‘Speeches and diatribes are not fine at a public reading’: Cunningham backs in MWF Q&A ban
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours and star guest of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival has backed in their decision to abandon live question and answer sessions with its audience.
Literary festivals have a healthy and devoted following in Australia. Far more so, says US author Michael Cunningham, than for such events overseas.
And yet sharp divisions have emerged in the major state festivals, which convene panels fraught with ideology, in recent years. Adelaide Writers’ Week had provoked accusations it was “promoting extremist views” even before the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, and concerns intensified this year. Festivals in Perth and Cairns have been disrupted by anti-Israel protests.
Into this febrile atmosphere came the Melbourne Writers Festival’s (MWF) announcement – first reported in The Australian earlier this month – that it would ban its longstanding live question-and-answer sessions. The festival said the move was made with the “safety and comfort of all artists and audiences in mind”, with moderators interviewing guests on behalf of attendees instead. It added: “Based on what we’re seeing in the current climate, we know that artists are being asked by the public to comment on current events that they may not wish to comment on or may feel uncomfortable commenting on, so we would like to empower each author and moderator to steer the ship of their own conversation to areas they want to discuss, whatever that may be.”
Now, screenwriter and Yale University professor Cunningham – whose novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours – who is attending next month’s Melbourne Writers Festival, enters the debate.
Do you feel audiences are becoming less tolerant/more polarised? And, what can we all do to encourage respectful debate more broadly? The Melbourne Writer’s Festival has been planning to ask audience members to submit written questions, since well before October 7, based on audience feedback about sessions running to time last year. MWF has done this selectively over the years, and was planning to do so for my event since I was first invited to participate in April last year. It is not a measure introduced this year in hope of quashing arguments over current controversies. Most venues in the US have been working from written questions for a while now. The practice (of banning live questions) is not intended to discourage disagreement. It’s to weed out the occasional inappropriate or relatively minor question, like, “how do I get an agent,” which is unlikely to be interesting to many members of the audience, along with the occasional diatribe. Speeches and diatribes are fine in all kinds of situations but not really at a public reading, all the more so in that they can take up to 10 minutes out of the 20 minutes allotted to questions from the audience. It’s meant to focus the conversations, to make them as pointed and substantive as possible, for the benefit of everyone. All right. Assuming you want to keep talking …
Yes we do. Your latest novel, Day, charts the lives of one family before, during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic.Why did you decide to embark on “the pandemic novel”? I didn’t “decide” to take on the pandemic novel; I just didn’t see any way not to, not at least in a novel set in the present day. There was no place on earth, and not a single person, who wasn’t affected by the pandemic. There was no place to set a novel as if the pandemic didn’t exist. That said, I never wanted Day to be a “pandemic novel”. That’s why I structured it the way I did, focusing on the characters as they start out before the pandemic, go through it, and come out the other side. I’d be happier with a phrase like “love and survival novel”.
Can you pinpoint the moment when you realised The Hourshad taken off, and your life might be forever changed? It was when I got the call about the Pulitzer. I’m not being falsely modest; I truly had no idea or expectations, if only because the Pulitzer is, in theory, awarded to a work of fiction that depicts American life in some form or other, and I didn’t imagine that a novel about Virginia Woolf, and her influence on two different American lives, would qualify. What most affected me that day was not primarily the prize itself; it was the very idea that a machine the size of the Pulitzer could see me at all.
Its film adaptation was an equally big hit (winning Nicole Kidman her first Oscar). Other novels of yours have been optioned for films. Do you think of your novels as films as you write them? Film adaptations continue to increase my resolve to write books that couldn’t possibly be made into films, lest I start thinking of a novel as some sort of midway point toward its ultimate destination as a movie. That said, the offers keep coming in. So, really, what do I know? When The Hours was published, I felt certain no one would want to adapt it for the movies.
You dedicate Day to publisher and editor Frances Coady (who is also the wife of Australian author Peter Carey). What does she mean to you? Frances has had a greater effect on my career than anyone, alongside my husband, Ken Corbett. Frances and Kenny are my first readers. Frances is also an extraordinary agent. If she didn’t function, first, as a reader, I’m not entirely sure what sort of career I’d have for her to promote.
Growing up in California, who were the authors you treasured as a young boy? I was not a particularly bookish kid, which wasn’t helped by growing up in Los Angeles. But when I was a junior in high school I had a crush on a girl who insisted that I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Which I did. Or tried to. I couldn’t make sense of it. What I could comprehend, however, was the power and beauty of the language. I’d never read prose like that. It turned me into a reader, which was the first step toward becoming a writer.
Can you describe your writing process? Sleep segues as directly as possible into work. Writing fiction is in a sense an ongoing state of cultivated delusion – you have to remain convinced, for years, about the reality of your invented worlds. I work for anywhere from three to six hours, depending on the day. There are better days and worse days, but I stay at it for at least three hours, even on the bad days, just to see if something might arrive.
What do you suppose are the biggest challenges the next generation of writers will face? There may be fewer readers, but there are still readers. I’m encouraged, as well, by the number of undergraduates at Yale who want to take creative writing courses. We’ve got more demand than our faculty can accommodate. I was once on a panel about the death of the novel, along with Norman Mailer. Toward the end of the debate, Mailer said, “The novel will be at your funeral.” Thanks, Norman, for that.
You have visited Australia three times. What are your impressions? All three have been for literary festivals ... and so I’m especially familiar with literary Australia. The literary events have all been fascinating, and the houses have all been packed. I marvel at that, sometimes, along with other American writers who’ve been to Australia. None of us can name an American literary festival that attracts an audience one-tenth the size of Australian audiences or, for that matter, an audience so engaged, so prone to interesting and provocative questions. And so, will I fly 16 hours in order to meet the readers of Australia? Yeah, I will. Oh, and the Thai food in Australia is amazing.
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