The Other Writers Festival

Not all the cool kids were at the Brisbane Writers Festival’s Word Play for young readers, writers and illustrators this week.

Some of us – er, I mean, them – took a mosey down Waterworks Road to the inaugural Mater Dei Writers Festival at Ashgrove, where they heard tall tales and true from award-winning authors like Michael Gerard Bauer, Narelle Oliver, John Danalis, Josie Montano, Julie Fison and of course, yours truly.

It was a fabulous end to Book Week for this little black duck. After quacking away to nearly two thousand students in three dozen sessions over the past three weeks, I was delighted to shake my tail feathers closer to home for my last official school visit of the term.

My littlest guy was in the audience, just one of the gorgeous Year 4-7 students from Mater Dei, St Ambrose’s, St Peter Chanel, St Finbarr’s, Holy Rosary, Windsor and St Joseph’s.

Thanks to Dominique Gardiner for organising what we all hope will become an annual event. Watch out BWF, MDWF is stealing your thunder!

Big weeks keep on rollin’

Feels like I been everywhere, man – Biloela, Rockhampton, Bracken Ridge, Toowoomba, Newmarket, Springfield, Ascot, and Sunshine Coast (for an online festival)… I barely had time for a breather after Book Week and now Brisbane Writers Festival is upon us.

Word Play, the kick-ass program for kids and lovers of youth literature kicks off on Wednesday with a host of international, award-winning, and best-selling authors and illustrators including Kate Forsyth, Morris Gleitzman, John Danalis, Leigh Hobbs, Gabrielle Wang and Dave Hackett.

I’m there Wednesday and Thursday introducing Henry Hoey Hobson to Years 6-9, trying not to look like a naughty school girl with my scraped knees and band aids.

Seriously, I’ll be hobbling rather than hobnobbing, after not one, but two nana falls in the past week.

I tripped over my Birkencrocs on the way to school last week. Tore my tights and looked like a right scrag when I fronted up at St Margaret’s for my Book Week talks to Years Six and Seven.

Then I opened up the same knee a few days later, crash-tackling my runaway beagle after he rifled my visiting brother’s suitcase and stole his socks.

I came away with an egg on my forehead, bent glasses, a tear in my brand-new jeans and a sliced open knee.

The beagle, of course, got away with the socks.

Knocking myself out at BWF

The gods are rubbing their hands and giggling with wicked delight.

Only days after publicly revealing my fear of ever again sharing a signing table with Morris Gleitzman, they’ve conspired to put us on the same bill for this year’s Word Play at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

For those who missed it the first time, Morris has queues that extend to the outer reaches of the galaxy, while I try to attract passing interest by balancing a pen on the end of my nose, toppling backwards out of a chair, and knocking myself unconscious.

If you’d like to see me knock myself out for Grades 6-9, click  here and here to book for my sessions (1 and 2 Sept). Book now and ker-ching! you’ll get an early bird discount (available to June 25 or while stocks last. )

Seriously, Word Play at BWF is made of awesome for kids and lovers of kids’ literature. Click here for everything you need to know about Word Play, and here for the full program of fabulous authors and illustrators.

Crime Pays @ BWF

‘She’s nervous,’ whispered the former army interrogator into my ear. ‘Look at her body language:  scanning the room; seeking the reassurance of eye contact with people she knows; the nervous chatter… I guarantee that afterwards she won’t remember a single thing she has said.’

Talk about getting my money’s worth out of the Crime Pays session at the  Brisbane Writers Festival.

Like everyone else in the State Library auditorium, I was there for crime writing tips from international best-sellers Lisa Unger and Gregg Hurwitz. But I also had the added bonus of Brisbane-based thriller writer JJ Cooper in my right ear.

JJ spent seven  of his seventeen years with the Australian Army working in the Intelligence Corps, and has just released his first novel, aptly titled THE INTERROGATOR. It’s fiction, of course. It had to be, what with the Official Secrets Act and all… I’d like to say more, but if I do, I’ll have to kill you.

It would have been clever programming to have JJ up on the stage with Lisa Unger and Gregg Hurwitz. After all, Lisa did blurb JJ’s debut novel and even made a point of introducing him to the audience during Q&A.

I would have loved to have seen the panel Chair, Inga Simpson, short-listed for this year’s Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best Emerging Author, bounce questions off a local thriller writer as well as the visiting big-guns.

Interrogating the Interrogator – now wouldn’t that have been something?