Out of Luck

When I had to write about definitively Melbournian experiences for Lonely Planet's the City Book I included this:

hunkering down in a Fitzroy pub to watch local band the Lucksmiths

If you own that book, it's time to get out the red pen, because this essential Melbourne band is no more. And their final show wasn't in Fitzroy, but at Richmond's Corner Hotel, one of the city's great remaining pub venues.

It was a bittersweet gig after a long farewell tour but the cheeky chaps behind Melbourne's best indie/folk/pop outfit put on a great final show. Stage banter between Marty, Tali and Mark has always been a big feature and this gig featured songs interspersed with good-natured scuffles about Scrabble rules and a nod to the ex-Fitzroy landmark Punters Club, which was "dear to our hearts if not our livers". They were always a Melbourne band - where else could a song like "T-shirt Weather" be such a powerful anti-depressant?



They played songs from across their 16 year career but even after two encores they were bound to leave fans disappointed. The gig sold out so the Luckies even had their own breed of scalper - a weedy bespectacled guy who mumbled "Anyone need tickets or whatever." After the show, girls cried on the footpath about how much they'd cried inside, while their boyfriends got restorative pizza slices. Sure it was the end of an era, but there's something eternal about fans. Maybe that's why I bought the fridge magnet with an elephant on it weeping, "I remember the Lucksmiths".

End of Melbourne Writers Festival

As well as a beguiling name, Wells Tower has one of those author photos that promise much. It has the look of someone who is either hurt or about to throw a punch. His Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a blistering collection of short stories where you want to hear precisely what inflection the author puts on every word.

His Friday free session was packed with folks who couldn't get one of the limited places in his Sunday workshop and although he spoke quietly he didn't disappoint. He was most interesting on his writing method citing the internet as 'lethal to writing and reading', because of its distracting power. He described his ideal writing day as creative fiction for breakfast when he's fresh, then giving the afternoon over to journalism then in the evening working on his screenwriting which he reckons comes easy to him. Sleep wasn't part of the equation.

He emphaised the importance of revision by talking about the need the 'grad school' wisdom that that you begin thinking revision "is like cleaning up after the party, but you learn that revision is the party". Except for Wells there is no party. His hard work ethic and dazzling writing made me put a small note over my desk: WWWD (What would Wells do?) to stop me from goofing off on the web instead of writing.

On Sunday there was a late (but free) addition to the program in the form of a chat with US editors hastily named "Are you a writer interested in submitting work to American magazines?". It just so happened I was, so I found myself in an audience of 50-odd other "interested" folks. Jessa Crispin characterised her Bookslut as for intelligent people "who won't be adjusting their monocle or putting on a faux British accent" while reading. She was intersted in writers with enthusiam and sincerity to write about books.

McSweeney's publisher Eli Horowitz and The Believer editor Heidi Julavits talked enthusiastically about their publications. They found it difficult to characterise the kinds of writing they were after (Eli was influenced by some crocodile jerky he'd just been given and said he'd accept anything to do with crocodiles right now), but welcomed submissions. The Believer has 'a pathetically long lead time' of six months which means timely articles require a lot of organisation. Julavits pointed to the themed issues (around art, music and film) as good targets for publication and talked about her bias against the first person pronoun especially when the author intervenes in the story needlessly.

A useful side point for publishers was that both areas had a good base of subscribers (Eli estimated that McSweeney's Quarterly had "about 8,000 subscribers" and "around 5,000" sales through bookstores). It means they know they're going to sell enough to pay the printer so they can swerve clear of advertising and can concentrate on content.

As the festival rolls up its banner for another year, it's exciting to think of next year's fest with new director Steve Grimwade at the helm.

Melbourne Writer's Festival: Future of the Book

Thursday the MWF got all digital. There were sessions dedicated to marketing in the info age and showing off the latest e-readers. I got along to three sessions but the whole day proved too much of a test of stamina and battery life.

The opening was called the State of Digital Publishing. Victoria Nash and Elizabeth Weiss grappled with the huge subject from the publisher point of view. They were concerned about the rise of the $9.99 e-book and how it had pushed them into what Elizabeth refererred to as "Get all out books out there and have them competing" mentality. Victoria mentioned piracy and how they saw it as "protecting our authors' copyright and obviously our revenues". It all looked very industry-focussed and I felt like the author was out of the picture.

Thirty minutes in Bob Stein got a word in about the future. He pointed out that more than a million books are available on public domain and that the book industry was facing the same challenges that video and music had online. He characterised it as seeing the book as something unique that allowed it "a free pass - I actually think it's going to be worse". It wasn't all grim as cloud computing would change the way we read and Bob pointed to newer shorter forms of writing that would thrive in this environment. Get your flash fiction ready now.

