‘Live and local’?

Place: Civic branding, festival site and community identity

Two varying conceptions of place are at play in literary festivals, and they pull in opposite directions. At one level, there is a cosmopolitan conception of community as defying geographical boundaries and celebrating a Habermasian public based on shared cultural interest in writing, akin to Pascale Casanova’s ‘world republic of letters’ (2004 [1999]; English, 2011: 63; Giorgi, 2011: 35–36, 39; Johanson and Freeman, 2012: 304, 311). The trajectory of such conceptions is centrifugal, reaching outwards from the geographical site of the festival to embrace international writers of diverse stripes and languages and debates of transcontinental import, consequently cementing the festival a place in the A-list of literary festivals. This, by extension, consecrates the host city as a significant node on an international cultural festival circuit. It is in this light that we should read the MWF’s claim that it ‘connects writers and stories to celebrate a world of literature, explore universal ideas and inspire a global community of readers’ (italics added). ⁸ Second-tier international capitals appear particularly given to this kind of insistence on world-class status, such as through flagging their anointing by UNESCO’s Creative Cities programme (Hamilton and Seale, 2014: 146). The other conception of place at play is economic. The principal funders of literary festivals internationally are typically the cultural policy divisions of national, state/provincial and local governments. Given that a sizeable proportion of festival funding is derived from taxpayers of a particular locale, they have a legitimate desire to see their interests reflected in the resultant event. The dynamic here is centripetal, with global interests illuminating and reflecting on the cultural specificity of a particular locale. To some extent, flagging localism may also help in attracting inbound tourism, catering to the desire of interstate and international visitors to access an authentic (albeit curated) slice of cultural life in the host city.

Where international community is emphasized over local embedding, festival organizers leave themselves open to criticisms of elitism and resultant funding cuts. Conversely, focussing on localism invites criticism of the festival’s provincialism, a failure to attract ‘big names’ suggesting it is not/no longer an A-list festival, and a decline in attendance figures which (somewhat ironically) also threatens continued public subsidy (Dempster, 2013). Thus, literary festival organizers engage in complex strategies to ensure these two, frequently competing, senses of community can – however unstably – be mapped onto each other. For example, Toronto’s International Festival of Authors has a long-running offshoot ‘Lit on Tour’ programme which tours festival guests around libraries, bookstores and universities across the province of Ontario. ⁹ Building on this idea, the SWF in 2015 inaugurated its ‘Live and Local’ programme offering live streaming to libraries and writers’ centres in other New South Wales (NSW) cities and regions, and even the western suburbs of Sydney itself – a vast metropolitan district battling stereotyping as Harbour-obsessed Sydney’s unloved backyard. Remote participants could ask authors questions via Twitter or text message and receive answers in real time. ¹⁰ Building on this success, the following year the SWF rolled the ‘Live and Local’ programme out nationally, adding a live feed to bolster the sense of co-presence during question and answer sessions. ¹¹ Such innovative programmes are constructive attempts to counter regional and outer suburban taxpayers’ common grievances that flagship cultural festivals are unduly concentrated in the metropolis. But in their interweaving of digital media into the fabric of the literary festival, they disrupt the geographical specificity which is traditionally central to writers festivals’ self-conception.

Staging writerly authenticity

One of the primary reasons that many audience members volunteer for attending live events is the opportunity they offer for direct, human connection with writers, which subsequently enhances their (re-)engagement with their works. Audience members described literary festival events as humanizing, but also augmenting, their experience of literary culture, emphasizing the invaluable quality of the direct, face-to-face contact with a writer – long writers’ festivals’ key selling point:

I’d like to find out what other literary festivals there are, that are within relatively easy reach from me, and go and visit them. And I do, I have discovered in the last year or two that it’s great fun, and very enlightening, to sit and listen to an author about a book you’ve either read, or are interested to read. […] I was listening to Brian Selznick this morning, about his book Hugo, and Wonderstruck that followed it, and he’s got another one coming out. And although I think they’re predominantly aimed at children, they’re fascinating books, because he draws the whole thing, and I’m very interested to see that. And he…just makes the whole thing, he made the whole thing come alive. And I think that’s what the authors do, they make the whole thing just come alive. (Participant PEF1)

