I really
didn’t know what to expect when touching down in Newcastle. My domestic travel
is embarrassingly light-on, the only thing getting stamped in my metaphorical
passport (because you know they don’t stamp that sucker for local) being Sydney
and Far North Queensland. I’d spent a childhood country-hopping Europe and an adolescence
setting roots in Brisbane, and even in my early-twenties, my travel has
consisted of New Zealand and Townsville. Newcastle would, hilariously, be a
step for me. A nervous one, because I’m a nervous sort of girl, plus for
various health reasons flying for me is a sort of torture that can only be
managed by disorienting myself with prescription drugs the week before
take-off. The result being that I was marginally incoherent and boarding my
Jetstar flight with a tension in my neck that wouldn’t give, an uneasiness in
my fingers that left me gripping the pages of my book (Georgette Heyer, for
those playing at home) so tight my fingers went bleach-white, and my face took
on the appealing colour of someone seconds away from vomiting. This was
apparently obvious to the elderly woman beside me who asked three times in the
first 20 minutes if I was sure that I
was okay, and then spent the next 65 very kindly distracting me from the fact
that I was on a plane.
We landed
with the familiar bump and rattle and cheery pilot announcement that goes with
every safe arrival, and I was lucky enough to have people I knew at the airport
shuffle me into a car and into the heart of the town where I was dispatched
with an awesome lady friend who knew that the exact cure for my ailment was
fresh air, a glass of wine and an Apple Danish.
The reason
for the trip was the This is Not Art festival, or, more specifically National
Young Writers Festival. The whole thing is a four day adventure of panel
discussions, debates, workshops, readings and general piss-ups and shenanigans
disguised as industry networking. There were collaborative novellas, radio
plays, poetry slams and spelling bees. The festival is as much one of ideas of
the way writing functions, as a community, as a craft and as an art, as it is
about writing generally, and the thing came together like a particularly
delicious rainbow layer cake.
Everything was
engaging and interesting, compelling to listen to. I’m particularly blessed to
have a job at Queensland Writers Centre which meant that in reality I didn’t
learn a whole lot about industry that I didn’t know already, but I still
enjoyed each session I went to. A testimony to the talent of the artists and
coordinators involved. In particular, the panel on ‘Getting Published: How to
Emerge and Get Established’ with Voiceworks
editor, Kat Muscat, the incoming Lifted
Brow editor, Sam Cooney, short story writer and my make-believe wife,
Josephine Rowe and novelist, Courtney Collins was great and very insightful in respect
to four very different people taking very different paths professionally.
In writing
this, I realised how hard it is for me to recap the festival as a whole, as the
long weekend passed in a bit of a blur, only partially alcohol-induced. I drifted
in and out of events, helping out where I could and generally absorbing the
town as a whole, engaging in every way it was just like Brisbane and every way
it was nothing like it. Both of these things left me totally charmed. Maybe
even a little in-love, infatuated with the sea-stained rocks and the boats that
chugged industriously metres off the coast. One of my favourite afternoons I
skipped out on the festival altogether and wrote for three hours on an old,
open jetty in a bikini I’d bought from an over-enthused Bras’n’Things
saleswoman, letting the salt off the water bristle my skin and tangle in my
hair until it was all I could smell and taste for the rest of the night. These
were the sorts of moments that made the festival for me, no single event, but
rather the tapestry of the whole. The seconds I was there were like flecks of
pottery making some hot, wonderful sprawl of a mosaic. It wasn’t all good, but
the stuff that was incorporated the bad, gave shadow to the light and made it seem
all the better (and really, how cliché is that?).
I was
enamoured with the sense of community there too. A group of ridiculous and
talented people being ridiculous and talented together. It was exciting, but
brought out a shyness in me that I normally do a better
job of hiding. I’ve never been the best at talking to strangers, and I tried to
nip any awkwardness or reservations I had in the bud. But in the early hours of
the morning, too many drinks and not enough food would leave me curling my
nails into my palms and gnawing at my bottom lip until it chapped painfully
beneath the tooth I chipped in fifth grade. The answer was always another
drink. Too much to drink probably, but then again, I’m twenty-two, and this was
a young writer’s festival, and I am maybe equally ridiculous and observing and
felt at each event like the youngest and oldest person in the room. The whole
festival actually I felt like that. Like baby Sophie and old lady Sophie were
drag racing in my head, boxing with their fists out, gloveless, the realisation
(or recollection) that I can be starry eyed and patronising at the same time
and the hope that I came out as something charming in the middle. I am not sure
if I succeeded. I am not sure if I mind.
I flew out
in the impossibly early hours of the Monday morning; with sleep clustering at
the corners of my eyes like my clothes would be on my floor when I got home,
big piles of unpleasantness. I’d fly home blissed out on a plane with
post-festival feelings leaving my fingers strumming on an aero-fold-out tray and
itching for a pen, for a keyboard that I could write on, and I’d get home and do
just that. Write for far too long, not about the festival, but about the sea salt
that was still dried in my skin and the big old buildings that were being
constructed in my head and about the people that I’d met and the ones I’d already
known. I’d write for a long time, and then I’d go to my day job, vaguely
incoherent and in a camel coloured sweater that I thought I’d thrown out
(because Christ, it’s ugly), and then I’d come home again and sleep for
thirteen hours, not drunk, but inebriated still.
It’s been a
week and a half, and I think I’m still inebriated. There are probably nicer
words than that to use, but it’s the best one I can come up with. It was
certainly an experience, one that I’m still having troubles forming words on
(can you tell?). It’s one that I hope to do again next year.
