Well, let me give you a bit of a taster of one of the most entertaining festival sessions I attended: A Wordsmith’s Dream.

Chaired by the one and only Angela Meyer, the panel consisted of David Astle (nefarious cryptic crossword creator and star of Letters and Numbers), Kate Burridge (the linguist from Can We Help?) and Ursula Dubosarsky (author of The Word Spy and The Terrible Plop [teehee]) . This session was essentially just a big, fun discussion about all the words out there and how awesome they are.

There are some great words that have no English equivalent. For example, in Tagalog, the language of the Phillipines, someone who is only attractive from a distance is layogenic.  Or in the Czech Republic, a man who hangs around cafes and eats leftovers is called a bufetak. There are more fun foreign words here.

Then there are words with meanings so bizarre or specific, you can hardly imagine them getting much usage beyond novelty. For example, gymnologise: to argue whilst naked.  Or alloloutrophilist: one who drinks another’s bathwater.

Many an interesting word fact also arose in the session. For example, it’s said that there is no word in the English language to describe the opposite of an orphan — a parent who has lost a child. Childless doesn’t cut it, because people who’ve never had children can be childless. However, an Indigenous language of the Northern Territory apparently has 15 such terms, describing where the child was lost, when and why.

Then there were words that I just loved, and I’m surprised they’re not more popular, such as gry: dirt under the fingernails. Or glarpo: the juncture between ear and skull where pencils and pens are stored.

And finally, there are words that are utterly mundane, but are apparently very strange to some people. One audience member essentially queried: “I have investigated this and no other language describes the vegetable known as cucumber with two c’s. Why do we use two c’s to spell cucumber? I mean, do you think cucumber is a ridiculous word?”

Indeed.

But what I found especially great was that after this session I started taking heightened delight in the words around me. Almost involuntarily, as I looked at signs and listened to previously inane conversations, I plucked out words here and there, and twirled them around in my mind and mouth, seeing their strange beauty, exploring their sound, realising their onomatopoetic qualities.

This sheer joy of words is a great fuel for writing and for just adding extra play, pleasure and meaning to the language that is intertwined throughout the everyday. There were so many fantastic words and facts in this session. I wish I could remember them all so I could propagate them through my daily conversation and gymnologising.

But seriously, this is where you guys come in: favourite words? Obscure words? Words that don’t exist but should? Word facts? Rad foreign words? Words you think are weird? Words you hate? Words you overuse? Words? WORDS!

So first think of two characters who are going to have some sort of conversation. It can be any kind of pair – a fishmonger and a customer, a doctor and a patient, a dog and it’s master, whoever steps into your head.

Ok now pick one of the characters to start with and roll your die. Then write a bit of dialogue using only that number of words. For example, if I rolled a 2 and my character was a student I’d write ‘I’m late.’

Then roll the die again and write a response from the other character. If I rolled a 5 and my character was the student’s sister I’d write ‘Chill. I’ll forge a note.’

And so on for about ten lines or so. This exercise is great for thinking about how people speak and the kind of shortcuts we take. It helps you notice the way we drop or add words as we speak and why. It’s interesting to see how much we can get across when we’re so limited. Much luck!

Neon Pilgrim is a story that celebrates small bouts of success among countless  setbacks. As they say, it’s not the destination, but the journey that counts.

Lisa Dempster, a Melbourne-based writer and editor, shares her unglamorous  experience of a 1200 kilometre trek around the Japanese island of Shikoku. Here, she  tackled the 88 Temple Pilgrimage in honour of the man who introduced Buddhism to  Japan.

Overweight, unfit, unmotivated and suffering depression, Dempster threw herself into  the midst of this hike, without any real idea what she was in for. Neon Pilgrim delivers  a realistic and by no means glorified account of her journey as a henro (pilgrim).  Dempster allows the reader to live vicariously through her own experiences, as she    learns about spirituality, the Japanese culture, the act of receiving and It is clear that    she has breathed this gruelling pilgrimage, and doesn’t scrimp on detail, no matter  how minor (blisters, sweat poop and vomiting). Dempster’s writing is clean and simple while still retaining its depth in content matter. Call me superficial, but the layout and font really did things for me as well. Shmick.

This chatty account of what was undoubtedly an exhausting experience proved to be funny as well as insightful. Not only did she choose to travel by foot rather than bike or car, but rather than in a flashy hotel, she chose to sleep wherever possible – a park bench, the beach, a dodgy hostel and on occasion, a public toilet.

Neon Pilgrim gives the reader a sense of what can be achieved in the harshest of conditions, and while in the lowest of spirits. I enjoyed myself so much while reading this book, I’d already promised to lend it to a handful of people when I finished before I got halfway through reading it. And I don’t lend my books out willy-nilly.

Has anyone else read this book? What are your thoughts?

