South Coast Writers Festival - A review

South Coast Writers Festival, Wollongong Town Hall, 18 – 20 August

by A J Wright, 2023

As I prepared to attend the South Coast Writers Festival at the Wollongong Town Hall, I wondered if I’d hear well-worn anecdotes from authors about their routines and publishing experiences, or if I’d soak up fresh ideas and come away with information I could use as I prepare to submit my first manuscript. The answer: a bit of both.

Arriving in ‘the Gong’ for Friday night’s opening event — ‘Books we love’, with Kate Holden, Caroline Baum, Laura Brading et al — I parked in Burelli street, right around the corner from the Town Hall. So far, so good. I was early and hadn’t eaten, so I strolled down Crown Street and stumbled upon Night Parrot, a cosy wine bar chock-full of people. The friendly staff found me a table, and I enjoyed tasty dumplings and a glass of excellent Chardonnay. 

I’m not a Wollongong local, and had never been to the Town Hall, so I was pleased to discover it’s a great venue for a writers’ festival. Entering the foyer, I found myself in a space big enough for writers and readers to mingle and buy books, but not so big it lacked atmosphere.

‘Books we love’ was held in the Music Lounge, adjacent to the foyer. With its vermilion seats and sound baffles, its midnight-blue curtains and ceiling lit in striking purple, the Music Lounge is a beautiful space. Thanks to my visit to Night Parrot, I arrived a few minutes late and ended up on a stool at the back of the room, but I could see and hear perfectly well.   

Responding to a question from interviewer Laura Brading from WellRead, a literary book subscription service, Walkley Award-winning author Kate Holden (In My Skin, Text Publishing, 2007, and The Winter Road, Black Inc., 2021) said she didn’t read contemporary fiction, and had ‘no time for prize winners and new authors’ because she’s ‘too busy reading, and re-reading, old books’ — not quite what the festival organisers were hoping to hear, I imagine.

Kate warmed up when talking about books she loves: Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (Vintage, 1998), which she described as ‘a perfect book’, and The Tree of Man by Patrick White (Vintage, 2009), which, she said, ‘blew the top of her head off’.

Author and podcaster Caroline Baum (Only: a singular memoir, Allen & Unwin, 2017) said her love of books began with clandestine raids on a locked room containing her father’s ‘racy paperbacks’, including The Godfather by Mario Puzo (Random House, 2009). She went on to say she looks for ‘an astringent voice’ in a work of fiction, one that ‘cuts through the fat’, and gave Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics (4th Estate, 2019) as an example. She also loves Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (McPhee Gribble, 1991) for, among other qualities, its vocabulary. As an immigrant from the United Kingdom, colloquial Australian words like ‘chiacking’ and ‘shickered’ were completely new to her.

Following this discussion, singer-songwriter Kay Proudlove took the stage with her acoustic guitar and sang songs from Dear Diary, a show she performed at Wollongong’s Merrigong Theatre in 2022. These raw, honest and witty songs had me completely engaged. I particularly enjoyed this line from ‘Everybody’s Favourite Hobbit’, a love letter to actor Elijah Wood: ‘I liked when you had no shirt on in that giant spider scene, but you looked kind of sick and dying, so it wasn’t as hot as it coulda been’.

The audience shared my enthusiasm and laughed again when Kay said, as a child, she’d loved Healthy Harold, the cartoon giraffe from a national anti-drugs campaign, but had found, as an adult, the only way to reconnect with him was to take drugs.

When Kay finished, effervescent MC Adara Enthaler introduced a series of authors — Joshua Lobb, Julie Janson, Hayley Scrivenor, Dominic Knight and festival director Sarah Nicholson — and asked them to read from their favourite books.

Dharawal author Julie Janson (Benevolence, Magabala Books, 2020) took older audience members back to their childhoods with her reading from Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne (first published by Mclelland and Stewart, 1931), and Hayley Scrivenor (Dirt Town, Pan Macmillan, 2022) chose a passage I remembered fondly from my days as a teenage bookworm: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ (Methuen, 1982) by Sue Townsend.

Novelist and broadcaster Dominic Knight (Don’t Call Me Skippy, Allen & Unwin, 2022) had the audience chuckling with his extract from Nick Earls’ Zigzag Street (Penguin, 2000), and finally, Sarah Nicholson presented a tender reading of Adrienne Rich’s ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972, W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), a poem that gave us evocative images to ruminate on as we left the Music Lounge and made our way home.

The following morning, I was back in the Music Lounge for ‘$18, 000 per annum: what’s going wrong (or right) in publishing?’ — a conversation between authors Kate Holden and Meredith Jaffe (The Tricky Art of Forgiveness, HarperCollins, 2022), publisher Radhiah Chowdrey, and Australian Society of Authors board member, journalist and author Sarah Ayoub (The Cult of Romance, HarperCollins, 2022).

While under no illusions about the amount of money Australian authors can expect to earn, I was shocked by some of the speakers’ revelations. Sarah Ayoub said she’d earned a total of $2.50 in royalties for one of her audiobooks, and Kate Holden said, despite having published a bestselling memoir (In My Skin), and having received a Walkley Award for The Winter Road, she’d never been able to get a credit card because her income is ‘so small and unreliable’. Radhiah Chowdrey said authors sometimes get a lump sum payment, but this income is taxed without the Australian Tax Office considering the possibility that the author may earn nothing in the following year. Sarah Ayoub’s observation: ‘Authors need a side hustle’ struck me as poignantly self-evident.

 For the session ‘Admissions’ (also held in the Music Lounge), author and editor David Stavenger (Case Notes, UWAP, 2020) spoke with authors Helena Fox and Sara Saleh, and editor Radhiah Chowdrey about their poetry anthology — Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health (Upswell, 2022). I found this discussion refreshingly frank. Despite the ongoing stigma around mental health, it’s encouraging to know authors can be open about their health challenges and still find publishers and audiences.  

