When I came back to Adelaide from Melbourne thinking I could take some time off and bury my head in some books at work, I didn’t expect that a bunch of Adelaide crew would have set up a goddamn arts festival and plonked their headquarters down in a little side street off Hindley, that mungtarded street of strip clubs, sports bars and sleazy meat markets that also happens to house one of the most beautiful bookstores in the state, if not the country, let alone that they would approach me to coordinate the literary stream of said arts festival, but here I am.

It’s called Format Academy of Words, henceforth referred to as ‘the Academy’, because what other academy would you rather join? I don’t know.

An ‘academy’, as if you didn’t already know, is, according to the Macquarie:

noun. (plural – academies)
1. an association or institution for the promotion of literature, science, or art

Format Festival is:

an award winning artist-run festival that celebrates and explores the creative community, showcasing visual, urban and experimental art; as well as zines, live music, craft, activism, performance and discussion.

Their website used to have ‘creative activism’ in there, and was unashamedly inspired by This is Not Art, an ‘independent, emerging and experimental arts festival’, which takes place in sunny Newcastle every year, because, well, we’ve all been inspired by TINA, she’s beaut.

This is all just background noise, to give you an idea of what you might like to get yourself into at the Academy. The theme will be ‘literary activism’, but don’t let that put you off – feel free to replace ‘activism’ with ‘advocacy’, ‘lobbying’ or ‘agency’.

Just as TINA hosts a subsidiary literary festival called National Young Writers’ Festival, Format hosts the Academy, which I have started to think of as

a forum for the discussion of practical ideas about how to guide recent, rapid changes in the publishing industry toward a more democratic, representative, diverse and accessible market for reading, writing  and the dissemination of ideas.

It all sounds a bit grandiose, really. Well, maybe you like that sort of thing. If so, the Academy will happen in late February 2011, at 15 Peel Street in the Adelaide CBD. This is just a heads up for now:

…

Heads up!

Yesterday afternoon, waiting for an author who was waiting on the other side of the cafe, I had a chance to read ‘Clinching’, a story by Emmett Stinson in the first issue of Kill Your Darlings.¹

Emmett, at 30-odd, is on the cusp of SIB’s definition of ‘young writer’, but I’ve been encountering his work since Wakefield published a University of Adelaide anthology he was involved with back in 2005 or thereabouts, when he must have been around 25: his Age Short Story Competition winning story, ‘All Fathers The Father’, reminded be of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith², back when I was still enamoured of Peter Carey. So he’s more of our demographic than, say Peter Carey’s.

Now Emmett has a book of his own out: Known Unknowns, one of the collections released as part of Affirm Press’s Long Story Shorts competition.

‘Clinching’ opens with Anna punching Steve in her sleep, and closes with him feeling sorry about it, because in between are all the reasons they know he probably deserved it.

In particular, something went wonky in their relationship when he got so arse-numbingly drunk he pissed in her sock drawer during the night.

Now, I actually did this once. I include no qualifier because the exact thing happened: I got so arse-numbingly drunk I pissed in my then-girlfriend’s sock drawer during the night.

These are unusually synchronistic circumstances, but this is exactly what I come to literature for: to read about the similar experiences of others, so that I might get a handle on my feelings about my own experiences. That someone might have even conceived the fictional idea of pissing in their girlfriend’s sock drawer is enough to make me feel fractionally less like a fuckwad: this might not have happened to Emmett, but some similar almost certainly did, and that’s why he’s writing about it. Or it happened to someone he knows.

Either way, the function of literature connecting others in isolation is what draws me to it. That’s right, I said ‘function’.

And I’m going to say this: the opening is the punchiest opening I’ve read in ages. It dragged me in, and the story held me captive until the … actually, until I realised the end would be too neat, which it was, and in the affected way that suggests it shouldn’t feel neat – like the story’s own background characters’ hair, described, as in myriad other urban stories, as ‘consciously unwashed for several days so it would droop in a manner that seemed fashionably messy and unaffected’.

Otherwise the writing is mostly absorbing, funny and a pleasure to imbibe: really, it slides into your mind like a first Friday beer. The observations about interpersonal dynamics are insightful and interesting. And the characters are plausibly flawed and flailing. This is my kind of story.

It’s a worthy story, but it’s unexceptional due to the fact it’s a little too expository for my tastes: the themes are revealed with eloquence, but the characters are kind of generic, due to there not being a lot in the way of description, action³, and setting. This could be a good thing: you might like this.

Other stories I’ve read by Emmett were exceptional, and some of them are probably in his debut collection, which you can buy from Affirm Press’s website. I would, if I were you.

If, understandably, you don’t want to take my word for it based on my reading of a few stories, here are some actual reviews of the actual collection: With Extra Pulp’s and Overland’s.

Onwards! Keep out of sock drawers!

1. I take my time: KYD are up to issue three now, and they’re a quarterly.
2. which is actually quite good – it carries remnants of Carey’s penchant for magic realism, before he got got corrupted by the Australian realist novel machine
3. read: movement, not gunfights

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been co-judging, along with Stefan Laszczuk, a short-story prize run by the editors of Adelaide University’s student magazine, On Dit.

