Women of Letters

Marieke Hardy – writer, actor, on-air personality and lover of oat-rich breakfast snacks – reveals her plans for Sydney's first Women of Letters event to Andrew P Street

For Sydney folks who are not au fait with Women of Letters, give us a quick précis.
Michaela [McGuire, co-founder] and I call it a homage to the lost art of letter writing. It is also a celebration of strong female talent: the ones in Melbourne so far have been a great combination of better known talent and some more under-the-radar writers and performers.

And how does the night typically go?
We give all the letter-readers a topic: a letter to my first boss, a letter to the night I'd rather forget, a letter to the host of that party – we've tried to make it quite broad. In Melbourne we usually have five readers in the first half. Then we have a little break where people write letters – we supply aerogrammes and pens and stamps – and then in the second half we usually have a panel discussion where the readers are up on stage doing q'n'a and drinking wine. It's very relaxed. For the Sydney one I don't think we will do a panel because we've got so many readers, so we'll just do two halves of readers with the letter-writing in the middle.

And the drinking wine, I trust?
Oh yeah, that goes without saying. We looked at so many venues as we specifically need one where there is a bar in the room because it adds to the relaxation: you can actually just stand up and go and get a glass of wine during the thing, it's not this sort of prescriptive thing with everyone sitting down in theatre rows.

And people actually write letters in the break?
Yeah, it's amazing. It's so exciting to me, seeing all these people bent over aerogrammes, writing. And I always write an aerogramme in the break.

Were you a compulsive letter-writer as a child?
Yeah, I'm going to go and visit one of my pen pals in New York next year. I've gone through phases. I was quite a compulsive letter writer to politicians and a fan letter writer; I believe in writing positive letters to people if you like their products.

Products?
People get very cynical about that and they go "oh, you're just doing that to get free shit", and I'm not – but for Uncle Toby's I wrote to tell them how much I like their Oat Temptations sachet flavours. See, there were four different flavours and you open it and you go "what am I going to have today?" and you'd pull it out and sometimes in was maple and date and sometimes it was apple and sultana with almonds – you just never knew, and it always fitted your mood. So I wrote to them and told them that and they wrote me be back a very polite thank-you-deranged-person letter.

Very sweet.
Thank you. I mean, people get complaint letters all the time and I think it's really nice to have some positive affirmations. Then again, I wrote some fairly scathing letters to the Democrats when they shafted Spot Destroyer [former leader Natasha Stott-Despoja] but I wrote a lot of positive letters to politicians, believe it or not. I find it harder these days: of course, now that I work for the ABC I am politically impartial, trademark.

Are you a regular receiver of letters?
Yes. I mean obviously not as much when I was doing my column for The Age. There was an address so people could email and go "you're an idiot, Daryl Somers is fucking awesome", which happened fairly regularly.

So you did get my email?
You wrote two hundred emails? My god!

I had a lot of time on my hands in that psych ward.
A lot of people write letters through to The Book Show and I really like receiving them. I try and be quite disciplined about replying to them. My parents were really strict with instilling that in me. I was a kid actor when I was eight or nine in The Henderson Kids II and I used to get fan mail and my parents would go "now you have to write back to every single person". I think they instilled in me that discipline to try and respond to all that you can because I knew how great it felt for me to receive a letter after I'd written one, so I do try and extend that same courtesy.

Who's actually speaking at the Sydney show?
Tara Moss, Jennifer Byrne, Fenella Kernebone, Virginia Gay, Claudia Karvan, Sophie Braham, Sally Seltmann, Sacha Horler and our DJ is Zan Rowe, so it's a bloody formidable collection of women.

With people like Jennifer Byrne one would assume she'd know how to speak in front of people, but do you choose your speakers on the basis of "Well, they may never have done this sort of thing, but I think they'd be really good"?
Yeah, absolutely. We had Angie Hart give the first one and she was petrified. We've found a lot of the musicians are really nervous about public speaking – not Clare Bowditch, of course, she eats the mic [laughs], but [Magic Dirt's] Adalita and Angie Hart and [Dave Graney's long-time musical foil] Clare Moore all found it quite a difficult experience. But then you get the stand-ups like Celia Pacquola or Judith Lucy or Cal Wilson who are just like, "give me that damn microphone!" and I really like that combination.

So it's a mix of styles and content?
Exactly. On the first one we ever did, A Letter to a Night I'd Rather Forget, Judith was the first speaker and everyone knew what they were getting, she was hilarious, and then Angie was on next and she did this beautiful, weird, ethereal poem. And then Fee-B Squared from Triple R handed around lyric sheets of Todd Rundgren's ‘Can We Still Be Friends?' and got the audience to sing. So there've been people really stepping out the boundaries of a very straight up-and-down letter reading – it's not five women going "and another thing that happened on the way to the blah blah blah…"