The sixth Ubud Writers and Readers Festival is just on the cusp of becoming an office-load of staff and volunteers working to bring you a stellar cast of writers from around the world and spruiking their impending arrival. And while many will come especially to hear them speak about their work, the festival also provides the ideal launching pad for those who have always wanted to take the next step from reading and listening to writing and performing. How to perform a poem, writing for stage and screen, the art of the short story, biography, travel writing, editing, unblocking. All are the creations of experienced writers, devised to release the writer inside you or to finesse the one already practising.
Award winning Australian children’s fiction writer and illustrator Alison Lester, author of Are we there yet? and 25 other books for children and young adults will show how to move your story to the page in words and pictures transforming everyday anecdotes to magical form; a chance to finally write a book for your children. None of us lack stories - they are arguably the things that make us who we are, ever-evolving narratives told, retold and built upon, and the ability to relate them to others is a skill most of us take for granted. So what’s the problem? None, with Alison to talk you through it.
With the celebrity cast and crew of Eat, Pray, Love, the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling novel, expected to be rubbing shoulders with the literati at this year’s festival, it seems timely to speak of adaptation. For those wanting to launch their stories from the page to the screen and perhaps to one day land them in the laps of the likes of Julia and Brad, UK based filmmaker Asitha Ameresekere will be here to help. Thankfully, Asitha is currently more involved at the personal and poetic end of filmmaking - the sort you can start to explore immediately without mega buck budgets. Two samples of his work, 14 and the BAFTA Award-winning short Do Not Erase, will have a free screening at Casa Luna (as will adventurer Lawrence Blair’s The Dream Wanderers of Borneo, Malaysian dynamo Amir Muhammad’s Year of Living Vicariously, and Haitian sex god Dany Laferriere’s Heading South. The writers/filmmakers themselves will be on hand to tell you everything you need to know (and probably a lot you didn’t know you needed to know).
Surprisingly, to my knowledge, none of Michelle Cahill’s poems have so far been the subject of a film, although, after doing Asitha’s workshop you may want to proposition her. She has, however, continued to line her literary trophy cabinet with prestigious accolades; her Hindu poems were recently highly commended by the prestigious Australian Blake Poetry Prize committee. Michelle will be running two workshops for poets at the festival: one directed at finding creative pathways through the infernal block to grasp the voices and narratives waiting on the other side; the second addresses ways to edit and further refine your work.
Depending on the swell, Jaimal Yogis, writer, photographer and surfer will sit on the metaphoric steps of the agora to discuss with paid-up workshop participants the evolution of surf writing, a journalistic genre all of its own located somewhere deep in the hollow between travel, sport, science and nature, lifestyle and philosophy. In the process he will help you locate your own creative niche in a burgeoning market, harnessing the power of waves to propel you forward in your journalistic and literary careers.
Couch surfer Brian Thacker, whose latest book Sleeping Around received an award for best travel book in 2009, invites you to join him on an early morning ramble through the rice fields, an intimate ‘jalan jalan’ along the ridge behind Campuan. On the way he’ll regale you with stories from his current travel-writing project, which retraces Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s journey through Southeast Asia using the first ever Lonely Planet South East Asia on a Shoestring (1975) as his only guidebook. Incidentally, Brian thinks that Ubud is a truly magical place because he first met his girl friend and soul-mate on the jalan jalan walk led by Tony Wheeler at last year’s Ubud Writer’s Festival. They’ve been together ever since. Brian and his girlfriend that is, not Brian and Tony.
But wait, there’s more. There’s a photography workshop, workshops for children and a series of cultural workshops designed to give basic introductions to other modes of storytelling from cooking and the language of plants, to batik and the art of Balinese offerings. Pick up a copy of the full program now!