Of course I put my hand up, because now I am a fusty old ex-Voiceworks editor, desperate to get my hands on the raw content of young, emerging Australian writers. Really, reading submissions – at Voiceworks and in the capacity of a judge – is like tapping into a rare natural resource: it makes me all dizzy wondering about the sort of books that will be published in the next 10 to 20 years.

Hearsay is going to be ‘a glossy and professionally printed literary annual featuring the best emerging Adelaide writers’ that will be ‘distributed around the Adelaide CBD in May’.

Here is the introduction I wrote for the collection:

Props to old people and everything, but so much literature produced by adults, for adults, is characterised by a weird sort of fogginess. I put this down to the fact they have to sound like they know what they’re talking about because … well, because adults are supposed to know what they’re talking about, and when they realise they don’t know what they’re talking about at all, the lesser adult authors deal with this by jacking up the profound-sounding words and the awkwardly constructed sentences.

They talk about the same old shit, in language that makes it seem like they’re talking about something new and incredibly meaningful. They beguile their adult readers into reciting passages aloud at their book clubs and saying, ‘Mmm, yes, I see …’

Old people have to maintain this pretension, lest young people run up to them, steal their crown, and wear it to the pub, getting it all scuffed and smudged with garlic sauce.

The best young writers, on the other hand, are confronting their ignorance through writing, so inevitably their stories are explorations of new ideas. Ignorance dissipates pretension, and what we are left with is a distillation of the pure, heartfelt, curious sense of adventure that is consistently absent from so much adult literature.

These young writers have not yet been hypnotised by an engorged need for creative rhetoric: they’re not trying to dupe you into feeling something about something you don’t understand. They tell it how it is. They write about love (awkward, unrequited, shared, illicit), dreams (made, lost, abandoned), obsession, hatred (even murder), ambition and torment. And they don’t fuck around.

Older writers are great – they’re who we learn from – but young writers are who we can draw inspiration from. They’re writing about the present, but they are the future – these stories are the buds of ideas that will blossom in time.

Stefan and I have chosen a ‘winning story’, and two ‘runners up’: ‘Mutual Friends’, then ‘The Four Seasons’ and ‘House Party’. There is no such thing as a ‘winning story’. These just happen to be the ones we most enjoyed. You will feel differently – such is the beauty of literature, and the diversity of this collection.

In the same week that I gored myself, I accepted a job offer from Wakefield Press. I’m visiting Brisbane for Christmas, then I’ll be heading to Adelaide to resume a seat at my old desk, to make books full time again. I won’t be needing any presents this year.

This may come as a surprise to many of my friends and colleagues in Melbourne, but it’s been on my mind and in the works for a couple of months. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and working with the wonderful people at Wakefield. I’m looking forward to having an occupation again.

For seven months after Voiceworks I drove aimlessly around Queensland in my campervan, Delilah. For the last five months in Melbourne I have found it difficult to shake my holiday habits – in particular my tendency to start the day by sitting down with a computer and/or a book and chasing miscellaneous ideas down rabbit holes, which is fun, but not conducive to gainful employment or paying the bills or saving the world.

A lot of these ideas have related to agency and social entrepreneurship, as I have dallied with the idea of starting up a literary agency. The loftiness of this ambition has dawned on me only recently – along with the fact I am wildly under qualified. So I’ve deferred these aspirations for the short term. I will spend the next couple of years gaining experience of other areas in the industry – rights and contract management, hopefully. I will knuckle down and get to New York, where I hope to gain a placement with an agency – as a reading assistant or general work-experience lacky.

Wakefield, blessedly, are aware of my long-term ambitions. They always have been, even as I fumble about figuring out exactly what they are. When they originally employed me as a typesetter, they knew about and supported my aspirations to work as an editor. I took manuscripts home to work on in my spare time, and gradually worked up to the point where I was typesetting half the time, and editing the rest of the time, or thereabouts. I will do the same again.

Because this work aligns so perfectly with my own work, I don’t baulk at working overtime to advance my skills and experience. So I’ll continue to work with the writers I have been building relationships with, to the extent that I can in my spare time or within my new in-house capacity. I hope to bring my new networks and experience into this equation.

This decision also has ramifications for this blog: the new focus in my life will inevitably be reflected here. It’s early yet, but I have plans to move this away from a blog where I ‘empty my thoughts … on literary culture, philosophy and interesting things that happen’, and develop a focus on my exploits going into bat for young writers, as a book editor, aspiring agent and location-independent social entrepreneur.

Wakefield Press are incredibly supportive employers – such that Michael and Stephanie, as well as various members of the long-term staff have continued to be inspirational mentors and friends during my years at Voiceworks. I look forward to upholding their motto: ‘We love good stories and make beautiful books.’

I’ll be having short-notice farewell drinks at Prudence this Friday, from 5pm if you want to come.