Other individuals at the same Port Eliot Festival spoke of the humanizing effect of seeing particular event formats counteract the Romantic-originated, and now media-perpetuated, deification of writers:

It makes it very accessible I think. Particularly with the ‘dovegreyreader’ tent, it makes…it humanises what goes on behind the scenes, really. Because we can put authors on pedestals, you know, they’re these literature kind of giants, that are kind of studious, in a way, or you have this idea of what they’re like, and then coming to this environment where they’ve got an opportunity to talk about themselves, and their personality, and their motivations for why they write, it’s really interesting. Because they are labours of love, every book is a labour of love, isn’t it? (Participant PEF2)

The ‘dovegreyreader’ tent (Figure 1) described here is designed to provide an unusually intimate, engaging setting, and is on a much smaller scale than the other tents at the Port Eliot Festival, itself a comparatively small-scale event, with annual attendance capped at 7000. Furnished to resemble a comfortable living room, the tent features a sofa (for the speaker and interviewer, ‘dovegreyreader’ literary blogger Lynne Hatwell), a chest serving as a coffee table, and numerous quilts adorning the walls. Lynne’s husband passes around cups of tea to the audience, and people are encouraged to knit (wool and needles provided). Speaking to many members of the audience, as well as to Hatwell herself, over the duration of the festival, it was clear that the majority of visitors for this venue’s writer talks were already dedicated readers of Lynne’s blog dovegreyreader scribbles, although the more popular guests (like Brian Selznick and Martin Parr) attracted a larger, broader audience of festival-goers as well.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Brian Selznick speaks at the dovegreyreader tent, Port Eliot Festival, 2014.

In an inversion of the usual dynamic whereby virtual spaces mimic extant physical locales, in this instance the dovegreyreader tent is an attempt to recreate physically the domestic, rural, explicitly feminine atmosphere infusing Hatwell’s pre-existing blog. Both are deliberate acts of curating an evocative environment of enthused, non-professional reading. As Hatwell writes in her blog profile:

Sharing a love of good books is the plan, and I only write about books I’ve loved, books that have touched me, engaged me emotionally and captured my imagination. I harbour no pretensions about being a book reviewer, let alone a literary critic, this is about sharing a subjective passion for reading with like-minded people. ¹²

Emphasizing shared experience and emotional connections built around reading, and deliberately rejecting analytical, perceivedly ‘literary’ or academic reading protocols, Hatwell establishes her blog and its community within traditions of vernacular and feminized readerly community (Long, 2003). The tent, as material manifestation of this community, deliberately evokes a domestic space reminiscent of a suburban book club – a self-consciously informal, and (presumably) deliberately feminized, environment.

While literary festivals frequently serve to propagate the celebrity status of authors, encountering writers within the intimacy and domesticity of this particular physical space created what participants judged to be an authentic depiction of writers’ personalities and individuality. These live encounters work to humanize the writers and consequently add that interpersonal dimension to readers’ experiences of their books. Although without the inflections of domestic intimacy, even larger and less personalized festival spaces perform a similar function:

I think you get more meaning when you actually meet them, or see them, and you know – they’re talking personally, well, not personally to you, but they’re talking about their adventures, and what they’ve done, and how they’ve done it, and things like that. And I think that’s good, personally to do it, rather than listening to a recording of a message. To see that person in reality. (Participant EIBF11)

Such instantiations of festival community are indisputably keenly felt on-site by festival participants. But they are also prefigured, and in this sense cultivated, in festivals’ online presence through atmospheric graphics and photographs, as well as being reinforced after each festival’s iteration through organizer–participant digital interactions aimed at prolonging and recapturing the necessarily evanescent festival’s sense of community. The relationship between place and digital media for writers’ festivals is thus complexly reciprocal; as Rehberg Sedo (2003) and Steiner (2008) observe, onsite and online modes of experience complement each other, and each is engaged in continuously mediating the other. It becomes a futile, chicken-or-egg question to try to distinguish which place – physical or virtual – comes first in the festival participant’s experience.

