The Writer's Festival wrap up

When my efforts to attend The Lost Father event were foiled, I ended up in a talk on scriptwriting from the chief writer of the television show Spooks. This was not very interesting to me. It was mostly anecdotal stories about episodes of Spooks, which I have never watched, rather than broader ideas on scriptwriting. When it got to the Q and A I split, because listening to fanatics ask about the specifics of TV episodes you’re completely unfamiliar with, like “why did the Russian shoot the bag lady?”, is not what I was at the Sydney Writer’s Festival for. So I wandered outside into the sunshine, and probably should have been sitting out there listening to the talk on Interrogating Twitter being broadcast, because that sounded a lot more interesting.

The final event I attended was called The Sydney Poetry Readings, in the Bangarra Mezzanine at the end of the pier, featuring readings by local poets David Musgrave, Martin Harrison and Anna Kerdijk Nicholson. I was notably early for this event, because I wasn’t going to miss another one, and they let me in to sit down so I sat near the front, with my bag resting a little on the chair next to me. A while later a fellow came and sat in the chair next to my bag and I looked up and locked eyes with him and thought ‘my, you’re rather good-looking, after an unpoetic fashion’, because he looked a little too groomed and fashionable, and wasn't sporting a beret, a scarf or any other poetic accessories (I'm not sure that poets actually accessorise at all, but if they did a beret is probably the thing). When Martin Harrison got up to read he introduced one poem saying that he wrote it for the wedding of friends, Berndt Sellheim and Tara Moss, and was pleased to see Berndt in attendance. All that rather washed over me, because I didn’t know who those people were. Meanwhile, my friend Soph had arrived a little late and sat in the chair that once held my bag, between me and the handsome stranger, and afterwards she was telling me this story of how the poet and philosopher Berndt Sellheim met Tara Moss online (and I go ‘who is Tara Moss again?’ - because I am not into crime fiction, perhaps even less into models, and had heard the name but couldn't remember why). It’s a funny story. Then for some reason I thought of it the next day at work during lunch in my retrospective of the day and googled these two, and discovered that Berndt himself was the guy two chairs over. So I emailed Soph and said "you were sitting next to Berndt Sellheim you know" – and she reckons she didn't notice.

But, back to the poetry – I actually find it hard to take poetry in in all it’s fullness purely aurally, but it was quite entrancing watching the sun set amongst the clouds over the harbour out the window, listening to the cadences of the poetry.  It was a fine end to the day.