KEY POINTS:
No greater compliment can be paid at a writers' festival than when visiting authors sit in on a session by a local scribe - as happened yesterday when American Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford attended the hour-long session with Aucklander C.K. Stead at the Aotea Centre.
Stead kept his audience at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival absorbed with readings from his novel My Name Was Judas and explained the process that led him to narrate Judas' life in the first person.
Stead also detailed how he approached the brutality of Christ's crucifixion and the question of the resurrection.
Anglican Dean Richard Randerson once preached a sermon against the book - and sent a copy to Stead.
Another good session came from British biographer Patrick Marnham, who appeared on stage with literary agent Toby Eady, the son of writer Mary Wesley who is the subject of Marnham's latest book, Wild Mary.
Marnham met Wesley when she was 89, about a year before her death. Her stipulation?
"All the embarrassing bits must be in there."
Marnham and Eady traded anecdotes - some hilarious, some darker, about Wesley's lonely childhood, her marriages (three, with three sons to three fathers), her promiscuity during World War II when she worked for MI5, her smoking a joint on her 70th birthday, her third husband's mad ex-wife, who stalked them for years, and then the writing, with her first book published when she was 70.
As Eady put it, "as a mother you wouldn't order her from Harrod's" but she looked back at her sins with enjoyment.
Other sessions featured British art critic Matthew Collings in a panel with art writers Hamish Keith and Justin Paton, who discussed how to write about art in common-sense terms.
Keith, who was on the committee which facilitated the famous gift to Canberra of Colin McCahon's Victory over Death in 1978, a work reportedly derided by Prime Minister Muldoon, said that was a myth and Muldoon "knew exactly what he was doing".
Russian-born novelist Andrea Makine, who lives in France and speaks no English, spoke via a translator to a small-but-attentive audience who seemed to understand French nicely on their own.
Downstairs, Jenny Pattrick, Rachael King and Deborah Challinor discussed historical fiction, how they choose locations, research the minutiae of the period, and do battle with publishers over titles and cover images.
And, if there are any budding writers out there discouraged by rejection from the publishers, Pattrick - one of our most successful historical fiction writers - said it took seven years of writing, rewriting, rejections and redrafts to get The Denniston Rose published.
Today
5pm: Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Aotea Centre.
6.30pm: Will Hutton (The State We're In) Aotea Centre.
8pm: Poetry Idol, London Bar.