The marketing session was interesting - apparently it's all about community and SEO. But no-one really had a good way to monetise community. Lonely Planet pointed to blogsherpa (sharing traffic with bloggers rather than pays them) and their new groups. While Brett Osmond pointed to sucesses they'd had like a Where the Wild Things Are Facebook page which offered fans (more than 40,000 of them last look) of the book new content. I couldn't help but thinking that a major movie might have pushed up the fan numbers a tad. The AirBourne project Random House conducted looked amazing with 28 chapters contributed by users and the whole manuscript bookended by thriller writer James Patterson. But again it was called "a marketing exercise" rather than a big moneyspinner.

Thank god for Liner Notes' Thriller edition which ended the day on a high. Nick Earls mashed up Beat It with Masterchef while managing to sidestep Weird Al Yankovic's Eat It. But Melbourne's own shone out with Emily Zoey Baker doing a Jeff Goldblum impersonation, Sean M Whelan working his poetic alchemy on "Ma ma se mama sa ma ma coo sa" until the phrase had a new meaning and Ben Pobje told us how long lost twins getting it on was all part of Human Nature. A fitting tribute to the King of Pop that brought tears to the eye.

Cross-posted at Saturation Point of Bells.

Edinburgh Book Festival update

Wondering what's happening over at the Edinburgh International Book Festival? As part of our Duelling Blogs series, our good friend over at the Saturation Point of Bells sent this update (crossposted).

My first Edinburgh Book Festival gig (the first I was let into anyway) was to see Ian Jack, who was impressively articulate and perceptive, as well as pleasingly rumpled, as a journalist shoud be. I could have happily listened to him chat with the venerable Ruth Wishart for some time, as I think could have the rest of the audience. Alas, it was not to be.The audience was completely white, mostly middle-aged, and entered with a kind of furrow-browed earnestness that said 'I'm not here to enjoy myself, my national identity is at stake.' It was wall-to-wall tweed and natural fibres. Until, that is, the speakers arrived. Enter stage left a very slim woman with perfect make-up, a blonde bob with edges as sharp as a knife, a short, red, body-hugging dress, heels and a broad patent leather belt. She had to be American.

She writes for the New York Times, apparently, but I have never read her. For a start,I don't read columnists in newspapers. If you want to witter on about nothing start a blog, I say. I did. I see no place for it in a publication whose function purports to be news. At least that's what I think until someone offers me a column, at which point I will be wholly and enthusiatically in favour.

Judging ONLY from the appearance at the Festival, one would conclude that her column consists of amusing little observations about those whacky English with their sexual hang-ups and refusal to use the word 'toilet' in polite company(really?). The overall impression was that she probably came from a part of New York that was solely inhabited by well-educated white people, and upon marrying an Englishman, now lives in an area of London solely inhabited by public-school educated white folk. Apparently, they love their dogs but have trouble expressing their emotions to humans. Well blow me down with a fucking feather.

Well, good luck to her, if she can manage to get a gig at Edinburgh festival to promote her collection of columns, she is clearly destined for great things. I am not sure that being part of a session billed as being a discussion of Britishness was the right place for her, though. In fact, having only glimpsed America through the prism of Vegas and Arizona (see above mentioned blog), I am not sure she was even going to be much use in a discussion of American identity. She claimed, among other things, that Americans - unlike the British - become Americans when they arrive on those shores, whereas the British are always looking back to their origins and staying exactly who they were in the first place (those naughty fundamentalist Pakistanis were cited as evidence).

The tweedy audience, feeling increasing hurrumphy, kept her on her toes. They have been quite feisty this year. One pointed out that both on the stage seemed to be speaking solely about some white, Christain, tea-and-biscuits version of Britain that no longer existed, if it ever had. Another pointed out that in her 15 years of living in America the people she met were constantly referring to themselves as 'Irish' or 'Italian', when in fact that had not been the case for four generations.'Well,' our American friend replied.'People got very interested in their heritage after Roots was on television.'

Please.

One small editorial note on the program. It described her take on the English as 'waspish' when they clearly meant to say 'W.A.S.Pish'. Regardless, the most eloquent statement of national identity remained the appearance of the red dress and the shiny shiny black belt.

Click Lit

In a Melbourne bar, a group of people are gathering, not sure if they’re meeting each other. They swap furtive looks, raise speculative eyebrows, but no-one is sure exactly what the other bloggers assembled by the Centre for Books Writing and Ideas look like. The newly founded centre is about bringing together writers of all types, but this group are only familiar with one another’s writing – could that be author of Reeling & Writhing, Genevieve Tucker? And where is rising star Angela Meyer, whose blog Literary Minded is syndicated by Crikey?