Authorial performativity and aura

A key draw for writers’ festival audiences is the opportunity to see big name international and local writers ‘in the flesh’ to see how they measure up to the implied author detectable in their works. This ‘ritual of authentification’ takes literature back to a pre-industrial era where the writer might be a comfortingly familiar, physical presence whose oral performance of the work certified it as their own creation (Johanson and Freeman, 2012; Meehan, 2005; ¹³ Young, 2015). Other motivations for many attendees are the opportunity for a quasi-papal literary audience through asking a question of the star author in a public forum or the benediction of the signed book copy. It is hard to get away from such sacral language with writers’ festivals the major sites for perpetuating the literary star system (Driscoll, 2014: 165–167; Meehan, 2005; Ommundsen, 2009: 22, 31).

There has been long-running criticism of writers’ festivals in academic debate and cultural-sector commentary as forcing often introvert authors to become public performers, and consequently assessing writers on theatrical criteria rather than the allegedly ‘purer’ achievement of their writing (Barnes, 2010: 11; Driscoll, 2014: 166–167; Johanson and Freeman, 2012: 308; Literary Festivals: Who are they for? 2010; Llewellyn, 2005; Lodge, 2015; Montenegro, 2013; Nowra, 2010: 7; Ommundsen, 1999: 174; 2007: 246–47; 2009: 29–30; Starke, 2006: 158–59; Young, 2015). Writers might not be particularly well adapted to public speaking compared with politicians, actors, and others schooled for more obviously performative careers, but they are by definition professional communicators. That many writers are uncomfortable in a festival context is amply documented in the periodical publications of author societies, but that writers generally ‘perform’ to audience expectations is evidenced by these events’ popularity, audience members’ repeat attendance and reported high levels of satisfaction.

Distaste for the figure of the performing author is part of a broader critique that writers’ festivals contribute to a debasing and vulgarizing of literary culture (Driscoll, 2014: 158; Giorgi, 2011: 42; Lurie, 2004; Ommundsen, 2009: 21–22). For some commentators, this shoehorning of writing into performing arts-style engagement is central to what is problematic about writers’ festivals. Wenche Ommundsen writes: ‘The festival somehow aspires to make the moment of creation and the moment of consumption coincide in time and space, thus changing the fundamental dynamics of the experience’ (2009: 21). ¹⁴ Here, distortion of the typically asynchronous print culture encounter through importation of ‘live’, quasi-theatrical modes such as author readings introduces awkwardness and falsity.

The online expansion of writers’ festivals and shifts in the nature of authorial performativity via social media challenge this perception of festival performance as diametrically opposed to writers’ everyday business. Now the writer may have a long-running programme of promotional online engagement prior to their main festival appearance, peaking there perhaps, but often providing ongoing commentary about the writers’ festival through their blog, tweets, Facebook posts or Instagram pictures both during and after the event. The governing dynamic is less an off/on, private/public authorial toggle than an increase in the frequency and intensity of the writers’ consistent public communication. Further, these interactive online applications refocus attention on the writer as (pithy) written communicator, as opposed to the mediagenic chat-show persona foregrounded by ‘in conversation with…’-style events. So, while communicating effectively in the chatty, off-hand form of a blog or the haiku-like laconicism demanded by Twitter may be a far cry from literary prose, such mediums’ reinvigoration of the written word – as opposed to broadcast media’s foregrounding of authorial voice and appearance – may actually counteract many cultural pessimist criticisms of writers’ festivals.

