Quick Notes on the Melbourne Writers Festival #2

Featuring Claire Keegan and Bernadine Evaristo

This is my second and final post about the sessions I saw at this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival.

The benefit of a session that gets under my skin is that I could walk away with one thing — just one thing, I’m not greedy — that will make a difference to my writing. The danger of a session that gets under my skin is that I could forget the writer I am and walk out with the impression that what I need to become is the writer I just witnessed; I could derail myself, trying to be that writer for a time.

The Claire Keegan and Bernadine Evaristo sessions were highly stimulating.

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Claire Keegan (Small Things Like These) interviewed by Kate Evans of The Bookshelf 

Claire Keegan’s Booker Prize interview gives a flavour of the way she answers questions and that is why I didn’t hesitate to book a ticket to see her at MWF. (A caution: Claire talks about the ending of Small Things Like These in this video, in case you haven’t read it yet and think you might.)

Claire pushed back on Kate’s questions in a way that delighted the audience and made me glad it was Kate in that chair — someone so experienced and clever that she pursued Claire down every alley and embraced the dry Irish wit, which may otherwise be misinterpreted as downright awkwardness. It was fantastic.

This is what I took away:

Vintage photo of a woman with a pot of daffodils, courtesy of Suzy Hazlewood

1/ Mind your paragraphs. Sentences are gregarious.

Claire teaches her students how to write paragraphs. Not one brilliant sentence followed by another brilliant sentence followed by another, but crafting by paragraph instead. She used the image of a large pot of daffodils, their heads knocking together in a breeze. And she called sentences gregarious: “they love the company of other sentences”.