This article is the Flame's November 2023 cover story. Read the magazine layout here or the text below.
I always swore I would never run a festival. I’d watched other festival directors lose sleep over variables from money to last-minute author cancellations to the weather – factors within and beyond their control – and thought that kind of stress was not for me.
In the 30 years I’ve been going to writers festivals, I’ve watched them mushroom all over the country. Each one celebrates the power of storytelling but has its own personality. One capital city audience has a preference for big familiar names and is not keen on discovering new talent, as I found out as a moderator when faced with an audience of just two for an award-winning Indian writer no one had heard of.
Running a festival presents you with all sorts of unforeseen dilemmas; how to be distinctive and whet the appetite of your community? Whether to go with one strand of programming or run two in parallel? What topics to favour, what to ignore? Whether to have an overarching theme or a looser approach?
Until last year, I’d managed to dodge those decisions. I hadn’t reckoned on the persuasive powers of Dr Sarah Nicholson, the director of the South Coast Writers Centre. She has a gentle persistence that is hard to ignore. “If we do all the admin and you just focus on the program,” she said and, before I knew it, I had agreed. When Genevieve Swart, publisher and editor of the Illawarra Flame came on board, we were set. A team. We threw ideas around for months over coffees at Earthwalker.
A festival needs a good local bookseller and, in this, we have really lucked out. Deb, Amanda and the team at Collins in Thirroul not only run an outstanding program of free events during the year, but create a fabulous on-site bookstall for us – as well as stocking all the festival titles now, so you can get cracking on reading (and still get your book signed on the day).
I won’t lie, curating the program is a tough juggle. How to balance local with visiting talent? How to make sure you get a good representative spread of ages, voices, genders? How to make sure that diversity is part of the mix without seeming like a token gesture? When I first went to festivals, no one blinked at an all-white panel of men writers. You couldn’t get away with that today, I am happy to say.
Of course, our wish list is one thing and reality is another. Writers are not available because of scheduling clashes. We have to be brutal and weed out books that are not as good as we hoped. We didn’t want to be too predictable. Just because we had a star of true crime last year – and a full house for former detective Gary Jubelin – did not mean true crime would get a slot this year. Biggest regret? An artist who could provide a punchy rap commentary on the state of the nation was just way beyond our budget.
Sponsorship is not easy to find for an event as small as ours, which is why we are so grateful that Culture Bank Wollongong, the local crowdfunding organisation for creatives, came on board. They are not size-ist.
Unpredictable factors come in all shapes and sizes. Last year our festival coincided with a Covid spike, this year we’ve faced a cost of living crisis. As a result, we’ve set up a variety of ticketing options, including a ‘pay what you feel’ event to close the festival.
Right now, we all need a bit of uplift and new ideas about how to live in this increasingly complex world. The writers at True Story bring fresh perspectives to current challenges. I really hope you’ll come along.
True Story will be at Coledale Community Hall on November 18 & 19. Book tickets at southcoastwriters.org/true-story-festival
Download a program here