ewf @ mth

EWF report: the session was chaired by the lovely Angela Meyer, who said nice things about us all to the 100 or so people who attended...I was on first, which was both nerve-racking and good, because it freed me up to listen to what the others had to say: there was Patrick Cullen, who talked about how his characters' inner journeys correspond to landscape in his book What Came Between, set around the time of the Newcastle earthquake; there was playwright Sean Reilly, who was very funny and yet horrifying with his descriptions of growing up as a sensitive child in the remains of the Tasmanian convict/massacre landscapes - and said that playwrights in Australia these days don't bother with setting because directors cut it out, which I find quite mindboggling - and Leanne Hall, who read from her very clever book This is Shyness, and made me feel clever because I recognised one of her streets, Grey Street, which is the border of her imaginary suburb Shyness, as Smith St, which is the border between Fitzroy and Collingwood.

all in all it was a session I'd quite like to have attended myself. and I hope I got away with my trick of some general chat about the nature of place in writing, followed by readings from some of the better books set in Melbourne: Peter Carey, Helen Garner, that kind of thing - plus a little of my book. and it was in the amazing Yarra Room at the Town Hall, with lots of curlicles on the walls, a lovely high decorative skylight and big oil paintings of dead white males in gilt frames all around us.