From ‘audience’ to community

The concept of the audience for writers’ festivals has come a long way since 1960, when organizers of the first Adelaide Writers’ Week (its target audience clearly flagged in its name) made efforts to exclude the public from what was essentially a writers’ workshop on the grounds they were literary rubberneckers (Driscoll, 2014: 158; Ommundsen, 1999: 175; Starke, 2006: 157; Stewart, 2009: 26). For contemporary audiences, the exclusionary sting originally implied by the term ‘writers’ festival’ has entirely disappeared, with contemporary festival taglines – such as the MWF’s ‘For Everyone Who Reads’ ¹⁵ – positively broadcasting a determined orientation toward accessibility and inclusion. Possession of the requisite cultural capital is still clearly a de facto hurdle to participation, but the festivals themselves seem at pains in their marketing to downplay any exclusionary perception. Audiences value not only the interactive potential of encounters with live writers but also the unique affordances of live audience membership. Writing in the pre-participatory digital media epoch, Kristin Langellier (1983) argued that the value of attending a literary reading encompasses both the experience of the event’s content and the sharing of the physical experience with others. Listening and responding to the same cues as a group of other people, in the same physical space and within the same set of social and cultural norms offers a unique sense of interconnection. The respect that those norms dictate – remain quiet, do not stand up, do not obstruct another’s view – serves to ensure each individual’s ability to watch and listen uninterrupted. The function of the audience collects and connects people, but still acknowledges their individual experience. But it is only when all of the individuals in that group are collected in that precise space and time, and behaving in this manner, that the conceptual idea of ‘audience’ is realized and corresponds with the literal grouping of individuals gathered to attend. As Langellier comments:

The word ‘audience’ as a collective noun emphasizes that, far from alienated, as an audience member I am with others. Indeed the audience is precisely a group that is not simply an aggregate of its individual members, but a whole unit that takes on a life of its own greater than the sum of its parts. The presence of others watching and listening with me releases a power and a magic. Infectious laughter and hushed suspense are just two examples of the unity of audience and its shared experience. (1983: 35)

A recurrent theme in participants’ descriptions of their experiences as part of contemporary literary festival audiences was the value of collectively participating in a grouping that was large, physically immersive and ideologically relatively cohesive:

One of the sessions I went to at the Melbourne Writers Festival last year was a session about women’s writing, why women’s writing isn’t, you know, encountered as much as the men’s writing sometimes? Well, naturally of course, that sparked like a feminist debate and all the rest of it, and before you know it you’ve got all the women in the audience standing up, and shouting – ‘Go women!’…. It was very liberating! And that was at Deakin Edge, and that session was full. So, yeah, that sort of thing was really good to be part of. It was great to see, there’s some passionate people out there…it was quite emotional. (Participant EWF11)

Although literary communities and interpersonal relationships frequently do develop in online spaces, a sense of physical isolation and medium-induced disconnect lingers. Hence the opportunity for literary communities to meet in a physical space can be particularly valuable, not as replacement for but rather accompaniment to online engagement. This was consistently expressed by audience members, and particularly strongly by those individuals who identified as writers – their more intensive participation in solitary or online reading and writing activities, as well as their strong identification as members of literary communities, contributing to the importance they placed on in-person engagement:

I think there will always be a physical space for [the] writers festival, just because it’s a meeting point, and you feel connected to this big community, and it’s really – it’s, for a lot of writers who are starting out, they just feel incredibly enthusiastic, and it’s kind of confirming that they’re doing work, and they’re not alone, and it’s not an isolated thing. (Participant MWF13)

Liveness versus archival discoverability

What attraction does liveness hold for the writers’ festival audience member – whether onsite or online? Lisa Dempster, herself a pioneer in digital festival programming, is adamant that the ‘live connection’ is ‘the point of what a writers’ festival is all about’ (Dempster, 2013). For digital writers’ festivals, the fact that the majority of sessions occur online in real time (or with only a one-minute delay) allows organizers to make legitimate claims about the democratizing effect of digital media: online festivals facilitate involvement regardless of geography and their mostly free programming removes economic barriers to entry such as ticketed sessions. Admittedly, hurdles to participation still exist: participants must be across the requisite Twitter etiquette, have a good internet connection, and global time zones can relegate participation to antisocial timeslots. Nevertheless, digital writers’ festivals greatly expand potential audiences for literary encounters. This then begs the question: is liveness merely an adjunct, an added bonus, to the central attraction – the content of the talk – or, in a hyper-connected world, are the event’s uniqueness, its physicality, and the specificity of both the individual event and the festival setting intrinsic to the value of the experience?

