Author Emma Neale on the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival

Spook Service? Auckland Readers’ and Writers’ Festival 2011

Posted on May 18, 2011 by ejneale

I’ve come back from the Auckland Readers’ and Writers’ Festival knowing a little bit more about the Taliban; about Pakistan and its refugee camps; the African Masai and drinking cow’s blood (which AA Gill says tastes, logically, of steak). I know a little more about the middle-aged mind and its own newborn brain cells; how to fake a college transcript in the US; and the apparently small, yet Tardis-sized kindnesses people show each other in a crisis like the Christchurch earthquake. (Fiona Farrell, who talked about this, was a brilliant speaker. She tells a story as if it’s a spontaneous, unstoppable force, something seizing her in the moment – yet what she says has shapeliness and echoing refrains, so artistry sews it all together.) I’ve bought books and books and books, after swearing I’d already spent enough on the bedside tower for one year. I’ve had an hour or two to replenish energy while reading quietly in a hotel room; or to swim alone out under the stars and moon, feeling as free and elated as the young Beethoven in the one good scene from Immortal Beloved.

Like many writers, I’ve had a behind-the-festival festival, of coffees with writer friends; taxi-rides with poets and publishers; lobby conversations with novelists; walks through central Auckland with genial, clever film critics; of wines that marry silk and cheekiness (not to mention citrus and cynicism) with writers, publishers, festival organisers and volunteers.

I’ve sat in green rooms backstage with other panelists, in that heightened, shimmering, surreal, anxious space of the minutes before a public performance. In these moments I’ve longed for a costume, grease-paint, wig, props: all the ceremonial trappings of a stage show that help an actor get into character. I’ve longed for a script, with lines. (Hence poetry readings can feel less stressful than discussions.) Waiting backstage at a writers’ festival is something more like waiting for a job interview: where you know you are going to have to perform a version of yourself, but the lines haven’t been written yet, because readers’ curiosity can come spinning round all sorts of unexpected corners.

Before the panel talk with Carol Beu, Charlotte Randall and Laurence Fearnley, I’d crammed in a bit of breathless ‘I’m going to fail the exam!’ revision of a lot of my non-fiction research so that I could answer questions about everything from the Forbidden Experiment, feral children, hypertrichosis, gigantism, acromegaly and selective or traumatic mutism. I should have written it all up on my trouser cuffs, and done what they tell you to do in exams: which is to twist what you have learned to suit the question.

Because when I was asked about where Bu’s character came from, instead of talking about the way he grew  from a number of influences, rumours, sources, known phenomena, fantastic possibilities, I found myself calling on personal anecdotes. They told the truth: but they told it slant, and it was a different slant from the one I’d meant to take. Sometimes writers even hide from themselves. There is something in this, perhaps, of Bu’s own elusiveness – and the fact that the contact he makes with people is fleeting, restless; that he yearns for, yet can’t achieve genuine intimacy. He’s like a paper boat constantly pushed off course, slowed and entangled by the sticks and stones and water-weed it nudges into.

Full report at Emma's blog.