Writers’ Festivals and Dialogue

Online communities based around creativity and passion can be interesting beasts. Particularly if they exist also as an offline community because it’s intriguing to see how they play out online.

The St Kilda Writer’s Festival was on this past weekend. It’s so disappointing when they go to all the trouble to put up lots ofinformation – volunteers page, fotos from the event and so on – but don’t allow dialogue. Really, guys, forum software is free (or 40bucks for the professional edition) and not that hard to manage. And writers love to write…. even on forums!

One writer who does have a forum is the tres lovely ex-model, Australian crime writer, Tara Moss (the comments from Ms Moss come through a forum Admin). If you just can’t live without knowing how tall she is, park yourself here, and join the discussion. Ms Moss was at the festival, as was one of my fave bloggers, Mystic Medusa. It’s not so much the astrology that is fascinating, but her writing style. Anyone who’s had a giggle at The Australian/Yahoo!7 horoscopes knows of her work! Unfortunately, MM’s blog is locked to comments so not really a community.

I had a quick peek at the Australian National Playwrights’ Centre, but no dialogue there either. Given the number of writers’ courses in Australia, what would be the best mechanism for an online writers’ support and discussion group? We’d need to be able to post up stories and have a collaborative column for edits/tips/notes I guess. I’d probably combine it with a reading group forum. What do you think? S’not too late for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, now is it? There is a no-comments-allowed blog here tho.

Technorati Tags Online Communities, Australia, St Kilda Writers Festival, Tara Moss, Mystic Medusa, Australian National Playwrights’ Centre, Sydney Writers’ Festival