All posts tagged: Wayne Macauley

Cooking our way to salvation: Jim Hearn and Wayne Macauley

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Can we cook our way to salvation? This is the question posed to Jim Hearn (researcher, filmmaker, chef and author of High Season: A Memoir of Hospitality and Heroin), and Wayne Macauley (highly acclaimed and awarded author of many titles including his most recent, The Cook) by Michaela McGuire (writer, columnist and author, Melbourne’s Women of Letters Salon host) in the Blue Marquee on the final afternoon of the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. Two very “real” authors sit facing the crowd from the stage, “real” as in honest and approachable. Jim Hearn and Wayne Macauley have a common thread in their writing; both their recent books are set inside commercial kitchens, but that is where the similarities end. Hearn’s experiences in High Season are gritty and real-to-life. Set locally in Byron Bay, it is a memoir reflecting upon the reality of chefing and the toll it can take on one’s life. He describes the havoc on our “actual, physical body” that long hours and unforgiving schedules creanjte, the roller coaster ride of adrenalin that fast-paced …

Australia’s literary tradition is still a work-in-progress

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Jane Gleeson-White, Shane Maloney, Wayne Macauley, John Tranter and Susan Wyndham enjoyed a humorous debate on our literary heritage centering the conversation around ‘what is a classic’ and does Australia have any? Gleeson-White was well placed to chair as she holds degrees in literature and economics and is the author of Double Entry,  Australian Classics and Classics. Shane Maloney is the author of the much-loved Murray Whelan series and his books have enjoyed worldwide success. Wayne Macauley’s short fiction and novels have been widely acclaimed, John Tranter has published more than twenty collections of verse and Susan Wyndham is a published author and literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. Wyndham pointed out that most of us read the English classics when we were young, Winnie the Pooh, Beatrix Potter and Alice in Wonderland have taught children to love reading. These books are usually given to them by their parents who had enjoyed them themselves, thus the status of classic comes to a book in part through the process of handing them down from one …

Life comes before writing

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Gathered in the ABC3 Marquee, would-be writers and connoisseurs of the short story scribbled notes and absorbed the wisdom of specialists Arnold Zable (chair), Nick Earls, Wayne Macauley and newcomer Laksmi Wilson, winner of the Heading North young writer’s competition 2012. Zable opened with a condensed and informative run-down on the history of the short story, taking the audience on a tour of extraordinary diversity from Chekhov’s ‘tales of quiet desperation’, past James Joyce and his love of epiphanies, Virgina Wolfe’s affection for the ‘moment of being’ to Raymond Carver’s moody, dirty realism. For Zable, the mood, the epiphany, the ‘moment’ are the hallmark of a good story, a strategy he intentionally incorporated in his last two novels Fig Tree and Violin Lessons. The birthplaces for his ideas are the observations he makes while going about his life, journal and pen at the ready, jotting down images and fragments of sentences as they float past his conscious mind. He described watching a young woman walk along the Tigres River with her father while he sang …