So Far, For Now by Fiona Kidman

Author:Fiona Kidman [Kidman, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143775812
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Flying places

Two black super-light suitcases stand in my bedroom. One is an overnight bag; the other, a little sturdier and larger, is for the long weekend. Going to literary festivals has become part of the professional life of writers and during the festival season I am poised for flight. That season gets longer every year as more and more towns host their own events. I have lists of items for the quick pack.

For the most part, writers have solitary lives, sitting alone in front of a computer. When we go to festivals, we are performing and selling our work and ourselves. The two merge into each other. We want to be liked. (Sometimes it is easier to be famous than it is to be loved.) For a short time, we enjoy the hospitality of people who, for the most part, are strangers. We are the outsiders looking in, just as we are when we sit down to create characters, people we know and can never entirely know, and will abandon when we start the next book. And yet we are changed by our experiences in the cities and towns we visit. We leave behind our books, our signatures, our dirty linen in hotel rooms. We take away with us fragments of shared lives, the enthusiasm of our readers, a renewed sense of belief in what we are doing. We are less alone when we leave.

Judging by the number of people who attend, audiences have an ongoing love affair with festivals. Writers usually speak as part of a panel or are ‘in conversation’, as the saying goes. A bookseller is on hand at the end and the audience, if they are sufficiently moved, rush to a signing table where the author or authors pen their names and a few thoughtful words on the title page. And so it goes. Behind the scenes there is usually a group of volunteers – particularly if it’s a small-town event, though the ‘internationals’ will have paid staff – who have been toiling for months to bring the event together: booking the writers, arranging their contracts, their travel and accommodation, preparing their biographical notes for publicity, contacting media, hiring venues, sound systems and so on. I know all of this. I’ve organised a few events in my time; now I benefit from the generosity of others.

I go to lots of festivals. I love them. I love getting on aeroplanes and flying off to some other place where it will all be new all over again, a different hotel, fresh people to greet, old friends to reconnect with, and those who say, Remember me, we went to school together, and to marvel at each other, how the years have passed, and here we are and still alive. Nothing can beat the Auckland Writers’ Festival on a bright day in May. And what author’s vanity can resist the lure of an event that draws audiences of seventy thousand. But, with one or two exceptions, I prefer small festivals to those featuring international writers.

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