The Melbourne Writers Festival, which opens later this month, is bearing down like some kind of benign leviathan. And this year there are a few events that might appeal to theatrenauts. There isn't a category on the website called "theatre", so I'm listing some here so you can put them straight into your diary.

The Arrival: A performance of Sydney composer Ben Walsh's sonic-scape of Sean Tan's The Arrival, performed by Orkestra of the Underground. Melbourne Recital Centre, 7.30, August 26.

New Indie Theatre: I'll be chairing what promises to be a lively discussion on the independent scene with Declan Greene, Anne Louise Sarks and Angus Cerini. ACMI Cinema 1, 4pm, August 28.

In Conversation: Daniel Keene. Multiply awarded playwright Keene talks to Deborah Leiser-Moore about working in France, the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project and so on. 11.30am, The Cube, September 2.

Meant To Be Spoken: Declan Greene, Lally Katz, Katy Warner, Daniel Keene, Robert Reid, Peta Brady and Angus Cerini read their own work. Hosted by Deborah Leiser-Moore. ACMI The Cube, 7pm September 3.

Essaying Opinion: Do Richard Flanagan, Robert Manne and Marieke Hardy think we are being served well by our publishers and thinkers? Chaired by me. 11.30am at the BMW Edge, September 3. (Ok, not theatre, but hey.)

Writing for theatre workshop: Lally Katz. Wheeler Centre, 2pm September 4.

There are many more events, literally hundreds of them, but you can find that out for yourself. The program and booking details are available here. My personal suggestion is not to miss Eliot Weinberger because OMG Eliot Weinberger is coming OMG. Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Programming Committee for the MWF. No, I didn't suggest programming Keene.

As you all know by now, it got through: this week it was announced that Melbourne is now, after Edinburgh, the second UNESCO City of Literature. Let's hope we can live up to it, although there's no way we can claim the kind of literary heritage Edinburgh has. And there have been unkind comments in the Australian about the Melbourne Writers Festival. Well, whatever you think of the festival, you can't claim that the 2008 program isn't big.

If you're going cross-eyed trying to work out what to see, never fear: Ms TN has filleted out those sessions of interest to the thespian-minded among us, which is why both of my pupils are now riveted to my nose. Observations about there being a lot of nose to look at will hereby be treated with the hurt disdain they deserve.

This Sunday, there are a couple of sessions for which it should be well worth making the trek to Federation Square. Barrie Kosky, fresh from wowing the Scottish with The Tell-Tale Heart at the Edinburgh Festival, will be in conversation with theatre historian/director Julian Meyrick about his Melbourne University Press book (I'd call it a booklet, if it were not not quite right) On Ecstasy at 10am at ACMI 1.

Barrie will be talking later the same day with the distinguished director Jim Sharman - whose memoir Blood and Tinsel (a weighty tome, rather than a booklet) is also just out from MUP - about changes in theatre over the past couple of decades. I'm sure that will be worth hearing - I'd be surprised if there weren't provocation in bucketloads. That's at 5.30 at the BMW Edge, and will be mediated by broadcaster Julie Copeland.

I'm chairing a session next Friday, August 29, in which theatre historians Julian Meyrick and Gabrielle Wolf - who have respectively written histories of the Nimrod Theatre and the APG, the leading theatres of the 1970s New Wave - will be discussing their history and impact on present day theatre. That's at 2.30pm at ACMI 1.

It's not all directors and historians. Joanna Murray-Smith will be holding up the playwright end in a session on Monday, August 25,that explores "issues of identity and belonging" with Waleed Aly and Diana Sandars. 6.30pm at ACMI 2.

Going beyond talk sessions, comedian/librarian Josh Earl will be doing his stand up act at the Festival Club from tomorrow night. Meanwhile, if you have a spare $130 a head, you can eat a meal and be entertained by "dramatic readings" by some of our best actors, including David Tredinnick, Jane Clifton and Paul English, at the Bottego Restaurant for Beyond Cuisine.

As for me: my other dates are all poetry. Tomorrow at 12 noon at the Festival Club I'll be reading at the launch of Over There, an anthology of Singaporean and Australian poetry published by Ethos Books, along with Edwin Thumboo, Alvin Pang , Madeline Lee, Aaron Lee, Angeline Yap and Isa Kamari. This one is unticketed, so come along for free wine and free poems.

At 5.30pm on Thursday, August 28, at ACMI 2, I'll be talking about contemporary Australian poetry with Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Justin Clemens and Robert Gray. We're supposed to predict the next big thing, but who knows? I certainly don't, so I'll talk about something else.

And finally, a session I'm really looking forward to - on Friday August 29, I get to discuss Anna Akhmatova, one of the great lyric poets of the 20th century, with the eminent Russian historian Orlando Figes in a session chaired by Ellen Koshland. It's a chance to read some of Akhmatova's work out loud, which will be a pleasure. 4pm at the BMW Edge.

And then it's September, when I can hang up my Author hat and go back to being an obscure and private writer. I hope.

Very interesting news in my mailbox this morning. Full Dress Productions, which under David Frazer has been producing some very respectable indie theatre about town, has announced a new Melbourne-based performing arts press, Full Dress Publishing.

