The Lit Fest Newsletter
Lockdown is easing but the future still looks very difficult to predict. The government has set up a Cultural Renewal Taskforce with the mission of getting the recreation and leisure sectors up and running. Whilst I have a lot of respect for Nicholas Serota, the list of participants also includes a couple of bankers, someone who made their money from contract publishing and a person that runs Christmas markets. There is noone from the music or publishing industries.
Melvin Benn, MD from Festival Republic, has put together an alternative plan to open up theatre, sport and festivals: The Full Capacity. The core idea is that everyone buying a ticket to an event would have to be tested beforehand. His worry is that social distancing will make many events unprofitable—a situation also highlighted by Michael Hann writing for Tortoise about how Glastonbury and other big pop festivals would have to adapt to social distancing. And while the government is still advising against organised events, some cracks are appearing. Fane Production have sold out a drive-in show in Enfield with the women from the Receipts podcast and in Canada the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival in British Columbia announced an outdoor event for 45 people - I am sure more outdoor literary events will follow.
Interview with Francesa Baker from the Margate Bookie
Francesa was kind enough to take time out to explain how the Margate Bookie (a festival we much admire) is coping with organising a festival at this difficult time. . .
Can you tell us how the Margate Bookie started and what is your role?
It all started in 2015 when Andreas Loizou decided to have a literary party in the town he grew up in. 80 people came, and most went to the pub afterwards. Now over 10,000 people have attended events.
I got involved three years ago doing podcasts, and my role has grown and expanded to being co-programmer. And I bloody love it. Bookie is an absolute highlight for me. I get to spend time with brilliant people chatting about books. It makes me fizz.
How has the festival grown?
It’s got a lot, lot bigger. We never thought so many top authors would want to come to Margate for the day. In the early days Andreas had to sell the idea of a day trip to Margate. Now we’re turning people down! Top alumni include Sathnam Sanghera, Louis de Bernieres, Dean Atta, Mark Billingham, Inua Ellams and more.
How do you involve the local community?
Our aim is to inspire a love of reading and writing. The events engage the local community and visitors in literary and artistic activities, encouraging them into spaces and experiences they haven’t previously enjoyed.
Margate is an area of high social deprivation and isolation. Our wraparound events create safe spaces for writers. Our community events turn individuals into communities. The high quality names at the litfests inspire the audience and our mentoring schemes and courses support their creativity.
In the real world we operate from Turner Contemporary, which has been part of the economic revival of Margate, and run events at local venues around the community.
And we always pay our artists.
How do you differ from other festivals?
We see ourselves as a friendly and accessible litfest for everyone, including people who wouldn’t ordinarily think a literary festival was for them. Our identity as 'the friendly lit fest by the sea' is backed up by author and audience feedback on the positive, inclusive atmosphere we create. Through our authors and audiences we are changing sector and public perceptions of literature.
We want literature to be a part of everyday life in Margate, a source of inspiration that communities interact with every day. Stories build understanding between different people and cultures and so we want to inspire people to express themselves creatively. Our outreach activities provide taster sessions, co-creation and reading aloud groups with partner organisations in settings these audiences will be comfortable with.
What had you planned for this year and how have you had to adapt?
When COVID-19 happened we already had our Write UP! writing weekend and a four day festival in July planned. We quickly took the writing weekend online, and sold out in a few days, and rethought the rest of the programme. The Bookie team is full of absolute geniuses and we’ve come up with a very imaginative programme of 12 events between July and December. It begins with storytelling for the children of key workers who are in lockdown over the summer and ends with a literary salon. In between you’ll find author evenings, a 90 page fanzine and the world’s lowest-budget film festival. There’s a poetry competition that mimics the 2020 Euros, fantastic creativity courses and a wellness weekend. There’s also a virtual walking tour of literary Margate that’s going to blow your mind.
What are your ambitions for the festival over the next five years?
We aim to attract national and international talent to be part of Kent's vibrant literary scene while building year-round high quality, accessible experiences for our audiences. We want our audience to have a deep and long-lasting engagement with the Margate Bookie. The core Margate Bookie team have all seen first-hand how literature can transform lives and communities and we have an ambition to put literature on par with the visual arts as part of Margate's cultural revival.
What value do you think literary festivals offer in today's society?
They don’t change big social and political issues. But they do change lives. They create a sense of community and connection, through bringing people together in a literal sense, but also through the transformative power of literature. They open up people’s minds to a new way of thinking, and make them see things in a different light.
Our courses and activities provide real tangible skills. Through work with the Prince’s Trust, as an example, we have really had an impact on education and employability skills.
We’ve seen local poets grow in stature and confidence, buoyed by their experience at the poetry slams. Our volunteers have gained experience and skills that have enhanced their professional development. And lifelong friendships have been formed.
There was one little old lady who seemed a bit intimated by the crowds at the festival. Could she come in, she asked with a tear in her eye, because her grandson had been on our writing course. She told us that was the first time he’d left the house that year, and now his poem was up on the wall of the Turner…
Twitch Explodes
Best known as a place where people watch other people play video games, Amazon owned live streaming platform Twitch has seen an explosion in popularity for music and talk content. This fascinating article in Bloomberg explores the way that musicians have started using it to speak with their fans.
‘What YouTube is for music videos, Instagram is for photos and TikTok is for memes, Twitch is becoming for live performance and conversations. In May, people spent almost 27 million hours watching live music and other performing arts on Twitch, according to StreamElements, more than five times January’s total. And music is now one of the top 15 genres on the site’.
Although Twitch is used by lots of podcasts, I can’t see that any publishers or festivals have yet opened channels. There are, however, a number of smallish book related streams including this German grandma that reads out kids stories. The cult painting teacher, Bob Ross, is also a Twitch phenomenon with almost 1.5 million followers.
Google Docs Party Time
My daily work life is now dominated by Zoom, Google hangouts and Skype sessions—so much so that I feel a real reluctance to go back to them for leisure. So I am always interested in new ways to communicate with people online. The curator Marie Foulson (she curated the brilliant video game exhibition at the V&A) recently experimented with a Google Docs Party which she writes about here.
‘Social video calls exhaust me. Face to face, voice to voice, with nothing in between. Communication so literally and abstractly boiled down to staring at and talking at each other’s faces. The only other times I think I interact with people this way in “the real world” are in job interviews or meetings.
‘Where is the space for the mundane, the idle, and the liminal… those subtle and nuanced moments that also come with being together?
‘How does it feel to be with someone and to know their presence not through their face, or voice, or a humanoid avatar, but just silently knowing which cell of a spreadsheet they just clicked on?’
(different sheets were used for different activities like this one for paint by numbers)
Escape to Ancient Greece
I have mentioned here before that escape rooms are a format ripe for literary festivals to adopt and adapt, so I was interested to see that the Actors of Dionysus, a theatre company that is UK’s leading interpreters in the field of Ancient Greek drama, have created an online escape room based around the play Lysistrata.
Thank you for reading!
That’s it for this newsletter. Please follow us on twitter, add us to your press release list and feel free to get in touch if there is anything you would like us to write about: mathew@bookamp.co.uk. It is has been brilliant to see the way the newsletter has been adopted by our small community - we now go out to over 500 festival organisers, bookshops, publishers and authors - you can get your fellow lit festival colleagues to sign up here.