Love & Desire: Literature and the intimate
Day One—Saturday, 23 September
9.50–10.00am
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Sir James Gobbo AC Download (32.07Mb mp3)
Chair
National Library of Australia Council
10.00–11.00am
Session 1
Kenneth Binns Lecture
LOVE AND LITERATURE
How important is the evocation of love, desire and intimacy
to our understanding of what it is to be human?
David Malouf
Chair: Margy Burn
11.30am–12.30pm
Session 2
THE BODY IN WRITING
How is the body perceived by writers and readers? How do
writers bring physical pleasure and pain to life on the page?
Milkbrain:
The Cognitive Body—Fiona Giles Download (9.28Mb mp3)
What Comes to Hand—Lucy Dougan Download (7.94Mb mp3)
Pleasure, Pain and Private Eyes: Writing the Body in Detective
Fiction—Leigh Redhead Download (8.37Mb mp3)
Chair: Ian Britain
2.00pm–3.00pm
Session 3
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
In one way or another, family and friends are central to
our understanding of ourselves. Three writers discuss how
they have represented family life.
The Love that Dare Not Shut
Up—Michael McGirr Download (9.09Mb mp3)
Unrequited: Readings about Love and Friendship—Hsu-Ming Teo Download (7.78Mb mp3)
A Broken Glass and Falling Water—Deborah Robertson Download (8.39Mb mp3)
Chair:
Helen Kon
3.30–4.30pm
Session 4
THE INTIMATE GESTURE
Often restrained, sometimes disguised, the intimate gesture
is at the heart of a great deal of writing.Writers
reveal their own intimate touchstones when creating their prose.
Ghosts
in the Machine—Brian Castro Download (8.70Mb mp3)
A Gift of Feathers—Brenda Walker Download (8.27Mb mp3)
The Turning Point—David Brooks Download (10.21Mb mp3)
Chair: Nicola Walker
6.30pm
Conference Dinner
Speaker: Nick Earls
Chair: Marie-Louise Ayres
Venue: Ottoman Cuisine, Barton
Day Two—Sunday, 24 September
10.00–11.00am
Session 5
IMAGES OF DESIRE
How do we capture images of desire? What
intimacies are negotiated by photographer, subject and viewer
and filtered through the camera’s lens?
A Shared Space: Photography
and Intimacy—Helen Ennis Download (8.61Mb mp3)
Images and Longing: The Insufficiency
of Language—Gail Jones Download (9.28Mb mp3)
Writing Desire, Writing Shame—Francesca Rendle-Short Download (6.41Mb mp3)
Chair: Robyn Holmes
11.30am–12.30pm
Session 6
LOVE AND OBSESSION
When does love become obsession?
Does writing require the writer to become obsessed? How do writers
convey sexuality and the compulsive attraction that is ‘falling
in love’?
Does Poetry Do Sex and Violence Better Than Prose?—Dorothy Porter Download (6.50Mb mp3)
Obsessive, Compulsive, Instinctive and Strange: Why Writing a Novel is Like Falling in Love—Charlotte Wood Download (8.49Mb mp3)
Uses and Abuses: The Utility of Love—Peter Rose Download (9.14Mb mp3)
Chair: Adrian
Caesar
2.00–3.00pm
Session 7
INTIMATE HISTORIES
Fiction explores the intimate histories of individuals.
How do writers evoke the quality of intimacy that touches
the smaller and larger aspects of human interaction?
Eros in Dreamland—Beverley FarmerDownload (9.29Mb mp3)
Writing about Sex—Rosie Scott Download (7.42Mb)
‘I Think I should Replace the Strawberries with Forget-Me-Nots’ (IrèneNémirovsky)—Marion Halligan Download (8.15Mb mp3)
Chair: Ian Templeman
3.30–4.30pm
Session 8
WRITING DESIRE
Fiction contains many images of what
people wish for. How important is desire as a motivating force
in the writer’s
work?
Self Portraits— Carmel Bird Download (20.85Mb mp3)
Chair: Paul Hetherington
4.30–4.35pm
Closing Remarks
Warwick Cathro
Assistant Director-General
Innovation
National Library of Australia
