Now in its third year, not-for-profit writers’ festival, Words on the Waves, is pleased to announce a Partnership with The Art House Wyong, the Central Coast’s premier arts venue.
On Wednesday 31 May, 2023, they will launch the inaugural Words on the Waves Writers Festival Opening Address, an event featuring three exciting and celebrated Australian writers speaking to the festival theme: Claire G. Coleman (Lies, Damned Lies), Diana Reid (Love & Virtue) and Tracey Spicer (Man-Made).
Words on the Waves can reveal the 2023 festival theme is the mind swims. With this theme, they playfully gesture at the human urge to move and explore. Together, we can consider how change is the only constant in life. Indeed, as the author Vicki Hastrich (who the festival likes to claim as a Central Coast local) writes in her memoir Night Fishing: “If you’re not moving, in a way you’re dead.” English artist Kae Tempest puts it another way: “None of this was written in stone, the current’s fast but the river moves slow, and I can feel things changing”. Water is a necessary metaphor, and one that was certainly a constant preoccupation for the late poet Robert Adamson from whom the phrase, the mind swims, is borrowed.
the mind swims denotes a state of restless inquiry, of roving exploration, both real and metaphysical. It speaks to transitions: the rise and fall of the tides; from one phase of life to the next; from one way of being to another.
At the Opening Address, held at The Art House Wyong, Wirlomin Noongar woman Claire G. Coleman will bear witness to the ways in which water forms her identity. Multiple Walkley award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer AM will dive into the exciting and terrifying world of artificial intelligence (and its inherent bias, explored in her new book Man-Made). And Diana Reid, whose debut Love & Virtue blitzed the charts and awards lists, will freestyle through the art of writing.
This historic event, which also opens the 2023 Festival, marks the beginning of an ongoing partnership between two organisations striving to enrich the cultural landscape of the Central Coast year round. Tickets are $30 and are on sale now.
Words on the Waves will take place May 31 – June 5, 2023. The full program and tickets will be released Friday April 21, 2023. For more information, head to www.wordsonthewaves.com.au