ABOUT THE EMERGING WRITERS' FESTIVAL

                                             Emerging from what?
                                             (Or what’s in a name)

e·merg·ing  adj.
Newly formed or just coming into prominence; emergen.t Come up or out into view (from water, enclosed space., obscurity)

As any business will attest, your name is your brand, it’s the starting point of your marketing, your promotion and in many ways your success is linked with the name. is it the same with Arts Organisations? Maybe. Maybe not. In the months at the helm of the Emerging Writers Festival I have reflected on this questions as I have fretted about the name of the festival, is it the right one? Is there a more apt title for who we really are and what exactly is emerging?

My own experiences with being an emerging artist have all involved grant categories and communications with program officers at various places that like to invest in the Arts. In fact I have distinct memory of one such Program officer telling me I wasn’t Emerging anymore I had Emerged. Yippee I thought, and then wondered how that was worked out? Body of work? Amount of income? Number of Grants I had submitted? Is emerging in fact just a term that has been bequeathed to the Arts industry by funding bodies as a convenient category? As with the other terms I have heard including mid career artist and late term artists. Maybe we should embrace this categorizing and make it a little bit more literal, maybe we should all be part of a day? There would be early morning for the youth sector, pre lunch for the emerging and bedtime for those who are finishing their careers. This would make me around about afternoon tea.

The other problem I have with the title emerging is it often denotes young, which is fine generally, but I started in my career at 27 and while younger at the time, I couldn’t have been called young and emerging. For the EWF we are an all ages festival, celebrating the fact that writers can move from aspiring to doing at any age so the title may confuse our participants.

In the plus side for the Emerging title is the fact that we explore the newer forms, you could of course call them the emerging forms of writing. The EWF aims to explore, discuss and examine what will be the new forms of writing, and through our festival of ideas sessions arguing the now issue for writing. We aim as a festival to be active and not reactive a big call but our history has shown we have been ahead of the game with what we have looked at. Thus yes, we are an Emerging Writers festival

The sealer for me on why the name is the best name for the festival at this time is that we aim to be a community festival, a community of writers of all genres, of all ages and of all backgrounds who, for one weekend manage to leave our writing spaces and interact with each other, to inspire each other and to remember that however isolated we feel, there are many many others who are out there,, all of whom we meet when the emerge from their writing locales and descend on the Melbourne Town hall

David Ryding
Director

FESTIVAL STAFF

David Ryding - 2008 Director

David has worked as director, dramaturge and arts worker, working consistently with new Australian writers. He was most recently Artistic Director for Mainstreet Theatre Company, a company dedicated to new Australian writing about Regional Australia. While with them he directed Waiting, Welcome to Paradise and the multi award winning The Sad Ballad of Penny Dreadful.  Recent freelance directing work includes Stories of Suburban Road for the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, fourplay for Act o Matic 3000 and Dogs Barking for Perth Theatre Company

Prior to his role with Mainstreet, he was Associate Director for Barking Gecko, for whom he wrote Sarenas Song, Hot Dogs and Littlest Bird, which toured Western Australia in 2004. He also assisted Grahame Gavin on Mice, Own Worst Enemy and 1001 Nights, and directed The Rodeo Kid and The Buzz (in 2002, 2003 and 2004) as well as managing all of Barking Gecko’s many and varied participation and community programs, a highlight of which was the award winning Leonora Project, a two-year Community Cultural development project in the Western Australian mining town of Leonora.

David has also sat on the Black Swan Theatre Companies BSX Youth theatre, I-gnites Editorial Committee and the City of Yarra Arts Advisory Board. He has conducted Community Cultural Development programmes in Broome, Kalgoorlie and Denmark and taught script writing across Western Australia as part of the WA State Literature Centres Writers on the Road program. In a former life he was a Youth Worker and ran camps for the YMCA.

Email: director (at) emergingwritersfestival.org.au

Volunteering

There are plenty of opportunities to get some hands-on festival experience. In 2007 the festival's success was made possible by 35 hard working volunteers. Stay tuned for volunteer opportunities in 2008 by joining the EWF elist.

