ALMOST AS soon as I checked into my hotel in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, a woman jumped or fell into the harbor and drowned. When I pulled my curtains open—drawn to the window by the buzz of a helicopter and a speedboat casting searchlights onto the water—I saw nothing at first, and proceeded to unpack my bags.
I was there for the 11th edition of the Sydney Writers Festival, reputedly the world’s third largest literary festival (don’t ask me what the other two are—I forgot to ask), bringing together over 300 writers, some 70 of them from overseas like myself, to what had become a very fashionable corner of the harbor city. This was Walsh Bay, and our hotel, the Sebel Pier One, was, as its name suggested, a rough old 1920s warehouse on the pier converted into a posh hotel. Form a vantage point you could see both the Harbour Bridge very close by and the Opera House in the distance. The venues for the SWF were mainly the buildings on the other piers—so, as with much of Sydney, we were never too far from the water.
It was an apt metaphor—the water as our Mother, our blood, our home—underscored by the woman’s sad demise (I’m presuming the sadness; I didn’t even know it was a she, until I read the papers the next morning; when I opened my window again, the harbor police were loading someone onto a body bag and a gurney, so I knew something terrible had happened.) It wasn’t the best of omens for the week ahead, but I wasn’t about to trivialize one person’s passing into a sign; I chose to take it as a reminder of the urgency of what we artists do—to capture the passing scene and then to redraw and to frame it for others to marvel at.
Indeed, Jeanette Winterson’s opening address—delivered before a capacity crowd at the Opera House, many of them having paid good money to hear her speak (as they would all week for us writers—how amazing is that?)—dwelt on the necessity of art, on its even more vital role in a world taken over by pragmatists, corporations, governments, and Disney mania. “Festivals like this [respond] to a need, to a hunger, to an impulse in people. That tells me that people's genuine natural creative impulses, both to make and participate, are real and they want those instincts to be fed." Winterson added, quoting Susan Sontag: “Art isn’t just about something; it is something.”
And what a something it was from Wednesday to Sunday, as the SWF got into high gear and I dashed like a madman from session to session, catching up with Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis in one of the SWF’s most intriguing panel discussions, on “grit” and “gloom and doom” in literature; her new novel, The Solemn Lantern Maker, had just been published by Murdoch Books. My own Soledad’s Sister had also just come off the press, rushed by Anvil Books so I could have some copies to show and sell, and a trade was quickly made. (Fellow UP professor and ANU graduate Jose Wendell Capili was also at the festival, to launch a new book on Filipino-Australian writing that he co-edited, titled Salu-Salo.)
Over the week I would make the acquaintance of writers of all kinds—subdued, funny, sensational. On the bus to the Opera House a gentle, bespectacled American in his 60s took the seat next to me and we began chatting about our daughters, both of them now in California; his name sounded familiar; he was his father’s junior, and James Reston had been a titan of American journalism, but James Reston Jr. had, I would later find, written more than a dozen scholarly books on everything from the Inquisition to the Civil War and Richard Nixon. Over cocktails at the Sydney Club, I ran into another fellow named Matt Costello, who had also written crime novels and screenplays but whose most interesting work, to me, was scripting computer games. Another man, only in his early 30s, had written and published a thick memoir—normally a presumptuous exercise at such a young age, but then Naldo Rei had joined the guerrillas in East Timor as a courier at the age of 9, and had gone in and out of prison since then, before studying in Australia and seeing freedom come to his country, whose government he now advises.
Sunday was my busiest day; in the morning I sat on a panel with Indian-Canadian novelist David Davidar and Singaporean poet Felix Cheung, for a “Spotlight on Asia” session, where we gamely took apart the notion of a single, inscrutable “Asia”, as we were as different from each other as Australians were from Americans. That afternoon I shared a session with the festival’s other big star aside from Winterson, Pulitzer prizewinner (for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) Junot Diaz; what a privilege and challenge, I thought, to be the only other one onstage with him, aside from our moderator, Australian novelist Antoni Jach. But Junot was such a warm and friendly person (and did I say brilliant?) that our one-hour conversation went by in a flash, and before I knew it the festival was over.
The exposure to a foreign audience was bracing and encouraging, but the most satisfying part of my Sydney sojourn was meeting with our compatriots, some of them old friends from the ‘70s. I gave talks to two groups in the public libraries of Parramatta and Hornsby in the Sydney suburbs, and was much heartened by the attendance and their response to a kababayan most of them had never heard of, much less read. Many also came to my session with Junot, and they went home poorer in the pocket but richer in signed copies of books by the both of us. (And here go my deepest thanks to Consul-General Tess Lazaro and her staff, and to Violi Calvert, Raych Stafford-Gaffney, Vicky Manalo, and so many others whose hospitality flattered me enormously. The NCCA, I should also say, supported my travel.) I shared a very special evening with two long-lost friends from high school, Nitz Axalan and Edwin Avila, and their spouses.
Oddly enough, I hardly spent anything on this trip—my only souvenir was a $15 cap I had to buy to ward off the chill of an Australian autumn—but my homebound luggage was seven kilos heavier, from all the books and, ah, the bottles of wine my Sydneysider friends sent me off with.
My last afternoon in Sydney went to a harbor cruise; writers begin as tourists, and maybe they also end as such, ever the visitor in a mutable landscape. The water sparkled everywhere I looked; I’m not sure what drove that woman to desperation, but there was something in the water that she saw, and which I didn’t, not just yet.