Herding Kites: A celebration of Australian writing

The National Young Writers' Festival (NYWF) in Newcastle is not your average writers' festival. It's a place for discussions about writing - about the craft, the practise, the point of writing - instead of existing primarily to promote book sales.

Every year the NYWF features a vibrant mix of performance poets, bloggers, novelists, screenwriters, journalists, zinesters, short story writers, comic book authors and more; mixing it up, arguing, drinking, engaging, speaking and thinking; and they comprise the audience, too, which results in some truly feisty questions being asked of the speakers on a standard festival panel.

I was invited to attend the very first NYWF in 1998, where I spoke about queer zines on one panel and the art of spoken word performance on another; and for several years thereafter, the trek up to 'Newie' each October became a much anticipated annual event.

For the 2000 festival I programmed the spoken word stream of the program, while for a few years after that, in my then-role as Artistic Director of the youth literature organisation Express Media, I helped ensure that some of the country's best and brightest young writers were part of the festival program.

I haven't attended the NYWF for a couple of years now - at 41 I think I'm a bit too old to be considered a 'young writer' - but god I miss its energy, and the sense of validation attending the festival bestows. Which is why, when earlier this year I was asked to submit a piece of writing for potential inclusion in a new anthology commemorating the NYWF's first decade, I jumped at the chance. When I heard that my submission had been accepted and would be published in Herding Kites: A Celebration of Australian Writing, I was overjoyed.

Herding Kites had its belated Melbourne launch on Wednesday evening, at Trades Halls' Bella Union Bar. Edited by Michael Williams (one third of the Triple R Breakfasters and a freelance editor and reviewer, among other things), the book is a collection of play scripts and poems, short stories and essays, comics and zine extracts, that's as ecclectic as the festival it celebrates.
To quote a review in The Independent Weekly, Herding Kites features "well known and lesser-known talent", a line-up which signifies "the NYWF ethos – ‘open to all’ and ‘infectiously participatory’."

Authors - apart from myself - include 'established' names such as novelists Linda Jaivin, Max Barry and Sophie Cunningham, and writer and illustrator Shaun Tan, alongside many of my friends, peers and fellow festival-goers: including spoken word performer and Going Down Swinging co-editor Lisa Greenaway, zinesters Vanessa Berry and Luke You, poet alicia sometimes, comic book artists Mandy Ord and David Blumenstein, artist Tai Snaith, and many, many more. There's writing for every mood and moment, and every taste.

Herding Kites is a fantastic collection - and not just because my short story 'It's Not Just Cricket' (written in 2002 for a performance featured in the cultural program of the Gay Games VI in Sydney) is included within its pages. Please support Australian writers, and go buy a copy immediately.

Herding Kites: A Celebration of Australian Writing, edited by Michael Williams, published by Affirm Press (paperback, 288pp, RRP $27.95, ISBN:9780980374643)