Graham Storrs

Well, you all know I’m home by now. I just want to summarise my experiences at the Byron Bay Writers Festival before I forget.

The BBWF is only the second writers’ festival I’ve been to but it was similar to the other one in many ways. The big differences were in the venues. The Brisbane Writers Festival, last year, was held in the State Library in Brisbane. That meant the workshops were in antiseptic, modern buildings, and the panels and presentations were in marquees in the grounds. Catering was by the library cafe which is uncomfortable and just a little pretentious. Byron had a very different feel to it. The workshops were dotted around the town in odd places – wooden buildings in the high street, upstairs rooms at the back of art galleries, and so on. The main event was in a big field outside the town with marquees sprawling everywhere. Catering was in its own marquee and was rather more basic but involved great coffee and friendly staff.

I felt much more at ease and relaxed at the Byron Bay event than I had been at the Brisbane one. The weather was great, of course, and the nearness of the beach gave everything a holiday feel.

Sadly, the two workshops I had signed up for were a complete waste of time. I didn’t get a thing out of either of them – which is pretty hard to achieve, I’d say – and, judging by the grumbling afterwards from my fellow attendees, others felt the same. In fact, both workshops were so arm-wavy, vague and internally inconsistent, I’m glad this was not my first experience of a writers’ festival. If it had been, I would never have gone to another writing workshop, ever.

The panels saved the day, however. There was some very interesting stuff on offer. Well, actually, let me start that again. There were loads of panels and presentations, book launches and signings – five parallel streams for three days – all with titles that made me want to run a mile. Yet I found that everything I wandered into was interesting, stimulating and entertaining. One of the biggest surprises was a panel called “Living and losing: the writing of grief”. You wouldn’t expect that to be enthralling, now, would you? But it was. Then there was “Worlds in words: making language work,” which I went to see only because Kate Eltham was chairing it. This started out pretty much as you’d expect but eventually turned into a riot as ‘performance poet’ David ‘Ghostboy’ Stavanger stole the show, giving an impromptu performance of one of his pieces at the request of the audience.

I was surprised to find that the bookshop at the main event was run by Dymocks. Strangely enough, there was no mention of their invidious Campaign for Cheaper Books, no mention anywhere about the stirling work Dymocks is doing to encourage the government to lift Parallel Importation Restrictions. Sadly, there were no protests outside the Dymocks tent. Writers seemed perfectly happy to go inside and buy books from the people who are trying to undermine and destroy the Australian publishing industry. Oddly enough, Dymocks seemed to be able to sell books, even though they were published in Australia and were not overseas imports. If you want to know what on Earth I’m on about, please visit the Saving Aussie Books website.

I didn’t meet up with anybody who told me they’d be there. In fact, I didn’t see a single face I recognised (apart from Kate’s). Not surprising, really, but a bit of a shame since I was bursting to tell people about my new book contract.