Twig Sweetacre is on the short-story panel at the literary festival.
The panel sessions are conducted in huge, windowless spaces. Readers, affiliates of the cosy, the one-to-one relationship, serial monogamists at best, are herded into these spaces. Writers are the polygamists of the festival, spreading themselves around wantonly for money. The sessions are, for readers, religious events for piety and devotion; the writers, gods and goddesses, are placed on high, the readers below, supplicants in adoration.

All paraliterary-festival activity (eating, drinking, chatting, book buying) is held in cramped quarters, causing distemper among readers.
The ambience of the festival bookshop, perched as it is on a slither of architecture—a narrow balcony two flights up from the ground floor—hovers between terror and pleasure. Readers mill, a compressed crowd, strung-out from the nervous energy generated by their desire to possess books, the souvenirs of literary-festival tourism. The books sit in horizontal and vertical planes, the white pages of their innards clearly visible, like layers of pastry and filling, or the lips of vulvas. Twig Sweetacre decides that in such circumstances, uncomfortable at the very least if not downright dangerous, purchasing a book at the festival is an act of heroic proportions, and consequently comes away empty-handed. She is immune to the science of consumption in circumstances determined by those who plot flow in shopping malls and mega department stores to keep consumers forever internalised and confused, forever consuming. If book purchasers act heroically, they share in the fated lives, the universally acclaimed work of their hero/ine–author.
At the festival as a writer not a reader, Twig occupies a different space, as if she was transported around the festival on a moving platform—the point being that she is above ground: she doesn’t mill, she doesn't throng; she is beyond the confused and edgy. The duality itself, of her being writer and reader, is what sets Twig on edge. In the context of the literary festival, these identities cannot be held together in felicitous suspension. She is either/or. She couldn’t place her feet astride; she couldn’t dip her toes into two ponds. Obstructed in this, she feels off balance, curiously decentred, chained to a fixed position—when her natural disposition is to fluctuate. The same goes for the readers who want to be writers.
‘Why aren’t we up on stage?’, the readers secretly ask themselves. It's the lack of a forthcoming answer that makes them hog down their food ungracefully, choke on the portions, tire themselves out with a roving gaze, with revved motor-mouths that discharge desperate and inane chatter.
The confined conditions of the readers are all the more emphasised by the breadth of the space accorded the writers, the panel members. They rest their elbows, stretch their legs, casually cross them. The writers have their needs enquired after and attended to. They have glasses of water to sip. They have glasses of wine bought for them and brought to them. They are paid to be there, instead of paying. They have comfortable hotel rooms to themselves, while the readers share a cheap hotel, or doss down on the floors of friends’ houses. The writers look and behave like people taking a moment from a busy schedule, a break from the real business which is conducted elsewhere. There is about them and their business an impenetrable veil of mystery, which forever hangs divisively, sheer and lightweight but impermeable, never to be lifted up or drawn aside. (Some writers admit to not being part of the solution of clearing this miasma. But they, like the others who don’t admit to such a thing, continue to attend festivals because it is their living.)

Twig arrives early, not the last walk-on like the biggest star in the firmament. (Another chooses to leave before the end, after giving the first address—to catch a flight to be somewhere more important, to do something with more purpose.) She says hello to the other panellists as a relatively unknown writer, with the fewest books out. She meets their glassy eyes, their diffident demeanour.
Weeks before the festival, she wrote to other panel members seeking, in judicious preparation, contact, information, a shared understanding. But no-one replied, with the exception of one writer who said she never planned, because she preferred to be spontaneous.
Twig is uncomfortable at the idea of being seen to be chatting comfortably with other panellists, while ignoring hundreds of others in the room who are wanting to speak, if they only could, wanting to be spoken to, but are being ignored—petulant but overpowered children until the adults are ready to engage with them.
When the first writer gets up to speak, she appears lost, embarrassed, and in an effort not to appear self-consciously brilliant, reads her speech from a sheaf of paper, sotto voce. Another openly admits he wrote his talk that morning. (Well, he has done this so many times before; it is expertise (or mechanical reproduction).) He offers an excuse: he had been out partying the night before (while the readers were asleep, pacing themselves, resting up, recuperating energy for the next festival day).)
The short story panellists reiterate the international history of the genre, placate the gods and goddesses of the genre by naming them in incantation—Chekhov, Carver, Munro—and instruct about the industrial conditions surrounding its production. They pontificate, make pronouncements and formulate declarative statements.
Twig thinks of herself as party pooping, making raids at the gates of genre, wreaking havoc on the boundaries, smashing any rising notion of genre envy, elevating the bitter-sweet pall of synthesis rather than exclusivity to an art form. She talks of a hybrid breed, the short story become prose poem/flash fiction, celebrating without shame the vignette, reclaiming from the exotic: the Siamese twins of essay and feature article.
The readers are allotted the speculative role: asking questions in uncertainty. However, the time metered out for questions is so minuscule, that in their consequent anxiety, readers ask only fatuous or longwinded questions, or worse, make lengthy statements—tragically failing to be brief.
When the session finishes, there is no after-glow. The readers are immediately on their way to another, and a new crowd of readers flood in to listen to another. 
One reader speaks to Twig, asks her to sign a book. Such a moment is … Would she remember it all her life? Would the reader?
No drinks. No further discussion. Twig makes a straight line through the readers and writers and leaves the festival venue.

Writers start, ill advisedly, to refuse interviews, stating that they, as writers, are shy and withdrawn, and would not do publicity—and in such circumstances, the only possibility is an exclusive interview. 
Readers taunt writers: ‘Rent-a-crowd,’ they quip.
‘Blue-rinse set,’ writers retort.
Readers dye their hair pink, green and purple. They go on longevity diets, increase their exercise regimes, buy rejuvenating creams, take age-defying drugs, have plastic surgery, and gender-reassignment operations. They encourage attendance at the literary festival of their young lovers and friends. Indulging in cross-dressing themselves, they encourage young readers to wear their school uniforms or the colourful dress of their tribes, to emphasise their presence at the festival. To the same end, the babies and young children of readers are allowed to be their vivacious selves.

Readers decide that they have outgrown the traditional festival.
They make their own texts: notes on the backs of envelopes, scribbles on toilet paper, drawing in sand and across the sky, photocopying, laser printing, fast book-producing, handwriting, embroidering and lipsticking. They step outside of the official economy of the festival and set up a trading system, a system of gift-giving. They share and exchange so many of their own texts and others' texts that the authorial name falls out of circulation and an infinite number of unique and original signatures are available for individual selection.
The literary festival is finally forced to move from its cramped quarters when it makes front-page headlines—but it is readers who make the festival a front-page item, not writers.
Readers alert the press to be at the festival, foreshadowing that they would outdo writers as stars of the festival, but giving no details away.
On the last day of the festival, there is a mass suicide of readers. Whole libraries of readers throw themselves off the second-level balcony where the festival bookshop is located. Some of the death-bound readers strap a book across their hearts, their faces, or over their heads. The grave is specified to be a mass one, in the joint will of the Kamikaze readers.
The very next festival would open with a tribute to the reader: all panel sessions would be based around the theme of reading and the reader—Dying to Read—and be held in a rest room.