Paradise Found

I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to break character for my final post. No absurd whimsical short story, for today is the last day of the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival. It should be a sad occasion, but there are still so many events to get through, that one doesn’t have the time to mourn the passing of yet another amazing festival.

One of the most notable elements of the MWF has nothing to do with the events and everything to do with the people attending them. They are all so different. Cast your eyes across the rows of an MWF event and you’ll see silver foxes and their balding gents, scruffy authors conversing with suited sharks, heads weighed down with warm woollen hats and minds inflated with new ideas, Mohawks and faux-hawks in deep talks, hands slapping thighs in mirth – when they’re not brushing tears of empathy aside, tiny hands proudly clutching at their first book with no pictures. All of them gathered for a shared purpose – the written word.

Despite this being a festival of the word, not one can come close to describing the mutual elation that erupts from the audience when a writer shares an idea that changes their thinking. I’ve witnessed these moments on an almost hourly basis in my time here. There is something wonderful about being seated with hundreds of other minds all glutting themselves on concepts and themes. Knowing that anyone seated in that theatre could be an instant friend. I can say that I have made many; I hope you can make the same boast.

The myriads of individuals that come together, to not only create this festival, but also to be a part of it is immensely comforting. It dispels all the nonsense talk of the death of books. For me, books are incredibly important, but it’s ultimately the ideas within them that are the key. I’ll confess to stroking the pages against my face and delighting in the familiar fetish of paper on skin. Though in the end, books are the method of obtaining the content. The book is just a means of engaging with concepts, and more importantly, with people.

The Melbourne Writers Festival is much like the covers on all of those books being verbally dissected each day. Take a solitary dot of ink and it means nothing. But when you combine it with thousands of similar specks, a larger image is realised by the millions of points pooling together.

It’s one book you can judge by its cover. You’ve just got to look a little deeper.

by Simon Keck
Festival Blogger

Dead Under Fluorescent Lights