Flipping the bird at answers

Last weekend I attended Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne because: it’s an awesome, craft-based festiva bringing readers, writers and everyone in between together; they invited me to talk on a panel; I jump at any chance to revisit Melbourne.

The difference between EWF and most other writers’ festivals in Australia is that it’s more like a readers’ and writers’ festival, where readers and writers interact, compared to most of the major festivals, which are structured so that readers sit in crowds and stare in awe at writers, as though they are some sort of sacrosanct being.

Speaking of sweeping generalisations, our panel was called Typecast, which was presented in the program with the blurb:

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The gay writer, the Indigenous writer, the young writer… what are the joys and frustrations of being typecast? Does writing for niche audiences create or hinder opportunities to publish in a more mainstream way? And once set is it ever possible to escape your typecasting?

I was the ‘young writer’, but as I said on the day, really I was speaking as a young editor who has worked with both young and old authors. Anita Heiss was the ‘indigenous writer’. Julian Leyre was the ‘gay writer’. Karen Pickering was the ‘feminist writer’. And the panel was hosted by Dan Ducrou, who has been dubbed the ‘young-adult fiction writer’, which he said was odd considering how much explicit sex and drugs are featured in his book, The Byron Journals.

That’s just it, and this was the premise of the talk I presented: these sorts of typecasts (otherwise known by the more discernibly unacceptable term, ’stereotypes’) are inherently flawed, because every writer’s work is characterised by myriad themes, which flutter about and alight in readers’ minds in all sorts of unqualifiable ways.

But we need to apply these labels to start somewhere in talking about these subjects, and a theme of the session was how each of the speakers has had to push against being arbitrarily categorised by others.

The conclusion of the speech I made solicited a sort-of barely audible gasp in the audience, and at one point an audience member laughed with such gusto that I was momentarily distracted. I didn’t read all that I wrote because I tend to pursue tangents with unbridled enthusiasm when I talk, and I can’t refrain from this even when I’m public speaking.

Angela Meyer, of LiteraryMinded, was in the audience, and I was chuffed that she said, in her write up of the session, that my speech “was a nice, challenging thing to hear at a writers’ festival – a place where one can wander in and out of panels in a bubble of ‘confirmation’”.

That was prexactly my intention, so it’s nice to have that … ah … confirmed.

I’m going to publish my speech after this post, because: I wrote it and may as well use it here; I quite like it; you might quite like it too. If you don’t, well, I don’t really mind, but I’d appreciate any critiques.

It may be worth noting, if you read the speech, that Dan introduced each of us before our talks, an exercise designed to establish the authority of the speaker, but the concept of an authority or expert is as dubious to me as the act of typecasting someone. Nonetheless, this is what I wrote for Dan to read out:
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Ryan Paine is an editor at Wakefield Press, where he works with a lot of old writers. Before that he was editor of Voiceworks, where he worked with a lot of young writers. Before that he was a typesetter at Wakefield Press. Before that he was a labourer, before that he was an outer-suburban high-school stoner, before that he was a chubby little mummy’s boy grubbing for friends in primary school, before that he was a grumpy little shit, before that he was an ill-conceived idea.