Today I was invited to join the Management Committee of the Sydney chapter of PEN, the international organisation dedicated to freedom of expression, and after a conversation with the organisation’s president I’ve decided to accept the honourable invitation. After all these years of wearing so many different professional “hats”, it feels good at last to be putting my varied publishing, marketing, writing, research and fundraising experience into the service of a non-profit organisation whose mission aligns with my primary interest, which has always been the freedom of ideas and the world of the mind.

At Bennelong Point on Sunday afternoon I was happily anticipating the inaugural session of the Sydney Opera House Talks series, an important addition to Sydney’s cultural landscape. One of my favourite contemporary creative minds, playwright Tom Stoppard, was billed as being “in conversation with” Andrew Upton, another playwright and also co-Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company from 2008 with his wife, Cate Blanchett.

It was a joy to see Stoppard in person, talking to a sold-out Opera Theatre about his creative process and the diverse joys and challenges of working in the theatre. He described the actual writing of a play as less arduous than coming up with an appropriately dramatic idea in the first place, and referred to the “happy accidents” that occur when the playwright allows his material to breathe life into itself rather than trying to impose a series of predetermined choices upon the material from “outside”.

For the Opera House series, I suggest future Talks need more focus and a sense of “housekeeping” at the beginning. Upton referred in his introduction to several points he was planning to raise with Stoppard in their conversation (research, for example), which never developed. The audience was not told in advance of the format: Stoppard came on stage after being introduced, then stood centre-stage and talked, and talked, and talked. Because it was Stoppard his speech was of course engaging, but I kept wondering why he was standing in front of Upton, who seemed to have nothing to do except scribble on his notepad while waiting for Stoppard to finish. Then after half an hour Stoppard sat down beside Upton and their conversation began, only to be interrupted fifteen minutes later when a third party – in the completely charismatic form of Geoffrey Rush – appeared on stage and took the now three-way exchange in an entertaining but tangential direction; namely, Shakespeare in Love, the film which Stoppard co-wrote and in which Rush acted. It was about ten years ago, and a tenuous link at best to spend so much time discussing in a forum which I expected (perhaps wrongly) to focus on the craft of writing plays. I would have happily paid money to hear Geoffrey Rush speak of his experiences as an actor, or even to read the phone book, actually; but I felt that I had paid money to hear Andrew Upton and Tom Stoppard discuss plays and adaptation, and I didn’t quite get what I paid for.

Well the PR wheels are already in motion – I’ve been alerted to an article in December’s Australian Bookseller & Publisher entitled “The Ones to Watch in 2008″, in which publishers spruik a few titles from their forthcoming schedule to the audience of booksellers nationwide who reads this industry bible. In it, UQP’s Madonna Duffy is quoted as describing my The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement as :

“Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking meets Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.”

Whether from the point of view of artistic merit or commercial success, I would be over the moon if my book enjoyed a fraction of the attention that either of those books received. I will cross every available digit.