I don’t make a point of skiving off to every literary festival in the country but, once in a blue moon, comes an invitation that’s hard to refuse (commerce enters into it, yet I want the heady feeling of selling a book, too). So I went to the third, and probably last, Hawthorn Writers’ Week in March. Why ‘probably last’? Read on.

The audience was small, but the issues raised were large. Among the latter: the rationale of festivals, the funding of such events, the role and funding of small magazines, and, associated with magazines, the paradoxical lack of subscriber support and the plethora of submissions they receive from apparent workshop junkies.