Writing 'Bout Writing

The Emerging Writers’ Festival Roadshow takes the I out of writer and places it in the context of a community. Festival Director Sam Twyford-Moore talks to Hannah Story. 

“Emerging Writers’ Festival is a festival for writers,” says Festival Director Sam Twyford-Moore. “So 80 per cent of the audience identify as writers, so it has more of a focus on the writers themselves. As well as that it was started to represent writers who were underrepresented by the bigger festivals: people starting out may not get a chance straight away to get into Melbourne Writers’ Festival or Sydney Writers’ Festival but there’s this great festival that supports them in a really interesting way. It creates a sort of great supportive space where the audience are creative practitioners; they’re really into supporting their friends who are getting up on stage and doing these things and the conversation’s more around the process of writing and the practice of writing. A big part of it’s community and celebrating the community. There’s that kind of boring old cliché that gets trotted out: ‘Writing is an isolated act’. I don’t know if I completely agree with that but I think festivals like the EWF really break that down because you get people together and it’s not isolated – it’s actually got this really strong community.”

EWF takes place in Melbourne in late May, early June each year, but for the last few years the Festival organisers have given Sydney a go, the EWF Roadshow heading north in November. “Melbourne’s the City Of Literature and part of the responsibility being the City Of Literature is to sort of export your knowledge and share your knowledge as well. There’s a great depth of stuff happening here but I think it’s really important to get into other areas and find writers outside of Melbourne and connect them as well.”

On their way up, they’re going ‘Station To Station’, passing through Wagga Wagga and Canberra and picking up new voices, including poet Lachlan Brown, science fiction writer Ingrid Jonach and novelist Lucy Neave. “Getting on the road and reaching people who may not be able to travel to the major cities is a really important step as well,” says Twyford-Moore. He’s excited about the conversations made possible when the community gets together. “[The writers] are a diverse bunch, they write across genres, there’s short story writing, travel writing, poetry, fantasy fiction, those kinds of things. Bringing these diverse writers together is going to be really interesting, to see what their conversations are like when they collaborate.”

So what is Twyford-Moore, a Sydney native himself, most looking forward to? “Definitely Amazing Babes is going to be an incredible event at Giant Dwarf, where we’ve got eight amazing female writers talking about women who’ve inspired them. And then we’ve got this incredible festival day happening at the NSW Writers’ Centre. There’s just a really diverse bunch of conversations happening with writers about contemporary writing topics. We’re looking at criticism and popular culture and travel stories and mentorships. There’s a really diverse spread of conversations; it’s going to be really exciting to get all these writers together and chat about what the state of writing is right now.”