Wark’s Wonderful World of Words

Marguerite Wark with her prize-winning books

Lyceum Club senior-vice-president, Marguerite Wark has won a special prize in the Writers’ Week competition and shares her delightful words with us.

“Writers’ Week – my favourite week in the year – when authors give insight into their raison d’etre , friends gather in the gardens to listen and discuss ideas put forward by highly articulate members of our community, a time for setting aside the daily lifestyle and immersing oneself into a world of words. Words not just written but spoken aloud amongst treed lawns where birds chirp and flutter and the water of the River Torrens runs by not far away.

There is a strong sense that this is a continuing flow of the essential nature of people’s lives in times past – times when storytellers gathered to pass on their insights and wisdom in songs or poems around a campfire to an audience who longed for their lives to be touched by their words.

Now is the waiting time – the time before the gathering together – when my thoughts turn to planning so that I can also be one with this community, who thrive in the prescence of language and the authors or storytellers.

I anticipate greedily the sensual delight of words written and spoken, thought about, discussed, savoured, reacted to: words that annoy, are argued with, played with, joked about. I wonder at that sensual fascination we have with the beautiful turn of phrase, the lyrical , the incantational , the rhythmic patterns, but most of all , I wonder at the enduring ability of words to define our thoughts and feelings and tell our stories.

Gathering together for all of this is the most important thing about Writers’ week to me.”

Marguerite won three books – The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya – who will appear in Writers’ Week 2013, Ossuaries by Dionne Brand and Reading By Moonlight by Brenda Walker – both of whom appeared in writers’ week 2012.

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