Published by Aduki Independent Press 2009

This week we’re going to do a bit of a throwback to one of our earlier exercises. That’s right, some freewriting. For those of you who have forgotten, I’ve stolen Maddie’s description. Freewriting is basically the idea that you set yourself a time limit and write continuously until the time is up. That means keeping the pen moving the whole time, no going back and rereading, no editing – nothing. With practice, it’s a great way to avoid self-censoring and apathy. It’s great for those moments of ‘God I have nothing to write about.’ and those of ‘Everything I write is utter crap.’

So grab your timer and set it to 10 minutes.

Now write the words last night down on the page and go!

Remember, don’t stop writing until the timer runs out. If your stuck just write last night again or, alternatively, fill it in with this morning then this afternoon etc.  for every subsequent time you get stuck (if you get stuck at all that is.) As long as you keep writing something will come to you. It’s just a matter of picking up a pen and making it happen. Much luck!

Jodie sent me this one about the relationship between food, language and language formation. It’s one of those kooky academic articles where it has some really great insights but a lot of it is either totally confounding or a bit too weird to be credible. I love the term ‘gastro-structuralist’ though.

The other one comes via my endless browsing (refreshing) of football websites, about the kitchen at an elite professional football club. Interesting stuff about the unbelievable attention to detail and cash outlay in making it all happen, but also the power granted by what you’d have to call food administration (in both senses of that word).

Share some crazy food articles or anecdotes, if you have them?

Writing students are notoriously conservative creatures. They write stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of what they have read. Getting them to try out alternative or innovative forms is harder than talking them into chastity as a life style.

— Robert Coover, ‘The End of Books’ in The New York Times Book Review, 21st June, 1992. (via parenthetical elements)

Please discuss.

Ben Eltham is a writer, journalist, researcher and creative producer from Melbourne, Australia. He has worked as a freelance arts journalist and critic, as well as a producer and festival director at a series of experimental and fringe arts festivals in Newcastle, Brisbane and Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development and is undertaking a PhD at the University of Western Sydney’s Centre for Cultural Research.

He blogs at http://culturalpolicyreform.wordpress.com.

Writing: necessity or luxury?

Both! It’s a necessity because that’s how I pay the bills, so there’s always sneaky deadlines lying around the corner waiting to surprise you when you get up in the morning and check your email. But I am also writing a number of long-form projects including a novel and these are very much projects I have to steal time away from other things to write. Lately I’ve been repairing to my local bar in Centre Place, Hell’s Kitchen, for sneaky afternoon novel writing over a pint. That feels very much like a luxury to me!

The internet: friend or foe? Discuss.

Friend of course! The internet is not only the friend of the writer; it is the friend of the reader. It brings us together. I think Twitter may just be the future of wit.

Why are you a freelance writer? What do you like most about it?

You make it sound like I always wanted to be a freelance writer! In fact, I kind of just fell into it over a number of years as the best way to fund my lifestyle. In particular I was trying to sustain a rapidly escalating and very expensive habit of putting on arts festivals, and I needed a job that I could do in my spare time, gave me lots of free concert tickets, and could be conducted from my bedroom in a dressing gown. Thus I became an arts critic. Later, after my arts festival failed, leaving me in $40,000 of credit card debt, I realised I needed to make some money quickly. Unfortunately, no-one in the arts wanted to employ me. So I fell back on my writing trade, which I rapidly found to be quite a useful way of avoiding credit card default. A realisation that contemporary politics is in fact merely a branch of the contemporary performing arts enabled me to move into writing about federal politics, where the pay is much better.

How do you go about pitching? What’s your strategy?

I actually run workshops on pitching for Express Media, so I probably shouldn’t give too many secrets away. But, in a nutshell, it is this: Find a publication. Read it. Work out what they want that they haven’t actually got yet. Work up 2 or 3 ideas in that style. Find the editor. Cold email her or him. Repeat and fade out.

You can punch one person in the schnoz and get away scot free. Who do you clobber?

I’m tempted to say Mitchell Hooke, the Minerals Council of Australia spokesman, but I imagine he might come after me. I’m going to settle for the sound man from Uber nightclub who destroyed my band’s last set in Brisbane.

You’ve done some great investigative journalism about the Australian arts industry. Is this a difficult area to delve into? How does it compare to, say, writing about the GFC?

Well, I don’t live in lower Manhattan so getting access to Jimmy Cayne or Lloyd Blankfein isn’t easy – unlike say Michael Lewis. So I guess you just do what you can with the resources at hand. With my arts writing, I try to approach it as any investigative journalist or long-form feature writer would, so a lot of desk research followed by an effort to interview significant numbers of people, particularly the key industry players if I can. I chased the Richard Kingsmill interview for a long time – no-one had really interviewed him in a rigorous way for some time, so it was something I was quite proud of.

When you’re writing about distant events or industries where you don’t have access, you can still conduct rigorous research and “break” news in the sense of bringing new perspectives and primary sources into the public domain. In covering the GFC, I tried to relate the developments in aspects of the academic literature that were relevant to the events at hand, for instance the sociology of finance, behavioural economics, or simply the rapidly moving economics blogs, which I think gave me an advantage over many journalists who really only had a kind of 2nd-year uni grasp of macro-economics, which is why they tended to believe what Ben Bernanke was saying about the mortgage crisis being contained.

