| The second National Young Writers' Festival incorporated
Electrofringe '99 and the National Student
Media Conference, in a gathering which defined itself in opposition to
existing Australian writers' festivals. While writers' events in
Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne could be described as Literary festivals,
the event in Newcastle decried books as a commodity form, and set out to
privilege "ideas as they are written down and as they are
applied" -– not only in books and newspapers, but especially
"in magazines, in zines, in comics, on radio, in the student press,
on the Internet, on film; and anywhere else you may choose to apply
them" (festival programme). It was, declared one of the festival
managers, Marcus Westbury, in the festival programme, "a festival
about infecting, dissecting, and (sometimes) rejecting the public
culture. It is about ideas that are breeding, and not ideas that are on
a life support system".
The importance of having a festival of this kind is articulated by
Sunanda Creagh in her contribution to this M/C Reviews feature.
In the Nietzschean spirit of the
festival, Creagh's words are a call to action for her readers to continue
to participate in youth cultures, but also to recognise the importance of
engaging with the official, public culture.
In the following review articles, the sheer diversity of the youth
cultures present at the festival is all too apparent. Paul Elliott (aka
Gonzo Macmillan) lauds the choice of sessions available at any one time
during the festival. His experience was different to that of Adam Ford
who often took time out from the festival to explore other aspects of
Newcastle, including the excellent range of vegetarian food and pulp
fiction that the city had to offer. Back at the festival, Felicity
Meakins questioned the use of "young" to describe some
participants, whose receding hair lines called their status as
"youth" into disrepute. Perhaps the unexpected range of ages
at this young writers' festival might be explained by the reviews
submitted by Alex Burns and Axel Bruns (no, that's not a typo, they are
two different people!). Burns's and Bruns's focus on the Electrofringe '99
stream of the festival show that the question of age is sometimes
unimportant -– you can be as young as you want to be in cyberspace, right?
Thankfully, you can also wear whatever you want, as Simon Mee wishes to stress
in his poetic response to the "Retromortis" panel which featured Richard
Fidler.
The timing of the National Young Writers' Festival coincided with the
official closure of BHP
in Newcastle. As a significant chapter of the city's history
came to an end, it is clear that there are many who have already begun
writing drafts for a new chapter, one that will be a "challenge to
action", and one that will almost certainly be published on the
Internet... Click here to read the first contributions to that chapter,
collected in the M/C Reviews National Young Writers' festival feature.
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