Byron Bay Writers' Festival
Feature Events
Friday 3 August, 2012
Stand Up Comedy
Three mums with a dozen kids between them and one bloke who specialises in playing deros and idiots in TV ads will keep the laughs coming on this night of stand-up comedians who’ve turned into authors: Jon Doust, Mandy Nolan, and Fiona O’Loughlin are all masters of the laugh.
The MC is lawyer-turned-author who should be a stand up comedian, Shamini Flint.
Brisbane Writers Festival / Yarn
Zenobia Frost
If you follow me on Twitter and you wonder, this week, “Where has all his incisive social commentary gone,” well, it’s because I will be tweeting during some of Brisbane Writers Festival’s events this week.
Moreover, I’ll be joining the likes of Paul McDermott, Scott Spark, Jon Doust, and Sam George-Allen at Yarn this Friday night, for a night of storytelling with the theme Behind The Scenes. MC’d by Richard Fidler and broadcast on Radio National.
It’s free, it’s fun, it’s outside, it’s spring time. If you can’t make it down to the State Library of Queensland for it, tune in and listen to me um and ah my way through an otherwise perfectly engaging story.
A Barefaced Tale
Went down to Barefaced Stories at The Bird (Perth WA) last
year (August) and told the story of the first chapter of To the Highlands.
The real story.
The first chapter is, of course, pure fiction.
Here it is, the one in the book:
The real story.
The first chapter is, of course, pure fiction.
Here it is, the one in the book:
The man on me moves.
I lie still.
He moves again. Maybe he’s embarrassed to be murdering a sobbing, bleeding, blubbering man who has no power, no strength, no will, no future. He rolls off me. I squeeze my eyes. Lungs suck great chunks of air. I hear him stand and walk away. I don’t know where to but I hope it’s far, so far I can’t see him when I get up off this floor because then I might stumble down the stairs to the kitchen, take one of the houseboy’s long knives, walk up the stairs to his room, open his door, find him lying on his bed exhausted from the attempted murdering and stick him – stick the knife into his musclebound body more than once, maybe as many times as the murder I heard about on Radio Australia last week when one man stabbed another to death because of a sweet potato deal gone sour.
I turn my head to the floor. The crying spreads. I am emptying, pouring out, everything is leaving me. I know that if I cry long enough and hard enough there will be nothing left but a wet patch of tears mixed with blood, and when he comes out of his room to check on me, or someone climbs the stairs, all they will see is a small pool of what was once me.
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