With a white beard, Perry Middlemiss is unmistakably the wizard of Oz lit blogs. He posted web pages about Australian literature way back in 1996, then began his Matilda blog in 2004 using news gathered from across the web. In part Matilda is an answer to print media’s limited criticism where Middlemiss believes “you come away from the review wondering if the critic actually recommends the books or not.” Matilda’s independence means Middlemiss can publish straight-up reviews alongside his favourite Australian book covers and ask if the US blogger Jessa Crispin’s appearance at this year’s Melbourne Writer’s Festival marks a newfound recognition of lit bloggers. “I have a lot of news items I want to highlight and personal items come out when I have something I want to write about,” Middlemiss explains his personal approach to blogging.

Matilda has seen the Australian lit blog scene flourish. In 2005 its blogroll featured just five blogs, by 2006 they’d scrolled up to 44. More recently newspapers and print publications have hopped aboard the blogwagon. This year the The Australian's A Pair of Ragged Claws appeared while Meanjin’s Spike and Overland’s self-titled blog have both drawn new audiences to established literary journals.

In the US the appearance of lit blogs has led to the sacking of book critics at major newspapers, but Middlemiss remains upbeat. “Litblogs won't force traditional print critics and reviewers out of business, nor will it happen the other way… Traditional print criticism needs to become more relevant to the average reader.” He’s already seen newspaper journalism shift towards the personal approach of blogs and sees “the rise of writer lit blogs as a major development in Australia over the past few years.”

Sydney-based author James Bradley was reluctant to start blog, because he once believed the bookosphere “has a reputation for being a place filled with flamers and wingnuts screaming abuse.” Authors are certainly more vulnerable on the web with instant comments and potential cyber-stalking. But the author of The Resurrectionist believes “people learned to moderate their behaviour. Partly it's just that we're getting better at using the technology”. Bradley’s City of Tongues follows the writer’s stream of consciousness with posts developing his ideas for an article on e-readers or following up on his essay about depression and creativity. “The nice surprise has been how many positive relationships and friendships I've developed through the blog: that community aspect is a real joy.”

City of Tongues lets Bradley embellish his text with video and images whether it’s to comment on his favourite comic book covers or link to film trailers he wants to share. But the blog also allows Bradley to write more flexibly than his typecasting as a literary novelist/critic might allow in print. “In recent years I've found my interests are more and more out of sync with the sorts of things mainstream media will publish… I decided I might as well write the stuff anyway and just put it on the net.” And Bradley has no shortage of readers. In a new iteration of the lit blog, Bradley has recently joined novelist and blog veteran John Birmingham, Larry Buttrose and others to ‘curate’ an online lit mag, The Group.

Internationally, group blogs have proven very successful. Jessa Crispin, who Middlemiss calls ‘the queen of lit blogs’, began Bookslut in 2002 as a way of sharing her opinions. It evolved into a webzine with multiple authors just three months later. “We got a lot of attention fast because there was nothing quite like us online. Now I can't even imagine how you would launch something like Bookslut...”Crispin says.

Bookslut’s longer author interviews and reviews have been key to the site’s success. “I remember being told that people don't want to read things of length online, you can never publish quality original content online. I thought, bullshit… I've been proven right, because more lengthy content gets posted online all the time”.

And it’s this longer content that has built big audiences for bloggers and, in the case of Bookslut, even advertising income. Just as Bradley blogs about subjects that mainstream media ignore, longer writing could be moving online as newspapers find their page counts shrinking. With no printing costs, lit blogging is limited only by enthusiasm. Bradley’s passion for blogging isn’t waning. “I'm quite clear that the most exciting writing happening today is happening online, and I want to be part of that conversation.”

This article originally appeared in The Big Issue, No. 335.

Rush in Your Street

Today our suburb was over-run or perhaps over-Rushed as a film crew set up at few key streets in the area. Residents were told to stay out of shot (I managed to get told off three times) though most of us just stood back and gawped.

I don't know any of the actors, but what struck me was how many people there were in orange vests surrounding the production. There was a guy who's job it was to wipe the windscreen and another who seemed employed to exclusively clean up coffee cups after each shot.

Security was like that of a presidential motorcade for a shot that lasted less than 30 seconds. The set-up for shots is amazing - one sequence that involved a hoodlum chased until he falls over featured an enormous reflective screen and several crach mats to ensure the actor fell snugly.

