Inner Worlds at Addi Road
Image: Eda Gunaydin (and Miro Bilbrough), ‘Inside the Confession Machine’ panel at the 2022 Addi Road Writers’ Festival. Photo: Bleddyn Butcher
The Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2023 is a one day event with a hearty program of literary and artistic delights. This year’s theme is Inner Worlds, with guests and events seeking to explore the tension between real and imagined lives; between public and private persona and where the illusory and the manifest intersect.
The festival is funded by Addi Road Community Organisation with support from Inner West Council. Sessions are being held across two main venues: Gumbramorra Hall and the Drill Hall, and book sales and author signings will happen in the special pop-up Marquee Moon area.
There will also be an all-day exhibition in the StirrUp Gallery. Hold It by Stuart Spence is a mixed media installation that features a display of Spence’s photographic work and responses to those images from poets, songwriters, novelists and other visual artists. The responses are presented as written captions with the images, and a selection have been read and recorded by various friends of Spence. They can be accessed through a QR code.
QR codes will also be placed at various points throughout the festival grounds allowing visitors to access an audio installation called Passage [Re]visitation, a collection of recorded poetry, birdsong, and other sounds.
The main program is an eclectic mix of literary offerings. Some highlights include:
Bad Art Mother
Musician and author, Edwina Preston’s 2022 novel, Bad Art Mother, interrogates the societal expectations around being a selfless mother and the supposed inherent self-interest of pursuing artistic ambitions and whether the two can co-exist. She’ll be joined in conversation by poet, Magdalena Ball and poet Gillian Swain.
Pomegranates and Figs in Afghanistan
Zaheda Ghani’s debut novel Pomegranate & Fig (2022) examines tradition, family, war and displacement. Tracing the lives of three young people, the narrative takes us from the streets of Herat in the 1970s, invaded by Soviet forces, to India in the 1980s and then to the suburbs of Sydney. Pomegranate & Fig vividly illuminates the disruption, displacement and tragedy that war unleashes. Author, Ghani will be in conversation with writer and researcher, Zarlasht Sawari.
Songwriting – Muse or Machination?
Join Murray Cook (Warumpi Band, Mixed Relations, Midnight Oil, Mental As Anything) and Jim Moginie (Midnight Oil), Amanda Brown (The Go Betweens; REM) and Reg Mombassa (Mental As Anything; Dog Trumpet) in a conversation about originality, influence and theft inside the tower of song.
This sample barely scratched the surface of the diverse and fascinating sessions and speakers.
The festival will open with a welcome to country by Aunty Jenny Thomsen followed by an introduction to the day by Addi Road CEO Rosanna Barbero and Artistic Directors Mark Mordue and Sheila Ngoc Pham.