EMERGING WRITERS' FESTIVAL BOARD

Angela Woods -  Chair

Angela lectures and tutors in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is the Melbourne Expeience Coordinator at the universitiy's School of Graduate Studies. She has recently been awarded her PhD: an analysis of the way schizophrenia has been represented in clinical and cultural theory. Angela has published articles on the connections between schizophrenia and cyborgs, terrorism and fascist corporeality; she has also been an editor and symposia-convenor for Australia’s longest-running postgraduate journal, antiTHESIS. When let loose from the ivory tower, Angela worked as an Editorial Advisor for ABC Arts Television.

Christian Gusner - Treasurer

Christian is Director of Corporate Services for MLC, an independant private school in Melbourne. He has 22 years of broad strategic and commercial experience in education, banking, legal services, not-for-private organisations and private companies. Christian has skills in strategic marketing and planning, budgeting and performance monitoring and best practice governance.

Lorien Kaye - Secretary

Lorien has worked in and around the book industry for 10 years. She currently freelances as a writer, editor and researcher on all things book-ish. Her most regular gig is reviewing two books a week for The Age, and her commissions have ranged from editing a book on street art to compiling a potted history of Australian bookselling over 80 years. She is a former editor of Australian Bookseller & Publisher and the Weekly Book Newsletter, trade publications covering all aspects of the book industry. As the inaugural recipient of the Unwin Trust UK–Australian Fellowship, she spent three months in London researching the UK book industry.

Ross Karavis

Ross Karavis is a former marketing coordinator at RMIT University, director of the Antipodes Festival, the Australian Greek arts and cultural festival and the Chinese New Year Festival. Ross has extensive broadcasting experience as well as tertiary sector experience, including managing the Masters in Creative Writing and the Doctor of Creative Writing at UTS, Sydney. He has also worked for the Australian Publishers' Association, organising industry training courses and their annual Book Design Awards. Academic qualifications include a BA (Hons) in Politics and History from Flinders University, a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Technology, Sydney and Ross is one day hoping to finish his Masters in Gastronomy from the University of Adelaide. Ross has been Secretary of the Express Media Management Committee since November 2005.

Rohini Sharma

Rohini Sharma is CEO of Kultour, a national multicultural arts touring network. Rohini was Artistic Director of Express Media from 2005 - 2007, and Producer of the 2006 and 2007 Emerging Writers' Festivals. Pervious to moving to Melbourne Rohini spent four years working in London for Arts Council England and a small independent Indian Film Festival. In a former life Rohini was involved in theatre as a producer, performer, director, general-dogsbody and finally as a writer. Her plays have been workshopped by the ANPC, performed in Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney and London. Rohini has been writer-in-residence at Canberra Youth Theatre and written for arts magazines. Rohini has a BA (Hons) in Drama from ANU and a Graduate Diploma in Professional Writing from Canberra University.

Joel Becker

Joel has been Director of the VWC since 2002 after thirty years as a bookseller, freelance writer and editor, and cultural project manager.  He has written regular columns for The Sydney Morning Herald, Cairns Post and Western Advocate, and co-authored a book for Choice Publications. His clients have included Gleebooks, Readings, Currency Press, the Australian Foundation for Culture and the Humanities (now AbaF) and the Australia Council for the Arts. Joel is immediately past-President of the Arts Industry Council. He is currently on the Writers & Readers Committee at the State Library, the Boards of Free Speech Victoria and Emerging Writers’ Festival. Joel is also President of the Fairfield Primary School Council and has been on the judging panels of the Premiers Literary Awards and the State Library Creative Fellowships.

Sophie Cunningham

Sophie Cunningham worked in publishing for 15 years.  She now works as a writer and journalist. She was a founder of Loud: the Media Festival of Youth Culture and the Arts and has sat on a range of arts boards and committees. Her first novel, Geography, was published in 2004 and her second, Bird is due out next year.