Writers' week or Politics' week?

When our Festival of Arts began it was held every second year, not every year. There was also a week devoted to writers, people who had published books, people who reviewed them, editors, publishers and others in the book trade. 

I was fourteen when I first prowled quietly along even though I was "not published" and maybe "not even really a writer" I was made welcome, very welcome. Some of it was due to going along to help Judith Wright. Judith was a national treasure even then. People thought a lot of her. She was highly intelligent and very well informed. She was also very deaf. She made no secret of this. Back then hearing aids were clumsy affairs and the batteries for hers sat on her chest in a box about the size of cigarette packet. 

Judith wanted me there to help her follow discussions and conversations so that she could also participate in them. It was a very big ask of a very shy, very young, very immature teenager. It was also an incredibly steep learning curve. 

Over more than one Writers' Week I was introduced to writers I would never otherwise have met, people who were household names. I heard them discuss. I heard them argue. Occasionally the arguments would get a little heated but, for the most part, the discussions were civil. They were mostly about the writers' craft and reading. There was one session which probably taught me more in an hour than I would later try to learn in an entire term in teacher training college. I was hauled along to pubs and plied with lemon squash because I was too young to drink alcohol - and later discovered I have a genuine allergy to it. I went on picnics and school visits and an amazing "Persian BBQ".  And even now there are writers I met then with whom I exchange Christmas greetings and the occasional letter. They gave me a massive amount of support for International Literacy Year and they have gone on supporting me.

And it is all this which makes me now so uncomfortable to see the way Writers' Week has shifted. Yes, it probably did need to change focus from "writer" to "reader" but the focus has become a political rather than creative. There have been sessions for more one previous Prime Minister and more than one other politician to talk about politics. A look back over the last few festivals, now annual events, shows that these people come more from the left side of politics than the right. Does that matter? Perhaps they just write more books. There have been other highly controversial writers too. Again they are almost always left of centre, often far left.  Does that matter? Perhaps they are just writing material more worthy of presentation and discussion. I don't know.

What I do know is that this year it is unlikely I will even bother to sit very often in the small room off the library so I can watch and listen to some of the sessions by video-link. I really have had my fill of politics. There are more than 40,000 dead in the earthquake zone and that number is still rising. There are still people without food, water, shelter and more. They are just some of the people in this world who need help. I do not want to listen to those who tweet support for the invasion of Ukraine and who cannot see there are two sides to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.  I do not want to listen to people who tell me that I am responsible for the actions of people who lived long before I was born and that I must now pay reparations for those actions. No, I am not closing my mind to those things. I just don't choose to continually flay myself.

I hope I know it is more important to do some more work so that others can go and help those who need help. Writing something deliberately controversial, deliberately upsetting is not something I ever want to do - and I am not sure I want to read anything like that right now.  Yes of course reading should challenge our ideas at times. We should seek out new ideas and other points of view. That is one thing but listening to what amounts to hate of us and others is not that.