The Monthly interviews writer and poet Mark Mordue about the setting up of the Addi Road Writers’ Festival – Part 2 – Allowing people to express themselves freely

How do you curate the festival and has that process changed over the three years of the festival?

It has certainly changed because for the first year I was the only artistic director and I pulled the whole thing together in three weeks. I asked people I knew and then they told me about people they knew and pretty quickly we had a festival. It came together in an organic rush. It was a bit mad really. Not a quality you want to lose.

I am now Co-Artistic Director of the festival with Sheila Ngoc Pham, who is a writer and an essayist. She has a lot of connections that I just wouldn’t have, so that widens the possibilities.

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We have also just started to get some writers to organise their own panels so that we are not in total control of the picture. We want it to cohere, but we try to keep windows open so that there are always new possibilities. I was moving in that direction accidentally, really, but Sheila nailed the idea into shape and invited a few writers to take over. I love that kind of thinking and where it might develop.

There is also a crossover between the Addi Road Writers’ Festival and the music scene. My career began as a rock journalist, so that is probably to be expected and yet it is not as common or as deep as you might expect for literary festivals and their performative side or the way people actually ‘read’ and get involved with ‘text’ in the modern world. For some is almost entirely a matter of songs and their words so we have looked at including conversations that involve musicians and their lyrics, or beyond that, we have looked at other kinds of artists who might use text in their work, or artists using other media like animation where text is included. It is as much a storytelling festival as it is a writers’ festival, really. We want the festival to be quite lively and fluid.

Do you see any recurring themes that writers or poets or other artists are investigating?

I think so, although I would say that some of what appears in the festival is of personal interest. I am not a ‘curatorial rationalist’, put it that way. There is nothing wrong with gut feeling sometimes. Not to mention a kind of counter-intuitive or paradoxical thinking, by which I mean programming things you don’t necessarily like but can respect for their quality. I don’t need toalways programme things I agree with. I feel adamant about that.

That said, I have a definite interest in the question of class, and that’s not so much a strictly political or a Marxist orientation, but more a sense of class as it is lived. So, if someone is writing about drugs in working class areas, or they are a working class surrealist writing some sort of Joycean drug trip, or they might be quite raw, or they might write in a hyper-masculine way, just because of where they come from, I want to hear that. And, like I say, that might not be the kind of radicalism that I would necessarily agree with, and it might not be neatly packaged for a more mainstream literary audience, but I still think it is worth getting to hear. You can probably tell I have a libertarian cum anarchist streak in me.

At the moment, all the vectors which carry culture to us whether it is the media or festivals, they seem to be these closed bubbles where the small group, or collective of people, guiding things, only programme ideas which they absolutely religiously believe in. But if you are going to have a democratisation of culture you need to have respect for oppositional voices. Especially oppositional voices to your own way of thinking. You also need stylistic challenges and you hope that these will rise outside your own viewpoint.

Is freedom of expression a starting point?

It is, definitely, although I think the festival hasn’t gone anywhere near far enough. If anything, we have been quite tentative because the times are quite conservative. It often feels quite brittle and aggressive. It is, at times, around certain debates, very tense. In many ways, we have just barely touched on all sorts of ideas which can be very difficult to discuss. We have just started the process of looking for alternative ideas and voices. To be honest, there are times I feel ashamed at how modest and tentative we have actually been. I’m talking a big game but the real world practice is a whole other animal.

I have big problems with the way capitalism in its literary and cultural forms often consumes new work and offers you very tame versions of what is really going on. We are trying to find out what are the ideas being expressed, the conversations being had, around culture are or at least that’s the ideal, We try to pair relatively successful people with relative unknowns and we bring in what you might call wild cards, like I said, where you might not know exactly what you are going to get.

What other things are you trying to achieve with the festival?

The biggest thing is a sense of energy, and adding to that, we are trying to create allies, to create friendships, maybe even building some sort of network, so that everything won’t just fall away. I also want to see if is possible to make those connections last. To try to not let things dissipate. To nail something down with a solid centre.

