Manifesting with... Tess Woods

What goes into creating a sell-out literary festival?

It’s no secret that Perth is the most isolated city in the world, and when it comes to events like writers’ festivals, we often get left behind. It should tell you something that when tickets for the inaugural Festival of Fiction went live last year, they sold out in less than a day.

In this interview, director Tess Woods shares how she went about creating not just a literary festival, but a highly successful one.

Tell us about the Festival of Fiction.

The Festival of Fiction is a new literary festival in Perth bringing together readers and writers to celebrate popular fiction. It’s the first of its kind event here in WA and only became possible with the backing of Dymocks and the City of Joondalup who are major sponsors, as well as local and interstate publishing houses and literary agencies who threw their weight behind us. The festival is held on the beautiful grounds of Edith Cowan University’s Joondalup campus.

What inspired its creation?

It was years in the dreaming! There was many a night over dinner and drinks where my commercially published fiction author friends and I would lament our lack of representation at Australian literary festivals and we used to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a festival that celebrated popular fiction?’

That was as far as we took it though, just complaining and no action!

Then, in 2023, I was part of a City of Joondalup community choir. One evening at rehearsal, a representative from the shire asked the community to email him if we had ideas for cultural events, so I jumped on that opportunity and floated my idea of a literary festival featuring popular fiction. Through the shire, I was introduced to the president of The Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre which is based at Edith Cowan University.

PCWC had been struggling with their membership numbers since COVID had hit and they saw a potential festival as a great chance to get themselves in front of Perth writers and bring in new members. So an alliance between me, PCWC and City of Joondalup was formed with the shared vision of bringing an epic festival to the shire. It took almost eighteen months to plan but in October 2024 we held our first festival and it really was epic!

Did you encounter any setbacks, and how did you work through them?

The first massive challenge was actually securing any funding. The shire wouldn’t fund us until we could prove we had a festival program. How to get a program up without any money? Begging! I became a professional beggar overnight and secured sponsorship from several publishing houses as well as Dymocks. I somehow miraculously convinced some of Australia’s biggest names in fiction to shlep all the way to WA to take part in a single panel discussion and go home because we only had the venue for one day so could only feature authors once and in a group at that. ECU donated the venue and we were off!

The next hurdle was pulling together a volunteer committee because there was no way I could do this on my own. I reached out to local writers and ended up with a brilliant committee of twelve women who have been simply phenomenal in every way.

We had a setback with Fergie, Sarah Ferguson the Duchess of York. She was initially due to come out and headline the event but then the King announced his Australian tour at the same time as our festival so the Duchess delayed her trip to Perth to avoid a timetable clash. It was hours and hours of reorganising and a massive headache for us all to then add a second event two weeks later but in the end it was so worth it, the Duchess event was also a huge hit.

And we had a couple of late pull outs for the festival, some big name authors who were due to come but had family emergencies so that gave us some stress finding fast and adequate replacements. In the end, our lineup was just amazing!

There were so many other small things that were a little tricky to navigate but no problem was too big for my incredible committee.

How did you come up with the panel themes and which authors to invite?

That was the most fun part! I invited authors I knew personally who were famous enough to get bums on seats for us and who I could also count on if funding fell through and would work for free if need be. Luckily that didn’t eventuate!

Like I mentioned before, we only had the venue for one day so we had a maximum of seven hours. We decided to make it a panel format to be able to squeeze in as many authors on stage as we could and give our audience real bang for their buck.

We wanted to show off as many genres as we could too, to celebrate all kinds of fiction writing from children’s books to speculative fiction, historical, crime, romance – everything! So the panels were all genre based.

What can we expect from this year’s festival?

Mark your diaries, The Festival of Fiction will be held on the weekend of 18^th and 19^th October at ECU Joondalup campus.

We are going four times as huge this year! Instead of one auditorium over one day, we have two auditoriums over two days.

What we’ve decided to do this year is have a Readers’ Room and a Writers’ Room. In the Readers’ Room we will have a panel style program again, not necessarily genre based this year. We’re going to throw authors from different genres together with some fun topics to discuss with a focus of entertaining readers.

The Writers’ Room will feature back to back masterclasses and in-conversation sessions with the aim of authors helping aspiring writers find a way to publication.

We will also have heavy weights from the publishing industry flying in to take in-person pitches from aspiring authors. Dymocks will be there selling books and we’ll have signing sessions after every panel so readers and writers can get up close with their favourite authors. Once again we’ll have Bermuda Café open along with a coffee truck and there’ll be an awesome merch stand too. Our entire volunteer committee who did such a brilliant job last year have signed on to run the event again this year.

We’ve already signed on some of the absolute biggest rockstars in the Australian fiction writing world and I cannot wait to share with you who they are. It’s going to be amazeballs!

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