2 weeks ago
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The Sorrento Writers Festival fadged very well this year. Aha, a word there you don’t know? Shakespearean actor Jane Montgomery Griffiths has encouraged me to use it. “Fadge” can be a round loaf of bread, a bundle of wool or, as the Bard has it, a verb meaning to turn out.
And Shakespeare isn’t that hard. In a session with fellow actor Richard Piper, Montgomery Griffiths showed us the difference between a dumbed-down Lady Macbeth speech used in some schools, and the real thing. It was no contest.
The four-day festival, in its fourth year, is a big event for a small seaside town. Around 6000 visitors came to see 230 authors and guests at 175 events at Sorrento and Portsea and record ticket sales topped 23,000.
The festival aimed to be balanced, respectful and tolerant – but not too tolerant. As historian A. C. Grayling said, “It’s wonderful to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” Festival director Corrie Perkin said they were saddened by the recent cancellation of festivals at Adelaide and Bendigo, but their sponsor and board support remained firm. It was a question of trust: “All any of us want to do is showcase Australian creatives and talent.”
It was a big event for Perkin in other ways: she took to the ferry for the birth of a new grandchild, Rose, and got back just in time for the first sessions the next morning.
Things didn’t fadge so well for Irish writer John Boyne when he wrote his 2019 YA novel My Brother’s Name is Jessica and was attacked by people who believed someone who wasn’t transgender had no right to write about that topic: “I’m just a gay bloke, out on my own… I’ve had enough of it, people making me out to be a monster.”
What annoyed him most was a transgender woman who wrote a long critique without having read the book. “I’m not very thin-skinned, I can take criticism,” Boyne said. “But if you haven’t read the book, you don’t have the right to criticise it.”
A woman in the audience said he stopped her doomscrolling in bed and got her reading instead. “That’s the best thing I’ve done for a woman in bed,” he quipped.
Helen Garner was unwell and couldn’t make it to a session on The Mushroom Tapes, a collaborative book about Erin Patterson and the “mushroom murders”. But she was very much present in the discussion between her fellow writers Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, who spoke of the case as a conversation about power, marriage and mycology, a dark fairytale, a recipe for a horror story and a witch hunt.
Hooper described driving to their motel to cover the trial and realising Garner had booked one room with one bed. “Waking up next to her was suddenly intimate in a way I hadn’t imagined.”
They had to edit about half a million words of text, working with Garner around the kitchen table. It was like a bootcamp masterclass in writing, Krasnostein said: “Helen has this almost holy commitment to plain speech. She would just say ‘This is shit!’ ”
Irish writer Niall Williams described waiting for his wife, Christine Breen, his most brilliant editor, to read the manuscript of his first novel. They didn’t discuss it for two years. When it was finished, she read it and didn’t say anything. “I’m in a pool of sweat but that’s okay. Then she says ‘It’s very Niall Williams’. I understood in that instant, that is the goal of every writer: to put something inside themselves outside themselves, into the world.”
