Story Week 2024’s program to foster ‘Common-Unity’

This festival wants to close the distance between artist and audience.
A young man with fuzzy brown hair and dressed in shades of blue is standing up and reading from a book among a seated crowd of people.

“We have so many avenues for passive consumption of art: TV, film, books, songs. We don’t need another celebration that divides artist from audience,” the director of Story Week, Miles Merrill, explains to ArtsHub. “A lot of people want to be heard and seen. They want to participate in the creative process. Everyone has a story and an urge for creativity, otherwise YouTube would have failed. The aim of Story Week is to pass the mic around. Spin the spotlight around to people who aren’t ‘on the bill’. That’s what slams do and what our Story Dinners do – where everyone who attends shares a story and a meal. Story Week is a deepening the human experience beyond consumption to creative communication.”

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Thuy On is the Reviews and Literary Editor of ArtsHub and an arts journalist, critic and poet who’s written for a range of publications including The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, The Age/SMH and Australian Book Review. She was the Books Editor of The Big Issue for 8 years and a former Melbourne theatre critic correspondent for The Australian. She has three collections of poetry published by the University of Western Australian Press (UWAP): Turbulence (2020), Decadence (2022) and Essence (2025). Threads: @thuy_on123 Instagram: poemsbythuy