Congrats, Clunes

During my Sunday morning leisurely read a few hours ago, I came across a piece about Clunes Booktown, which since April has actually been an accredited international booktown, one of only 15 such towns in the world. Ever since I moved from St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne, and had to give up my easy access to all the festivals that go hand in hand with living in a capital city much enamoured with artistic exhibitions, the closeness of Clunes, and the many other regional Victorian festivals that are springing up all around me, have gone a long way towards fulfilling my cultural needs. Yes, I know Melbourne is just a train trip away, but after a week of commuting, the thought of popping down for a film festival tends to make me groan. And besides, my focus has shifted to the place where I now live, as it should.

Anyway, what caught my eye about this piece was how the three organisers emphasised their determination to maintain the Clunes event as a "festival of books" as opposed to a writer's festival. That made me smile. I could almost read into the line - and I'd like to point out that this is an entirely subjective interpretation of their remark - a gritty resolve to not let the purity of the Clunes event  "degenerate" into a writer's festival, which would inevitably be about egos, personalities jostling for the biggest marquee spaces and the grubby art of promoting products. You have to admit, they have a point. Impoverished writers desperately scrabbling for attention so they can make a living doing what they love can tend towards dominating proceedings.

 As it is, Clunes is about the finished work, the book that leaves its author's brain and goes on out into the world to take on a life of its own. No matter how much writers might loudly claim otherwise, the popular perception is that once it's published, a book becomes the property of all its readers. It goes through a myriad of reinterpretations as it filters though the minds and experiences of countless individuals, some of whom, if the writer is very very lucky, think the book was actually written just for them. That said, those same readers can become quite upset if the writer, who has no clue about their own creation obviously, dares to contradict readers' cherished preconceptions about the book.

Clunes Booktown is more about the cult of collecting rather than the cult of celebrity, hence the joy of stashing countless shopping bags on the backseat of the car before you set off in an optimistic anticipation of a gigantic book haul. Who cares about the bleeding writers? It's all about finding that out-of-print book you've been searching for for years. It's about finding old magazines and obscure texts that make you quiver with excitement. It's about coming home with a stack of treasured tomes higher than yourself and the joyous anticipation of leafing through all those many many pages.

So back off, writers! Clunes Booktown is not all about you.