Normally I see Rush being filmed around Lonely Planet's Footscray offices, but today Flemington was chosen as the locale for crime sprees. With so much security and fake police it could even reduce crime in our little suburb.

Bad photography courtesy of my dodgey mobile.

Game on for Freeplay

Finns are an enterprising bunch. Take the Freeplay keynote speaker Petri Purho. From his flat in Helsinki, he created Kloonigames with the goal of creating a game a week. This led to his rapid protoyping method that built his creative game Crayon Physics Deluxe. He believes the next big development will be a "YouTube of games" where developers will be able to push their work to global audiences to play, comment and refine - though he admitted to being nervous about business people crowding out the creativity for the dollars.

Purho believes making a lot of games will eventual create a good game. Make a lot of what he calls "shit games" and you'll eventually hit on something that resonates with an audience. The only way to get over your fear of the inner-critic and your lack of technical skills is to churn it out.

It's an idea that applies across the arts. Purho referenced the Scarlet Letters: Notes on Making Art, written by two visual artists. Many of their ideas can be applied to writers - including knowing when to judge your work and when to create, and my favourite 'have lots of ideas'. On a first draft anything that frees up creativity is good for writers.

A writer's equivalent of rapid protoyping would have to be write a novel in a month, which encourages writers to bash out their first draft by writing every day and coming away with 50,000 words. Where writers aren't like game developers is that we don't have a "YouTube of stories" - writers would love to have the problem of creativity being crowded out by dollars.

But what about blogs? It's true that interconnections of blogs do create little creative communities and there are writing tools developing with blogs. But do writers feel comfortable drafting on the web and refining through comments? I've seen some interesting experiments, but can Purho's rapid prototyping work for writers? Are there writers who are courageous enough to "write shit stories" in public?

MIFFed film goers

As the line to 10 Conditions of Love sprawled out the front of Melbourne's Town Hall and ran a full city block up to Russell St, China's decision to oppose the film's screening was looking like the best publicity the could hope for. Without all the hackings, this 54-minute film might have got a limited release and only appeared late-night on SBS. Instead the flag of East Turkestan appeared on national and international news, international film festivals are saying they'll pick it up and Australian politicians are supporting a national struggle they may not have heard of two months ago.

Festival director Richard Moore kicked the film off saying "How sweet it is to push play this evening". The film itself follows the life of the Uyghur's most vocal proponent, Rebiya Kadeer, who was imprisioned in China for her actions. It uses the limited footage that has come out of the western province of Xinjiang (New Frontier) intercut with interviews with Kadeer herself. One film-goer remark on the way out "It's nothing that you couldn't see on Dateline." He was clearly taking the festival's "Everyone's a critic" tagline as an invitation.

But timing is crucial and this is a film that came out just as the Uyghurs were subject to some of the worst violence "in the country since Tiananmen Square". China has been keen to highlight Xinjiang's Islamic population and make connections to terrorism. Just this morning a plane from Afghanistan flyng into Xinjiang was turned back after a China claimed the airline was victim of a bomb threat - though later AP reports that there was no threat.

As Kadeer said following the film "It's the Chinese Government that politicised this, the film, and I think the media plays a very important role in basically highlighting our situation and covering our situation, so I'm very grateful for the coverage." She was joined on stage by Labor MP, Michael Danby name-dropping the Dalai Lama, who supports Kadeer as a non-violent leader. And finally Greens Senator Bob Brown said he was looking forward to the next official visit of the Chinese president "so that we can take it right up to him in Canberra, that it is time for your family and the people of East Turkistan to be free". How Kevin Rudd will echo this sentiment in Mandarin is the real diplomatic challenge.

Canberra: A Case of Over-Capitalisation?

When Sydney and Melbourne tossed a coin to decide where to put the capital of the new nation, it landed on its side. The two rival metropolises had to settle for a capital that was exactly halfway between both of them. This happened to be a sheep paddock.

They've done a lot with the paddock. Architect Walter Burley Griffin "planned an ideal city, a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future". For his trouble they named a lake after him and proceeded to bugger up his plans. By the time Bill Bryson arrived in the late 1990s he pronounced it "an extemely large park with a city hidden it."

I've alway had a soft spot for Canberra having gone to university in the Bush Capital. There is plenty of Bryson's parkland and once all the politicians jet home for the weekend, it's a very livable city. One thing I can never understand is why it has such a large concentration of "Nationals": the National Library, National Museum and, more recently, National Museum of Australia. All fine institutions and worth the taxpayers busks, but why are they in a city that's mutually difficult to get to for both Sydney and Melbourne?