They've certainly spotted a gap. "Despite being the independent theatre capital of Australia, it's surprising that Melbourne doesn't have a publishing house with a specific focus on the performing arts, particularly given the calibre of the work produced," says David. "I am very excited to fill the void."

And they've started in style, with two playwrights who mark, as David says, a "generational leap" in Melbourne theatre writing. The company’s first two titles, Ross Mueller’s Construction of the Human Heart and Three Plays by Lally Katz – The Eisteddfod, The Black Swan of Trespass and Smashed, are on sale now from the company's website. They'll be launched, no doubt in the obligatory shower of cheap wine and cheese cubes, at a Melbourne Writers Festival event hosted by the incomparable Julie Zemiro. The details are:

Date: Friday, August 22, 2008
Time: 2.00 – 3.00pm
Venue: Festival Club, ACMI Function Space – Federation Square, Melbourne
Cost: Free public event, no booking necessary

As I have always suspected, being an Author is not the same as being a Writer. It might even be something like the opposite. I'm beginning to see how one can be so busy being an Author that one has no time to be a Writer. In some weird convergence ("Worlds are colliding, Gerry!), this August I am all over the place being an Author.

On the performance side, on August 21 and 22, the excellent folk at North Melbourne Arts House are hosting the Melbourne debut of The Villainelles, which features poems by Jordie Albiston, Kathleen Mary Fallon and myself set to music by Andree Greenwell. It's "cabaret-folk electronica layered with shades of opera". And I'm pleased, because I'll finally get to see it after missing its premiere in Sydney a couple of months ago.

I'm also doing some Melbourne Writers Festival appearances on August 28 and 29. Of interest to TNers will be a panel I'm chairing with theatre historians Julian Meyrick and Gabrielle Wolf which will discuss the ongoing influence of the theatre of the 1970s. Another couple of sessions are around poetry, including the delightful chance to discuss Anna Akhmatova with Russian historian Orlando Figes.

Simultaneously, the first book of my fantasy series, The Gift, has been chosen as part of the 50 Books You can't Put Down promotion being launched at the Australian public under the giant Books Alive program. This is of course very cool, even if Australian commentator Beth Driscoll thinks that books being promoted as a "thumping great read" undermines the intellectual seriousness with which one ought to approach Literature. (Well, as you all know, I am ever happy to be a crass populist...) So I have a fairly heavy schedule of appearances for this - closet Pellinor fans can find the dates here.

I really don't know why this is all happening at once, but que sera sera. Perversely, perhaps, after months and months of writing nothing at all, I have started a new novel. I guess all this stuff is pretty meaningless if I'm not actually writing. I'll of course be reviewing and blogging as I go, but this might be rather sternly minimal at times. In the interests of health and sanity, you understand...

World Croggon is a little ott at the moment (for those not hip to the cyber-acronyms, it means over the top). While some of my beetle-browed brethren are glued to Harry Potter, and others are just crashed with the flu, Little Alison feels a little like Cadel Evans in last night's stage of Le Tour, going backwards despite his most dogged efforts as Alberto Contador and Michael Rasmussen fly past him on wings of steel. (Ok, I admit, my sleeping patterns are a little disrupted by an unseemly obsession with a bike race: but the metaphor still holds. I really felt for Evans last night).

Anyway, this is a hotchpotch post on some of the things that are taking up my time, and which might interest some of you.

First, Currency House has announced two free public discussion sessions on Lee Lewis's controversial paper on racial casting, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, where Lee will be in conversation with me at the Malthouse on Wednesday August 15. Details are on Nicholas Pickard's blog. It promises to be a stimulating discussion, so grab the book, read it, form opinions and questions, and come and join in.

Second, I'm making a couple of rare poetical appearances in Melbourne in upcoming months. On Sunday July 26, I'm a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival, for a session called Poets Against the War. I'll be reading a favourite poem (possibly Neruda's passionate protest against what happened to Lorca in the Spanish Civil War) as well as some of mine, and discussing poetry and war with Barry Hill and JS Harry.

Third, I'm also, to my delight, one of the 200 local artists who will be part of John Cage's Musicircus at the Melbourne Festival on Friday October 26. Look out for me: I'll be there somewhere, sometime, in the BMW Edge, possibly declaiming poems about mediaeval mystics.

Fourth, TN gets a brief mention in Sophie Cunningham's huge overview of blogging in Saturday's Age, which takes a whistle-stop tour through the world of writers' blogs, and which rehearses the debate around the value of blogging through writerly glasses. Worth a look.

Meanwhile, I've finally managed to finish a review for The Book Show of Iain Sinclair's gigantic book, London: City of Disappearances. A very late review. The staff at the ABC have been saintly in their patience. This book inspired lust in me when I saw it, and I don't regret volunteering to review it for one minute; but next time I plan to find one of those slim, lyrical, lucid masterpieces, like Alessandro Baricco's Silk, which you can read on the train because they're about 100 pages long...

Next on my to-do list is proofing an essay I've written for the anthology Navigating the Golden Compass, about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is due to be published in the US next month. I daren't look further down. I think next week looks less squished, but it might just be an optical illusion.

Reviews on Thom Pain and The Eisteddfod up tomorrow. Promise.