Tomorrow night, Wednesday 30 July, is the first in Sydney PEN’s 2008 series Three Writers, featuring Christopher Kremmer talking about greed. I will be hosting the evening in my capacity as President of Sydney PEN. Light refreshments and even parking is provided, at the Mackerras Theatre at Sydney Grammar School. With the strong support of Copyright Agency Limited, ticket proceeds will help build an online community for Sydney PEN. All the details can be found here, with one significant change: immediately following Christopher’s lecture will be an in-conversation with author and commentator Anne Summers, instead of Monica Attard as previously advertised.

On Thursday night the caravan travels to Canberra, where the lecture will be delivered at the National Library, and followed by an in-conversation with ABC radio presenter Alex Sloan.

As someone who works in both the literary and philanthrophic spheres, I am extremely curious as to what such an impressive thinker as Kremmer has to say about the culture of greed in Australia.

I’ve been busy finalising the content, format and handouts of two workshops I’m facilitating at next week’s Byron Bay Writers Festival. Hopefully the weather will continue sunny and dry, as Byron’s not nearly as much fun when it’s grey and wet.

The first workshop is about Structural Editing – what goes where, figuring out the best way to tell a story, adding and subtracting material, and so on – and I believe some places are still available. That’s on Wednesday 23rd July 1.30-4.30pm. This should be particularly useful to people who have a manuscript they feel is stuck, or needs work but they’re not sure of what kind.

The second workshop, Thursday 24th July 1.30-4.30pm, has the fancy title “The Alchemy of Memoir”, because alchemy refers literally to transforming “base materials” into “gold”, and more figuratively to a magical process of extraction or transmutation (thank you OED). From experience I know that you cannot reach anything approaching gold without digging out all those base materials to begin with.

There seems to be an unquenched thirst for advice and practical information about editing your own work, the role of an editor, and the path to publication. I have a lot to say on these subjects, so I will endeavour to write more regularly on these topics in future posts.

Recently I was asked by a well-meaning chap at a writers festival if my recently published book was about interior decorating. I smiled, told him he was about to be a little bit embarrassed, and explained what it was all about.

It is for his benefit that I have chosen to post this short profile in the local Glebe newspaper, which has rather a lovely shot of the stained glass feature inside my house, and the wonderful speech Anne Summers made when she launched my book – now three months ago.

The caravan of PR opportunities wends its way to television. After my Sky TV debut in June, I am now scheduled to appear on none other than Kerrie-Anne Kennerly’s morning TV show in August. Details to be announced.

 

Noosa is no place to be when it’s raining. Nor when it’s pouring, as it was last weekend while I was there to attend the inaugural Reality Bites festival of nonfiction in Pomona, about twenty minutes’ drive from Hastings Street.

The two-day event, held at the Majestic Theatre (which is usually full of the sound of silent films), featured an array of documentary film-makers, playwrights and people of the non-fiction book chatting amiably about the telling of true stories. I liked the bringing together of storytellers from a range of art forms.

An article from the local newspaper summarises the who, what, and why of the event here. Still ringing in my ears are some rather grand claims that were made as to the sort of work editors, in relationship to writers, should or can be expected to do. There were two schools of thought: one, that the author should write everything down that comes into his or her head, then hand it over to the publisher’s editor to find the story, the pacing, the beginning, middle and ending; the second, that the author shouldn’t dream of submitting such an unrevised piece of work to an editor unless the author was paying the editor out of his or her own pocket, en route to finalising a draft of sufficient quality and polish to attract an agent, and in turn a publisher.

Illustrator Christoph Niemann‘s poignant homage to the New York City subway can be seen here. His son Arthur’s knowledge of the subway system is almost savant-like, running like blood in his young veins. This series of captioned illustrations, which is the first in a monthly series in the New York Times, made me homesick for New York. I loved the comment of one respondent to the illustrations, who wrote that now, when faced with a query about which subway line to take, “I have to ask myself: What would Arthur do?”

Here is a highly amusing account by Washington Post journalist Gene Weingarten of winning the Pulitzer Prize for this article – lauded at the time as original and groundbreaking – about a stunt which turned out to have been a brilliant if unintentional echo of another stunt just like it, carried out more than 70 years ago.

Weingarten wrote about an experiment he undertook with classical violinist Joshua Bell, in which Bell played in a Washington DC metro station “disguised” as a generic busker, to see whether anyone noticed the quality of the busker’s playing, to find out how influential context can be. After winning the prize for his article, Weingarten was shocked to discover, via the research efforts of an intrepid reader, that this very stunt had been pulled in 1930 by another journalist.

The news, while dispiriting, does nothing to take away the power of Weingarten’s article. Does this story prove there’s nothing new under the sun, or that everything old is always new again, if you wait long enough?