Knit your own literary festival.

I studied the bios on my Auckland Writers & Readers Festival yesterday, and there's an amazing line-up of writers from Madhur Jaffrey to Ingrid Betancourt, Margo Lanagan (with whom I'm sharing a stage) and an incredibly rich variety of New Zealand poets, novelists, film directors and composers. One of the best things about literary festivals is the new people you meet and the books you might not have otherwise discovered. But there's a side-effect, which happens when you're wandering around town during down-time. And you make some pretty great discoveries that way too.

I wandered into a local bookshop on Queen Street and found this:

Which may not be nearly as satisfying in the long run as some of the novels I've discovered, but did make me howl with laughter. From what I understand, the authors (Sally Muir & Joanna Osborne) are actually English, and responsible for the famous (young people, look away now) sheep sweater that a pre-princess Diana wore, and which started an unlikely trend for sweaters with 3-D sheep knitted into them. Ah, the good old days.

I bet Knit Your Own Dog is not a complex genre-smashing triple narrative with different points of view and a stunningly fresh voice, but I can live with that.

There is, however, no knit-your-own-lurcher pattern.

Which is a shame, for so many reasons.