Melbourne Writers Festival – Day 5, Schoolies

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL: Grace and Sabrina Omar (photo by Allie Brill) www.1000pencils.com.au  

Between sessions during the week it can seem like there’s nobody at the Melbourne Writers Festival. All the dedicated volunteers are all still there though, the MWF crew of organisers are still dashing about, cheery even, despite the hours and the harassment. Where is everyone?

Then the doors open and students pour out, talking, pushing, checking who’s beside who, adjusting clothing. They’re moving clumps of colour with attitude. Uniformed teens sort of follow teachers, who long ago stopped bothering to try and keep their charges orderly. They shuffle around then all disappear again, into the next session.

Here are three examples of what they were listening to.

In the BMW Edge around 200 high school kids were talking football in literature in The Beautiful Game with Steven Herrick (Slice), Deborah Abela (Grimsdon, Max Remy Superspy, Jasper Zammit (Soccer Legend) series) and Phillip Gwynne (Deadly Unna, Nukkin Ya).

We love sport because it’s a form of theatre they said, full of great highs and lows, suspense, and stories. Sport has spurred fabulous and ridiculous language, played with and punted with pleasure. All the panellists use sport as a scaffold for telling universal stories. As Gwynne described it ‘what was played out on the field in my town was race’. In his award-winning Deadly Unna he talks about his hometown’s obsession with footy and the way Aboriginal kids from the settlement up the road were bussed down to play on the weekends.

Up in ACMI 1 James Roy author of Anonymity Jones was talking about the awful things writers do to their characters, working out what a character most wants then taking it away from them. Authors, especially YA authors I think, love making their characters miserable, throwing obstacles of every kind, just to see what they’ll do. Roy was relatively fluent in teen-speak, I’m sure they could pick his accent but they laughed when he said he lol-ed and I think that was nice of them. He got funnier deconstructing Stephanie Myers, impersonating the different communications methods of teen girls and boys, like yeah, ‘en that, and talked obsession, revenge and eating disorders.

On the other side of the corridor, in ACMI 2 Growing Pains were being explored with Lili Wilkinson (Pink ) and Jacqui Moriarty (Dreaming of Amerlia). The audience here was gushy, and a bit girly and listening to grown ups talk about how they remember how important it was to talk all the time to your friends, and the pressures of ‘fitting in’. They totally related to Lili ‘s trauma when she changed schools to McRob in Year 9. Suddenly, short ankle socks were out and you had to wear really long socks to be cool. They didn’t tell you that in orientation. No. No, they didn’t.

On how they got into writing, Jacqui told a great story about her incentive growing up to put pen to paper. Her dad paid pocket money on a commissioned basis. Filling an exercise book was the only way to earn an income. Every adult in the room was noting that one down.

Lili looks as though she’s barely left school herself, yet she’s totally excited for the next generation. You’re the first generation of true writers, she said. It’s not like when I was younger, where we only talked, Through twitter, blogs, text, you construct your identity through writing.

Writing gives us more than just identify though, doesn’t it? That’s why there is an empty chair in every session of the Festival in support of International PEN. The chair represents the writers who can’t come to festivals, who face persecution arrest, even death for putting pen to paper. The pre-record opener announces this at every session.

So I giggled when as the film played to start 1000 pencils from King Lake to Kabul, a volunteer rushed out to unstacked a chair from the pile in the corner and put it near the stage. It was a smile in sympathy of human fallibility not the PEN cause. And as the session got under way, what that chair represented really hit home.

The cinema screen filled with images of billowing smoke, an old Afghani man’s weathered face, mountain gums enflamed from earth to canopy, distant brown mountains and dry dust buildings, a city the colour of sand merges into teenagers in school uniforms standing in Fed Sq then to young boys selling bread in a bustling market a man stands beside a burnt out house brown skinned children smile. 1000 pencils.

It’s a slow pan and scan opener of stills encapsulating what happened to some King Lake kids who survived the Black Saturday fires of February 7, 2009 and their remarkable initiative to reach out to others their own age in Kabul.

Writing had become a need after the fires, a compulsion to express the experience, helping them to heal. Their own understanding of loss and generosity gave them a powerful empathy and desire to give back in some way to others who have lived through destruction and pain. Learning in class about a child in Kabul unable to find just a pencil to write her own stories struck a chord.

What started as raising money to send a 1000 pencils to Afghanistan along the way became a book of their stories of hope and survival. There were doubts of course, why would they feel for us when they’ve been through so much. But it was the same in reverse; children who had known only refugee camps and war thought they had nothing of importance to say.

With the encouragement of their teacher David Williams and the mentorship of YA author Neil Grant, however, Diamond Valley College and the International School of Kabul have written and combined their stories, shared their incredibly different lives, and forged friendships through publishing. 1000 Pencil from King Lake to Kabul will be re-released next year by Allen & Unwin.

For this session at the Melbourne Writers Festival, three of the students from Kabul have been flown to Melbourne along with their teacher, American Celeste Walberg. Sadly, three others ccouldn't come because of visas issues. They joined the King Lake kids on stage to give readings from the collection.

Amongst them Tess Pollock in her Diamond Valley uniform, with a shy smile reads her story from the lectern. It describes how she and her Mum so desperately fought the fires that surrounded their house on Black Saturday. With harrowing honesty she describes her hysteria, fear, the choking smoke, the silence as the fire front passed over them the devastation and the joy of survival.

Sabrina Omar in her beautifully told story takes us through her slow acclimatisation to Kabul. Born of Afgani parents but raised in Colorado her family returned to Afghanistan in 2007. To her this unknown homeland was a city of dust, bad traffic and destruction. Gradually that view has changed. Despite the continuing suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and helicopters flying over her school she can now see beauty.

There were a lot of teary emotional moments, cathartic in every sense of the word. Grant almost cries describing watching these kids from two countries sitting together on park swings, just talking together, as it life could be normal.

Local Kinglake parliamentary Danielle Green has been involved since the beginning of 1000 pencils and was able to pass on a $5,000 grant to buy iPads for the students to take back to Kabul, a pencil for a new century.

The three students from Kabul stood together to read in a round what they had found coming out to Australia, lush regrowth, new buildings, green where once there’d been devestation, Big Macs, and being forced to say, Collingwood is their favourite football team.

It’s amazing what a few words can do.

To learn more about 1000 Pencils visit www.1000pencils.com.au

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL
27 August to 5 September
For further information and ticketing go to www.mwf.com.au