluctance to engage with the festival content, but rather it was the result of wanting to meditate awhile on my understanding of the festival as a whole.

My experience, and indeed enjoyment, of the festival was somewhat marred by financial difficulty. The inevitable delays in accessing funds from the government in the form of basic welfare benefits via Centrelink had me arriving in Bendigo on Thursday morning in a sorry state. I was under-rested, possibly slightly malnourished and unsure of where I would be sleeping that night, though I suspected it would be in my car. Even after obtaining more suitable accommodation, by the end of the second day these stresses had begun to manifest in the form of a headache which affected my ability to sleep that night. My mind has since wandered through association to the story I heard discussed recently on national youth broadcaster Triple J’s current affairs radio programme Hack. The story discussed the same Centrelink delays I am experiencing and reported that these were sometimes cited as a reason for some students feeling they had no choice other than to discontinue their studies. I, however, though still waiting, am determined to apply myself, be patient, and persist with studious endeavour, despite a growing feeling of anger towards the current parliamentary administration and a subsequent feeling of despair about my future.

The festival exists and operates within a fundamentally political space. This space is not confined to the auditoriums and lecture theatres in which the bulk of the content is delivered, but flows out onto the streets. This is especially true in between sessions when patrons walk between venues digesting the informative feast they have just been served. Nor is it necessarily confined to space literal, as one stray comment delivered by a speaker may cause the listener’s imagination to travel through space and indeed time to another location entirely. Also the subject matter of many of the presentations are works of fiction which exist in their own space, spaces that may include strange non-existent kingdoms or rooms in houses never built. I say this space, inclusive of all possible associated spaces, is political because it seems that the political is unavoidable in artistic congregational gatherings. Some sessions I attended were openly political, but even writers primarily creating works with no explicitly political content were asked questions, with each session opening the last five to ten minutes to the audience for this purpose, and these questions often related to issues such as censorship, gender equality and the struggle of the working class to name but a few. Additionally, openly political sessions, of course, had their question times devoted to discussion of the state of local and global politics at present; ‘Why did we get the Brexit result we got?’, ‘Why is there support for Trump?’, ‘Why was there such a narrow victory in our own recent election?’

The headline act for the festival was Julian Assange, one of the biggest names on the global political stage from the last decade. His image was beamed into Bendigo and displayed (in somewhat low resolution) as a huge projection which instantly increased the festival space to include a nondescript room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Tim Flannery’s passionate speech about global warming transported me, through imagination, to the Agora at La Trobe’s Bundoora campus (I studied there in 2007-08 and again in 2013-14) where one may not pass through the space without being offered, insistently, the opportunity to acquire any number of pamphlets and enter into dialogue demanding political action. Be it an invitation to an organised peaceful protest, or the opportunity to add a name to a growing petition, one of the biggest and most recurrent issues was that of global warming; another I remembered was the close-to-home hitting topic of the federal government’s proposal to deregulate university fees. The latter brought me back to my own studies, which brought me back to the theatre seat I occupied. I also listened to Kerry O’Brien, who was openly critical of Malcolm Turnbull on the matter of policy, and also censured Bill Shorten’s leadership qualities and general sense of purpose and direction. When compared to great leaders of the past he found these two, to his mind, came up short.

This last example highlights a major point I want to make, which is that it seems any space which is inherently political, is also intensely critical. Openly or otherwise, the speakers constantly spoke on subjects that upset or angered them. One of my favourite speakers was Gabrielle Tozer; leaving the talk she contributed to I felt an overwhelming sense of positivity and optimism, which is why I gave her my nomination for my group’s Ayye Plus Award. She offered real advice for aspiring young writers and real support for the idea of following your heart and chasing ‘the dream’ which was backed up with evidence in the form of her own life story. This sanguinity seemed to be in stark contrast to the overwhelming disgruntled nature of the festival’s general programme, and perhaps was due to its inclusion in the Schools Day Program.