[Will Day, Eureka Street, March 5th, 2010]:
The tragedy is that many non-sesh folk do not realise that, for so many of us, sesh is not merely a sexual orientation. It is a kind of ‘self’ — a sensibility, aesthetic, intelligence, humour, spirituality and creativity — so that to try to muzzle it is to try to muzzle the soul.
Given the sadness, I was struck by the enthusiasm and playful delight which bubbled through the room. Perhaps this was a simple expression of joy to be meeting in a richly religious context where the energies and expressions which are subtly or overtly damped down in many other religious contexts could flourish.
One week later, I was having lunch with a group of friends when poet Michael Farrell produced a copy of the book he has recently co-edited with Jill Jones, Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets.
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[Jason Steger, Brisbane Times, March 2nd, 2010]:
When is a writers festival about writing and when is it about issues and ideas? If we’re talking Adelaide Writers Week, the focus is very much on creative writing rather than, say, the more prosaic topics such as the future of journalism or how to get published that seem to crop up at almost any other writers festival in the country.
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[Michaela Boland, The Australian, March 6th 2010]:
Hours before musician Paul Grabowsky raised the curtain on his first Adelaide Festival last weekend, South Australian Labor Premier Mike Rann unveiled a big plank of his party’s arts policy for the March 20 election.
Outside the Famous Spiegeltent, which has been pitched in Elder Park beside the Torrens River, Rann declared his government would make the biennial Adelaide Festival of the arts an annual event from 2012 should the government be re-elected for a third term.
The 17-day Adelaide Festival would join the newly annual Fringe Festival and annual music festival WOMADelaide, thus underscoring SA’s claim as “the festival state” each February and March, the Premier says.
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