Flipping the bird at answers

Academy Of Words is a publishing industry event to be held on Sun Feb 27 as part of the Format Festival, itself an award winning arts festival. It’s been put together with a focus on the constantly changing face of publishing and what young people, in particular, can do about it.
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The event will consist of a one-day program of four panels (including “How To Sell Out Without Losing Your Cred” hosted by Melbourne-based author and Vignette press publisher Lisa Dempster), a poetry workshop and roundtable discussions with an affair at the end of the day called Literary Treasure Hunt.

Ryan Paine, a writer, editor and book enthusiast who currently works for Wakefield Press but who has also spent time as editor of Voiceworks (a Melbourne quarterly produced by writers and editors until the age of 25), and who co-authors the Socratic Ignorance Is Bliss blog, is deeply involved with Academy Of Words.

He says that through working quite extensively in the industry, he’s become acutely aware of changes that need to be made.

“I’ve become more and more involved in something I call ‘Literary Activism’,” Ryan explains, “but there’s some difficulty in doing that from within the industry as I get bogged down with the day to day production stuff. And I’ve been frustrated by the lack of sales we all have and wanted to get some good discussion going in how we can start making changes to the industry.

“And, in particular, how do we harness the new technology so that all the incredibly amazing young people who are doing this stuff can get noticed? At the moment, they don’t get a look in, so hopefully, something like Academy Of Words will help get them out into the mainstream and noticed by the big players.

“And that’s the other notion; that Academy Of Words is not just relegated to being an underground thing. We are all trying to do that same thing and that’s to make and actually sell literature.”

Ryan, who has been active in the industry for almost a decade, says he’s not familiar with a time before the internet.

“So I never really got to see how the internet changed things initially, but through working with Voiceworks until 2008, I saw how blogging really excelled and was almost becoming mainstream. There was an idea that people were producing what they wanted and that started me thinking that the people who were quite au fait with the technology were the ones who were really going to grasp it and use it to their advantage and start their own literary culture.”

Ryan is, however, a stickler for correct punctuation.

“Email has really corrupted the language,” he sighs. “Internet lingo can mean communication breakdowns because even leaving out a comma can change the whole meaning of a sentence. You have to think really hard about what the sender actually means.

“And I get really annoyed with people who don’t use apostrophes correctly,” Ryan concludes. “If you are serious about writing, you really have to get it right.”

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This interview was published in The Adelaide Fix.

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