Sydney Writers' Festival 2008 - Online Program
Memory
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The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom described memory as like a dog that lies down where it pleases. Accretive and adaptive, memory is the stuff on which literature feeds.

In Veny Armanno’s The Dirty Beat, rock and jazz drummer Max lies in his coffin as his friends prepare to bury him, surrounded by the ghosts of his life and the dreams that never faded.

In The Story of Forgetting, Stefan Merrill Block fuses myth, science and storytelling in his portrayal of people dealing with early onset Alzeihmer’s. His two characters are linked by a dual legacy: the disease that destroys the memories of those they love, and the story of Isidora – an edenic fantasy world free from the sorrows of remembrance, a land without memory where nothing is ever possessed, so nothing can be lost.

Venero Armanno and Stefan Merrill Block discuss the holes, the fissures and the depths of memory in their novels with Brenda Glover.

Panel  |  Fiction
Participants
Venero Armanno, Stefan Merrill Block, Brenda Glover (facilitator)

When
Saturday, May 24 2008
11:30 - 12:30

Where
Sydney Dance Company, Studio 2/3
Pier 4/5, Hickson Road
Walsh Bay
Venue and Transport Info...

Cost
Free

Schedule
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VENERO ARMANNO (INTERSTATE)
Venero Armanno is the author of a book of short stories, Jumping at the Moon, and six critically acclaimed novels. These are The Lonely Hunter, Romeo of the Underworld, My Beautiful Friend, Strange Rain, Firehead, The Volcano and Candle Life.

Firehead was shortlisted in the 1999 Queensland Premiers Literary Award for Best Fiction and The Volcano won that award in 2002. The Volcano was also shortlisted for the Courier Mail Best Book of the Year.

Veny’s books have been published in the USA, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Israel and South Korea. Film producers have also shown interest in his work, with four books being optioned for film adaptation. Also a scriptwriter, Veny trained at the AFTRS in Sydney and TISCH School of the Arts, NYU. He now teaches creative writing at the University of Queensland.

His new book is The Dirty Beat, and it has won rave reviews, including a four-star review in Good Reading Magazine, “This is a lovely rocking rolling swoop of a novel about a muso with a penchant for self-destruction, but in the most engaging way. A blast.”

also appearing at...
255: Artistic Passion
272: The Soundtrack of My Life

STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK (INTERNATIONAL)Block, Stefan Merill
Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas and graduated from Washington University in St Louis in 2004. Block is 25 years old and lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Story of Forgetting is his first novel.

www.stefanmerrillblock.com

also appearing at...
156: When Words and Science Meet
193: The Big Reading
278: Stefan Merrill Block in Conversation

BRENDA GLOVER (LOCAL)glover, brenda
Brenda Glover has been teaching in Writing and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney since 2003, predominantly in the MA Writing program. She has published short fiction, book reviews and academic articles. She is currently working on her second novel, a work of creative non-fiction, and is collecting the oral histories of senior medical women in NSW for a series of biographies. Her areas of research are Australian and Canadian literature, women's writing, autobiographical and biographical writing, and marginalised writing.

also appearing at...
231: Motherlove