Festival highlights

Here is a look at my Festival highlights – from the sublime to frippery and footnotes.

Location, location – I love the Aotea Centre. It was an outstanding venue, managing to combine expanse and space with closeness and intimacy. Wherever you sat, you had a great view of the speakers.

Best looking panel – The Bards of ‘Treading the boards with the Bards’. Toa Fraser, Michael Galvin, Victor Rodger and Carl Nixon were a smart quartet – in words, ideas and looks.

Quotable Quotes

Wine is rock n roll, and sex and drugs – Keith Stewart

It was like trying to force a camel through the eye of a needle fictionally. There is only one way to do it. Shoot the camel, boil it, and spit it through the eye of the needle. – Tim Winton (who also spoke about standing up to read a 10 minute short story “with varicose veins popping out the side of the Levis”)

Best sessions:

• The Bad Dads in Meltdown – artfully coralled by Festival creative director Peter Wells – intense, funny and honestly brutal
• An hour with poet Shane Koyczan – Shane got a standing ovation (the only one I saw in the Festival) and he earned it and then some. Powerfully hilarious and tragic with words heavy as jackhammers and gentle as a kiss. Plus he made a George Bush speech out of Steven Seagal movie titles, and what’s more he has a poem about a lanyard.

Now I MUST read …

Anything by Tim Winton
The memoir Heartland by Neil Cross
Books about art by Justin Paton and Matthew Collings
Biographies – of Mary Wesley and Lee Miller
Design books by Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins

and write …

As writers like Rachael King observed, going to this festival doesn’t only make you want to read, it makes you want to write!