I felt less encouraged by Radhiah Chowdrey’s description of her father as someone who’s ‘on the wrong side of sixty, so can’t feel anything actively’. Her ageist joke had the audience — including many people in their sixties and older — tittering uncomfortably.

I was also surprised by co-editor and interviewer David Stavenger’s assessment of Chowdrey’s editing as ‘brutal and true’. Having worked closely with an editor on my novel-in-progress, I understand the need for editors to be direct and critical; however, I think kindness and sensitivity may be better attributes than brutality when editing writing by authors facing mental health challenges.   

Unlike the vibrant colours of the Music Lounge, the lighting in Wollongong Town Hall’s Ocean Room was sombre. Fortunately, the panellists for ‘One act’ — podcaster and interviewer Simon Luckhurst, and authors Rachel Mogan McIntosh and Anne Howell — provided plenty of warmth and wit.

Speaking about her memoir Pardon my French: food, faux pas and Franglish — one family’s riotous year in the South of France (Affirm Press, 2023), Rachel told several amusing anecdotes. Dropping her children at the school gate, she called a parent ‘a beautiful man-horse’ in mangled French, and said she sometimes went home half stoned from passively inhaling marijuana smoke.

By contrast, Anne Howell’s memoir (All that I Forgot, Bad Apple Press, 2023) explores her terrifying experience of waking from a coma with severe amnesia. Anne described trying to turn her ordeal into a novel, doing a doctorate when she couldn’t make the manuscript work, and then writing a memoir that, according to the publisher’s blurb, ‘reads like a psychological thriller’.  

 My first session on Sunday (back in the Music Lounge) was ‘Humour and heart: bringing teens to life’ with YA authors Helena Fox (The Quiet and the Loud, Pan Macmillan, 2023) and Will Kostakis (We Could be Something, Allen & Unwin, 2023). As a writer working on a novel for teenagers, I was keen to gain insights from these authors on current trends in YA fiction, and wasn’t disappointed.

I resonated with Will’s view that optimism is important in YA fiction at a time when young adults in Australia face a cost-of-living crisis, a housing shortage, and existential threat from climate change. Helena said, to foster optimism, ‘the critical thing is to speak’, an idea that became the theme of The Quiet and the Loud. I found irony in this observation because, in an era in which to say the ‘wrong’ thing can result in a person being publicly humiliated and trolled on social media, speaking one’s ‘truth’ is a complicated and risky practice. 

On ‘voice’ — a critical aspect of any novel — Will said the trick is ‘to avoid literary flourishes’, which are ‘the mark of the author’. I made a mental note to hunt and kill all literary flourishes lurking within my manuscript’s pages.

When, at the end of the session, the opportunity to ask questions arose, I asked Will (an openly gay author) if he felt attitudes of publishers towards sex and sexuality in YA fiction had changed over the course of his seventeen-year career. His answer came in two parts. In the first, he said queer themes in YA fiction are now seen as an asset, not a liability — an insight I found reassuring considering my protagonist’s fluid sexuality. The second part of Will’s answer surprised me. He said the recent controversy around Yumi Stynes’ Welcome to sex: your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out (Hardie Grant, 2023) had made YA publishers so wary of sex scenes he’d decided not to include them in his next two novels. Despite being disappointed to hear Will — an experienced and acclaimed author — saw self-censorship as his best option, I felt reassured in my decision not to challenge literary gatekeepers by including sex in my novel.

I chose to attend ‘True story: everything and nothing’ — an interview between podcaster and author Caroline Baum, and actor and memoirist Heather Mitchell — because I’ve been a fan of Heather’s since meeting her on a film set in my early twenties. As I expected, her anecdotes were delightfully entertaining and amusing. I particularly enjoyed her description of her eccentric father’s travel outfit: trousers with their pockets extended to the ankles so he could carry everything he needed on his person, and shoes with their soles cut out so he could enjoy ‘feeling his feet on the earth’.

 On her long and celebrated career, Heather said a casting agent once advised her not to expect to go far in acting because she didn’t have ‘it’. Heather didn’t know what it was, but later realised ‘everyone has their own it, and the trick is to discover what it is’ — an insight I found astute and heartening.

 In the ‘The writer at work’, the final session I attended, Associate Professor Catherine McKinnon — whose novel Storyland (4th Estate, 2017) was shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award — interviewed Fiona Kelly McGregor, a multidisciplinary artist, writer, critic and mentor, and Kylie Needham, author of Girl in a Pink Dress (Hamish Hamilton, 2023).

Kylie said her debut novel — promoted as ‘a sharp-eyed and compelling story about love and art, sacrifice and ambition, and the often damaging relationship between artist and muse’ — began as a short story she wrote at university. This gave me hope my short fiction (occasionally awarded in competitions, but mostly rejected) will, eventually, work its way into a novel and find a home with a publisher.

Fiona Kelly McGregor, author of nine fiction and non-fiction books, including her latest novel Iris (Pan Macmillan, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, said her stories are ‘propelled by relationships’. I found this observation encouraging too. My storylines are also driven by the complexity of relationships: their pleasures and pains, satisfactions and frustrations, and, above all, their potential to help us grow.

Responding to Catherine McKinnon’s question about the role research plays in her writing, I liked the quote Fiona attributed to Australian writer Kate Grenville, author of acclaimed novel The Secret River (Text Publishing, 2013): ‘On the pinhead of research, I build the superstructure’. This struck me as good advice for all writers — novice and experienced. Find universal themes in fine-grained detail, and you’ll be on your way to producing a satisfying read.