If you could read anyone’s journal or raid anyone’s hard drive, through whose would you?

Tough question. I’m going to say Karl Bitar. Maybe these hidden files can explain just what the hell the ALP factional henchmen think they’re doing.

What’s the best book anyone ever recommended to you?

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, recommended by Rebekah Scott.

What are you reading now?

A few different things. Apart from my daily omnivorous diet of the Australian newspapers, particularly Crikey, ABC The Drum, The Financial Review, The Guardian, The New York Times and sometimes the LA Times and South China Morning Post, I also like to check Slate, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and then there’s the blogs, Larvatus Prodeo, Think Progress, Marginal Revolution, Brad De Long, Paul Krugman, Economist’s View, and some of the arts pages around the world, and then when I can the cultural policy academic literature and so on and so forth. Google News and Google Scholar is something I use every day for random reading.  Books-wise, I’m currently reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, and The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane, and I’ve just finished Freefall by Jospeh Stiglitz and Four Fish by Paul Greenberg.

Emmett Stinson’s debut collection of short stories is entitled Known Unknowns. He has received The Age Short Story Award and a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, and serves as the President of SPUNC – The Small Press Network, a Fiction Editor for Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Writing, and the book reviewer for Triple R’s Breakfasters. He is a Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne.

Writing: necessity or luxury?

It depends on what you mean by writing. I didn’t write any fiction at all between 2006, when I initially finished the manuscript of Known Unknowns, and 2009 – not a word. I published many stories in that interval, but it was all a backlog of work I had already written. But during this period of literary ‘inactivity’, I generated more than 90,000 words of academic writing, most of it literary criticism. So, broadly speaking, I’m always writing, but I’m definitely skeptical of the Creative Writing ‘truth’ that you need to write fiction all the time – I can think of many authors who would be better off writing less often. Milton said it best: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’

You’ve had a lot success with the short story as a form. What do you like about short stories as a reader and as a writer?

I suppose the requisite response here is to discuss the formal differences between short stories and novels, ending with a valorization of the former. Unfortunately, I despise these kinds of assumptions about literary forms, as if writing were essentially just about applying a set of pseudo-Aristotelian conventions and categories to narrative. Simply put, short stories are shorter than novels, which means short stories end more quickly. That can be nice. My interest is in language, not in how long a work is.

A young writer is considering university study in Creative Writing but is hearing contradictory reports about its usefulness. They come to you for advice. What are the most important things they should consider?

I have an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. I’m very glad I did it, but I also have conflicted feelings about how and why such programs are valuable. (I’ve recently written about this in detail, if you want my complete thoughts on the matter.) I don’t know any writers who have an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, but most writers I know did take at least some undergraduate Creative Writing classes, and would say they benefitted from them. If you want to write, the main thing is to read. Be a reader first, and a writer second.

The internet: friend or foe? Discuss.

This is easy – friend. A quick note to all of the baby boomers writing about how the internet is destroying our capacity to concentrate: please shut up. Between my university library’s databases, Google books, and – oh yeah – everything else on the web, the internet is an incomparable research tool.

Voice or narrative? Which comes first in short story?

I can happily report that I have never asked myself either of these questions. I get most of my story ideas while I’m walking, but I might wait for years between getting an idea and writing about it. For example, I spent three years thinking about my story ‘Great Extinctions in History’ before I decided to try to write it down. At the very least, I like to have the first and last line of a story settled in my mind before I begin writing – although I may change them later.

I will also say this: there seems to be some really wrongheaded focus on the idea of ‘narrative’ right now, in which ‘story’ is some kind of universal category across all human cultures. I guess one could argue that Twilight, The Iliad and Gilgamesh are all ‘narratives’, but they seem to have very little in common with each other. I guess I’m not very interested in narrative per se – I think most of my work is about people who are avoiding narrative, who are trying not to tell stories about themselves because they are too unpleasant, too painful.

Have you ever hit a cane toad with a golf club? Could you?

No, I couldn’t. I killed a mouse once, and the memory still troubles me (there’s a fictionalized account of it in my story ‘Something so Helpless’). Like most misanthropes, I am an animal lover – and I generally prefer animals to people.

What’s the best book anyone ever recommended to you?

Gilbert Sorrentino’s vituperative, salacious satire of the Greenwich Village scene in the 50s and 60s, The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things; William Gaddis’s encyclopedic meditation on art and originality, The Recognitions; Wyndham Lewis’s scabrous attack on the Bloomsbury group, The Apes of God; everything by Borges and Roberto Bolaño; Gerald Murnane’s The Plains; Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life (which is the Australian Moby Dick); Donald Barthelme’s short stories; Beckett’s later novellas (eg. First Love, The Lost Ones); I’ll stop now because I could go on forever.

Why does this interview have so many questions that force you to choice between two options?

I don’t know. Why have I avoided answering them?