Camp classic gets erotic makeover

Melbourne’s Emerging Writers Festival is back this month, with 11 days filled with more than 50 events across the city.

An independent arts event based at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, this year’s festival will include a number of up-and-coming queer authors and creatives including Benjamin Law, Matthew Lang and Ash Flanders (pictured).

Flanders’ reading during the festival is sure to generate plenty of interest from queer audiences. An avid blogger with a taste for all things pop culture, he’s planning to present a self-composed piece of Golden Girls erotic fan fiction — destined to garner the attention of long-time fans and bemused onlookers alike.

“It concerns the one and only Blanche Devereaux and Dorothy Zbornak,” Flanders explained.

“It’s a tender tale of forbidden love, the hot Miami sun and games of gin rummy.”

Flanders is co-director of Sisters Grimm, a theatre company in Melbourne that specialises in high-camp and trashy comedies, and notes his literary hero as gay author David Sedaris. But it was another event at the Wheeler Centre that inspired his turn at erotic fantasy.

“I saw a great fan fiction series there and I got thinking if I were to write fan fiction what it’d be. Then they asked Sisters Grimm to present something and my co-director, Declan Greene, suggested something erotic, and when I think of erotic, I think Bea Arthur,” he said.

Among the new initiatives for the Emerging Writers Festival in 2011 is the writers’ toolkit stream of workshops, which give budding writers the opportunity to learn and gain skills from industry professionals. Other new events include Dirty Words raunchy cabaret, Get into Genre panels and Tram Tracks public transport performance event.

These will be coupled with regular festival staples such as the Town Hall Writers’ Conference, First Word, Page Parlour, 15 Minutes of Fame and 48-Hour Play Generator.

“Everyone’s so desperate to express themselves now with the internet and blogs and news feeds, I think it’s great they’ve got a festival for people who do that professionally and take it seriously. I think that’s worth exploring and it’s worth getting our voices out there in light of how hard it is to get published,” Flanders said.

info: The Emerging Writers Festival runs from May 26 – June 5. Visit:  www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au Sisters Grimm’s Ash Flanders brings his hard-hitting style to the festival.