28/05/2024
'Eat Your Words' on Saturday night was a warm and wonderful gathering of community, of old friends and new. Thanks to everyone who came along and experienced a different kind of Sydney Writers' Festival event: a night of words, art, food and connection. We felt the love and we hope you all did too!
Huge thanks to our six wonderful storytellers for their generosity - Ellen O'Brien, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Max Easton, Anney Bounpraseuth, Fiona Murphy, Jumaana Abdu. When we curated the event, we wanted to bring together a range of different voices and styles of writing to reflect on food. Not in the facile way that food is sometimes used as a signifier of multicultural success, but in the very real and deep ways in which food is consumed and experienced by all of us. After all, eating fulfils a basic human need and is a hardwired bodily act, but it is also one of life's great pleasures and brings us all together. Our storytellers rose to the challenge and offered a range of interpretations around eating and food, reading prose and poetry from their books and other publications, as well as specifically written pieces shared for the first time that night.
We had fun introducing Singaporean and Asian snacks between readings, a nod to Daryl our special guest from Singapore, with treats familiar to so many of us who grew up in Asian diaspora communities. We also had specially designed cookies with the inscription, 'God Does Not Eat', a line used by Jumaana in her story. On the night, Jumaana also spoke movingly of the incongruity of being part of such a cosy gathering, while at the same being a witness to what is happening in Palestine right now.
Parramatta Artists' Studios is our spiritual home and we're grateful to the ongoing collaboration and tireless support from all the PAS staff, especially Sophia Kouyoumdjian and Hayley Megan French. We were regulars at the old site but we love the new Granville site and looking forward to more events there in future.
We wanted to acknowledge the funding and support of Western Sydney University Creative and Writing and Society Research Centre. The delicious food also made the night, and we wanted to give a shout out to the hardworking caterers who supplied us with the thematically resonant food including pasta and ragu, char kway teow and vegan green papaya salad - Rossetti's, Temasek Restaurant and 40 Grains.
And big thanks to ace photographer Anne Kucera for her always excellent event photos. There were so many good ones we had a hard time narrowing them down, but here's a whole album's worth we thought we'd share. If you attended and happy to spare a few minutes, we'd love your feedback, link in the comments!