Bryson remarks constantly about how difficult it is to travel around the Nationals, because the public transport options are so poor. Taking a bike around the lake makes a good alternative if the weather is fine, but let's be honest it often isn't. It's a product of most pollies having a driver and car, because getting to/from the airport is usually a taxi (though it's only a short hop).

But it's not all bad in the 'berra. Once you find these Nationals they're rich treasure troves. The newest arrival is the Museum of Australian Democracy which was hustled into the old Parliament House, a federal building which was almost instantly redundant when it was built for an expanding government in the 1930s.

One of my favourite buildings is the National Library which manages to look both Modernist and classic at the same time. Its collection is huge and the Bookplate cafe is one of the best places for lakeside grazing. But my favourite landmark isn't a National at all, it's in Australia's great tradition of Big Things. The spookily named Black Mountain Tower has views across the the Brindabella Ranges and the sprawling city that can be seen without the height of the revolving restaurant. In the city that inspired troubled poet Michael Dransfield, I call the pointy object on the hill the Big Syringe.

Thanks to Carolyn Bain for the update on Old Parliament House.

Where to Workshops?

Later this year I'm teaching a Travel Writing Bootcamp. It's a slightly ridiculous name I know, but it should sound like a way to kickstart your writing while sidestepping the traditional workshop model. Not that there's anything wrong with the traditional workshop. I still have a great creative writing workshoppping group and use workshops in most of my classes. But as Louis Menand points out in the New Yorker article, Show or Tell, we've been using workshops as a method of teaching writing for more than 50 years. In all that time shouldn't we have evolved some new tools for writing?

Menand's essay tackles questions like can you teach writing succinctly ('What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft.') and gives a romping history of how creative programs grew up in the States throughout the 1940s and much later in the UK and Australia. Workshopping as a technique isn't really discussed in depth, but essentially it's the process of getting a class to share work with fellow students and encourage discussion around it. Some interesting variations are offered - "One of Rick Moody’s teachers at Columbia asked the class to indicate, by a show of hands, how many found Moody’s work boring." This is the kind of bloodsport feedback that most students just aren't ready for.

Feedback should be a deep engagement with the work. Friends and family may say they like a work, but a workshopper will say why they like the work, what techniques worked and suggest new directions. Poor feedback is prescriptive and pushes the work in the direction of the commenter. In a workshopping group, it's a fine line between cross-pollination and blandisation. So workshoppers need to bring work that can sustain criticism and have some idea of direction. Bringing fragments is fine, but a workshopping group isn't going to write a piece for you.

In classes, I've seen students who just want praise. And praise will encourage you to keep writing and give you a good idea of what works. But workshopping shouldn't just be about praise. The gushy soccer mom who tells you "Good job!" isn't going to improve your work and isn't really engaging with it. When someone uses flat statements about 'liking' or 'disliking' something they should be pursued by a facilitator, because people can like stories just because they include cats, fluffy bunnies or your favourite holiday destination. A workshop likes something because it's good writing even if it says things that your fellow workshoppers may not like.

There's a great response to Menand's article pointing out that creative writing programs have filled the gap left by publishing houses. Certainly great editors can push along a work, but as publishing is being pressured for the bottom line it's harder for editors to find time to develop work. The masterclass model which includes one-on-one feedback on your piece with a teacher is an attempt to fill the gap. The 'with feedback' model is popular but pricey. Plus while students love 'name writers', developing work is about good teaching as much as good writing and that name writer may have more instinct than information about writing. Worse still is the idea that name writer will hand you a golden cookie cutter so you can write just like them. Good teachers should encourage your voice which can be difficult if a teacher just wants to hear echoes of their own.

When I sign up to participate in a class I'm looking for something that will prioritise my writing and could offer new craft or technique. Prioritising is about saying saying this class will force me to devote time and brainspace to a piece of writing. That's what I want the bootcamp to do. It will be about offering techniques and throwing exercises at students that get them to examine their own way of writing. Will it be useful to use in media res or do their stories start somewhere else? Should you close where you start for an ouroboros effect or do you want some loose ends that a reader will answer?

And there needs to be writing, as well as chalk and talk. No class hould be like one teacher Menand mentions whose "preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples." Well, maybe the vodka would be a useful teaching aid. But a writing class should work towards workshopping. If you've pushed people to write there should be a chance for them to get a wider audience for it. And a well-run workshop should be one of the most helpful audiences your writing will get.

I'm keen to hear about what techniques have worked for you as a writer. Has there been inspirational teaching that has kicked your writing in a new direction? Has there been an evolution beyond workshopping? Why do you sign up for courses, workshops or masterclasses?

Image courtesy of Cardigan Press & the Great State of Iowa.