“One of the things that I’ve really focused on is creating more ways for people to come and engaged with the festival, even when there’s no events on,” explains Dempster from her office situated in the The Wheeler Centre. “While we still have a lot of panels, performance events and everything [that] you would expect from this festival, we also have a new festival hub, [including] a few arts activities happening down at Federation Square,” including Word on the Square, a free event featuring an installation of 100 giant-sized wooden letters that can be used to create poems, play scrabble or nine-letter word games, or even teach children the alphabet. “We’ve [also] got more social media stuff happening. So, I think it’s going to have much more of a festival vibe.”
This importance of creating an interactive and inviting atmosphere is paramount to Dempster, who founded the EWFdigital for the Emerging Writers Festival — an online programming stream that featured events and discussion on the Emerging Writers Festival web portal, in real-time — and created Australia’s first Digital Writers’ Conference in 2011, as it creates an environment that audiences can engage with and help shape and create, as exhibited by the Big Ideas program of Melbourne Writers Festival.
“We had a lot of talk about this and when I put together the festival program I wanted it to be reflective of the conversations that people are having at this time. [Therefore,] with the federal election happening this year, it was really obvious to us here at Melbourne Writers Festival that the Big Ideas should be tapping into those conversation that we’re happening,” says Dempster, iterating how discussions like Anne Summers’ Keynote: Feminism, Misogyny, Power tap into the sexism within Australian politics which had pervaded the media since former PM Julia Gillard’s speech on Tony Abbott’s misogyny and hypocrisy. “Some of them are direct tie-ins — Bob Brown and Mark Latham [Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-Left Future] — but we’ve also got commentators and a lot of people talking about the issues that are coming up in the election, like refugees [Big Ideas: Alan Missen Oration: Border Vigils – How Far Can Governments Patrol Migration?] and Tradition Versus Development.”
“We just wanted [Big Ideas] to go beyond a media sound bite,” assures Dempsters, extrapolating that social media has a large impact on our views and the news we receive. “We live in a 24/7 news cycle and the media moves so quickly. We wanted to actually make these moments where people could come along and think deeply about a topic that’s going to be very important to the future of Australia.”
This idea about the affect of social media and the digitalization of information transcends Big Ideas and is spread throughout the festival program, particularly in New News, a panel series dedicated to the evolution of journalism and the issues that currently affect it.
“New News is driven by Margaret Simons and the Centre for Advancing Journalism,” explains the director, who is interesting herself in social media and its effect. “I have a real interest in how the digital sphere is changing our culture and it’s a theme that has been picked up right across the Melbourne Writers Festival. I think, in terms of journalism and the future of journalism, it’s just something that is a hot topic at the moment and there’s so much to talk about, because it feels like Twitter and social media has been around forever, but actually, it’s a very new for us to be communicating in this way and [consequentially], our traditional structures about how we talk about the news are changing radically and people are very scared about that, but some people are very excited about that. There’s plenty to talk about and I feel like journalists want to talk about it, news outlets wanted to talk about it and readers want to talk about it, so it seemed like a perfect time to bring it all into the festival.”
Interestingly, this is Dempster’s first year as the Melbourne Writers Festival Director, following her predecessor’s, Steve Grimwade, successful debut of The New Yorker at the festival last year.
“It’s been fantastic and amazing and nerve-wracking at times,” enthuses Dempster, explaining how her years directing Emerging Writers Festival helped manage this prolific directing role. “They’re very different festivals. The things that have been the most exciting for me has been that Melbourne Writers Festival is an International Writers Festival. So, when I first came into that role I was able to look at all the writers around the world and think: ‘Who should we bring to Melbourne? Who should we have talking to our audiences here? Who are the most exciting writers working today?’, and that was fantastic. I’ve been able to bring out Harvey from The Moth and Boris Johnson [Mayor of London, ex-journalist and one-time editor of The Spectator] and that’s been absolutely thrilling.”
BY AVRILLE BYLOK-COLLARD