Much critical work exploring the nature of liveness derives from theatre and performance studies: ‘[t]hat theatre is performed live is central to its definition’ (Reason, 2004). Matthew Reason explains that three features of the live theatrical event recur in audience members’ discussions of their experiences: the importance of shared memory and event talk in affirming an individual’s recollection of the event; an awareness of the humanness of the performer; and a sense of co-presence with other members of the audience. In the writers’ festival context, audience members interviewed repeatedly praised the uniqueness of a live event in addition to the benefits of physicality and shared experience. But wholesale importation of liveness theory from performance studies occludes the quite different experiential frameworks that audiences of readers bring to live literary events. For such audience members, the live literary event takes on meaning in contrast to typically codex-based or digitally-mediated literary encounters. Book historian David Reinking argues that digital technology offers a space for the dissemination of literary culture which is highly fluid but lacking fixity, while the printed book, by contrast, has been a widely successful medium for communication precisely because it occupies a middle ground between both fixity and fluidity (2009: 490). Concepts of malleability, portability and accessibility define this continuum, and Reinking suggests that the situation of the codex towards the middle of this spectrum implies that it will remain popular even as digital technologies continue to proliferate. Based on audience members’ descriptions, the present article contends that writers’ festival events are widely successful precisely because they do not conform to the model of protean malleability, portability and accessibility that characterizes digital engagement: these events are precise, located, unique and comparatively exclusive:

There is something in feeling like you’re there, in a particular moment, and there might be – oh, you know, the audience might ask a particular question, or something that you’re just not going to get in a pre-recorded, pre-edited set-up, you know. […] You have to want to go and get a ticket, and bother to get here, and all the rest of it. They’re not going to – it isn’t happening again next week, or whatever. So in that respect, I think it is quite special…. (Participant EIBF3)

Leading writers festivals’ extensive online archiving of past events, either on their own websites as podcasts or videos, or through content aggregator sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, SlowTV or iTunes, greatly expands the audience for such literary events. It also, of course, reinforces the prestige of a given writers’ festival through demonstrating its star-pulling power (hence, the festival-identifying banners and podium signage strategically positioned in frame). Such audiovisual records constitute digital paratexts which may significantly affect reader interpretation of a literary work – consecrating particular interpretations with authorial approval. But the more famous and virally circulated a certain authorial festival appearance becomes, the more literary bragging rights attach to having actually been there – having witnessed it live (Robertson and Yeoman, 2014: 332). Hence, the online circulation of writers’ festival content both significantly democratizes literary culture, and simultaneously reinforces the existing coteries of literary insiderness: those who live within a range of major literary metropoles, who can afford tickets to see big-name speakers, and who have sufficient leisure time.

Conclusion

Audience members’ experiences at writers’ festivals demonstrate self-aware and sophisticated negotiation of live and digital spaces. Rather than positioning different forms of physically present or mediated engagement in opposition to one another, our empirical data demonstrates how audience members construe their experiences with live and digital engagement as both complementary and mutually constitutive. Contrary to fears pervasive in the early-to-mid 1990s that digital technologies threatened to decimate all aspects of literary culture, digital media uptake does not diminish the relevance of literary festivals’ physicality; rather, digital technology increases readers’ awareness of the affordances of both environments and facilitates more deliberate and considered involvement.

Extant work on the interface between live and digital spaces in contemporary literary culture scopes the manner and extent to which digital technology has been integrated into festival programming (Dempster, 2012), and trials innovative methodologies utilizing audiences members’ own online discussion to better understand the nature of literary festival audiences’ experiences (Driscoll, 2014, 2015; Weber, 2015). But such single-issue-oriented research has, to date, lacked broader contextualization within theoretical debates about the shifting ratio of mediums comprising contemporary literary culture, the significance of authorial and audience embodiment and the blurring of formerly distinct producer and consumer media roles in relation to the literary encounter. Offering an overarching conceptual framework, supported by empirical data, this article contributes to the small but burgeoning body of academic research into writers’ festivals to explore the relationship between live and digital engagement along four key axes: place, authorship, audience and liveness. In so doing, it demonstrates that the tired notion of print/digital and live manifestations of literary culture being mutually exclusive is not only dead and buried in the minds of most 21st-century academics but clearly also in the beliefs and practices of festival audiences.