I see the festival as part of trying to establish an ecosystem, an ecology. Whether you are an 18 year old or an 80 year old, whether you are writing about taking methamphetamine in a working class suburb or you have a set of poems about the journey of your Jewish grandmother to Australia; we want to connect those sorts of disparate elements together. Damaged masculinity, suburban abandonment, feminist memoir. I’m not looking to ‘approve’ the content so much as appreciate the art or respect the energy.

It is true that on occasion the bigger festivals can have those voices represented, but really they are tangents, I mean, like, they are volatile things when they are less processed or not so tidily spaced apart. I do think the smaller festivals can offer more of a connection, an intimacy, a union if you like, between writers, ideas and the audience. Everything mixing, like combustion.

Are there are other festivals trying to do something similar to what your are trying to achieve?

Recently I arranged a talk with a couple of people, Gillian Swain who was the poetry curator at the Independent Festival (IF) in Maitland. She also works on a festival in Newcastle. And Caroline Baum, she used to work at the ABC and did other things on television and she has been involved in a non-fiction festival on the south coast of New South Wales. I got them to go with me to an inner west library to talk about why these new festivals were emerging.

Caroline told me that there were something like 190 literary festivals at the moment in Australia, and I do wonder whether that kind of explosion can be sustained. It does show that there is a perhaps a boredom or a dissatisfaction with the larger mainstream festivals, and that boredom shakes things up a bit and that energy leads to people setting up regional festivals, themed festivals, festivals on the coast, festivals inland, alternative festivals, fuck-you festivals. More power to all of them. Even of they can’t last.

Having said all that, I was at the Sydney Writers’ Festival recently and I have to admit there was a fair bit of energy at that festival like I had not seen for a while. I was horribly surprised at how good the vibe was! Some of that new energy is coming from a change of curator, for sure; I’d like to think it is also coming in from the smaller festivals. Perhaps there is that ‘new ecology’ taking shape: things being stirred, creating new opportunities for writers and musicians. The whole thing just starts to shake and vibrate and the competition and the friction from the smaller festivals changes the dynamic a little.

That sounds quite promising?

Yes it is, but one thing that is important to say is, and this is common knowledge but people don’t like to talk about it; if you are over 40, unless you are already a major success, you are very unlikely to be part of a major festival. There is a tendency for the publishers to tell the festivals that people are only interested in young writers. Or is that the other way round? I don’t know. But ageism along with class are the two non-inclusive blockades to new bourgeois inclusive festival funding-speak.

For example, if a new Cormac McCarthy came along now, after writing all those fantastic, disturbing books that went nowhere and in deep middle age you produced something like “The Crossing”, it is unlikely I would get to hear about you because you don’t tick that youth-and-diversity box. And this is really what I am attacking: pseudo-politics that are about commerce and nothing to do with art, and it really is nothing to do with youth and diversity either in any sincere way. Except to use you as cultural pulp in the mill.

What we want, or need, is great writers and great artists. Writing is a long game and most writers rarely make enough money to pay the rent, so the idea that you throw writers away once they reach that mid-life stage isn’t useful at all. It doesn’t help young writers either. I am guessing they will want to be there and be better than ever in ten years’ time. Pressure makes diamonds over time.

Where to now?

I’m not sure at the moment. Each festival has been feeling out the environment and more and more people are approaching myself and Sheila to become involved, to help, to do things. You do learn each time you organise a festival, you make mistakes, you do things on the fly that might not work out. That learning process feeds through to the next festival, then a new set of mistakes happen and its back to the drawing board.ANd this all happens with the restrictions of a very small budget.

We have been very lucky to have the Addi Road Community Organisation supporting us with their venues, resources and volunteers. As a community centre, it also has an inherent street-level attachment to democratising culture, a radical, pioneering spirit, and a sense of welcome, of access, to the community which really fits with what we are trying to do. That is something that we are very fortunate to have access to. I have to mention the Addi Road CEO Rosanna Barbero in that regard. There is such a great thing as people who let and make things happen. Who take big chances.

Otherwis,e I really won’t know until the end of this year when we start looking around to see what in the air, what is moving around and who is prepared to be part of the conversation.

See more information about the festival here – addiroad.org.au/writers-festival/

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