It’s all about taking books to the people

It’s the 20th edition of The Time of the Writer Festival, which begins tomorrow at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre and various other venues until Sunday. asked invited writers Bronwyn Law-viljoen and Sibongile Fisher to interview each other about their jour

the past paving the way for the future? You have had a longer career and have witnessed the shift. Are there enough crossgenerational conversations and platforms?

BLV: I struggle to speak in broad terms about this so I will try to answer this from the point of view of my own teaching in an academic department, and from my experience of independent publishing.

One of the things I teach my students in creative writing is to find new terms, new words; that their job as writers is not to settle for words and phrases and categories that have become muddy and empty of meaning, that are shortcuts. Words like “transformation” and “decolonisation” have become what I call shortcut words, they have stopped doing any work.

Tell me about some of the writers who have been important to you, and why they have been important?

SF: My world is informed more by the music I listen to than the books I read. Hip hop has been one long book written by different people all over the world. People who experience life as I do. Writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have bridged this lyrical gap for me.

I have also found solace in the writings of Virginia Woolf.

Black female writers are important to me. Professor Pumia Gqola’s writings are shaping my experience of the world as a political subject and I enjoy poetry from young poets such as Safia Elhillio and Vuyelwa Maluleka. There are so many writers that have played an instrumental role in how I see the world and why I write.

I am yet to publish a book or an anthology and the one question that races through my mind is: Will the book reach the hands of a person who experiences life as I do?

I ask myself this because I find that book festivals are not as open as they need to be.

Although I find that they are very necessary, and not for the self-indulgent writer, but for the networking and needed engagement with one’s audience.

What are your views on this? Are book festivals necessary and are they open enough?

BLV: The answer to this is manifold. You will have to do some of that work yourself by asking your publisher to make your book available in places where readers who have your experience of life will have access to it.

There are many places to have book launches and readings and discussions about books – writers should be prepared to work with their publishers to find such places.

For one thing, we should all, as writers, champion the community library, insist on readings and launches in the libraries in our own neighbourhoods.

I remember that the library close to where I grew up was a profoundly important and formative influence on my relationship with literature. The other part of your question concerns book festivals. They tend to be white and middle class events.

If they are uncomfortable for you as a black writer they are also uncomfortable for me as a white writer, though perhaps for different reasons.

They are weirdly rarefied spaces that often do very little to shift the terms of reference for anyone. I am not sure how to change this because the festival is so deeply rooted in the economies of book buying and in all kinds of cultural assumptions about literature and books. Literary festivals have always felt to me like cocktail parties instead of sit-down dinners. And I prefer sit-down dinners – meals with interesting people with conversations and debates that go on for hours and that make you exercise your brain about the world and fight – with good humour – about things.

Do you think that it is possible to reinvent the literary festival? And if so, what would it be?

SF: I know that the Abantu Book Festival is a space where I would feel comfortable. Not because I identify with the organisers but because the festival has opened itself to young writers. It also incorporates writing of all forms.

Sibongile Fisher won the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize for Short Fiction for A Door Ajar.

Bronwyn Law-viljoen is an associate professor and head of creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand and the author of The Printmaker