Finally, I get a chance to put digits to keyboard about the Going West Festival at the weekend. Can I just say a huge, huge thank you to Murray Gray and his team – what a feat of organisation.

I only actually managed to get to a few sessions (due to a lurgy which has paralysed our house, reaching its peak at the weekend) but what I saw and heard made me feel so deliciously civilised, intelligent and fabulous. Literary cocaine! It's so good to be able to lift up mine eyes and realise there’s a whole world of clever people chatting out there – and then be part of it … It should be mandatory for all mothers of small children.

Two sessions stood out for me: C K Stead talking to Diane Brown, and the extraordinary Michael Leunig in conversation with Titirangi-based cartoonist and illustrator, Bill Paynter.

It was great to see Karl Stead in the flesh again. And to hear him discussing his latest novel, Mansfield, which I read and loved, was enlightening. He was a good interviewee; relaxed and urbane, with no sign of his legendary scariness.

He spoke of the fiction angle he took for Mansfield: the boring and limited necessity for conscientious reportage of biography, versus the omnipotence and imagination (still conscientious, of course) of fiction – no contest, understandably.

Diane Brown was fairly well up for the task, unenviable some might say. She mentioned the part in Mansfield where Katherine and her French lover break up over the course of a long, long night and how uncomfortably close to the bone it was. Much more could have been made of this I felt. When reading the novel I was struck over and over by Stead’s feel for how women work; almost uncanny and indeed slightly irritating at times!

He proved to be patient under questioning from the audience (‘How do you think you would have got on with Katherine Mansfield if you could have met her? Do you think she would have found love if she had lived longer?’ – of course, unanswerable but he did try), but no-one, including me dammit, was brave enough to question him about his implications of a questionable level of intimacy between Katherine and her brother, and the resulting media scuffle from members of her surviving family …

C K Stead is apparently being hounded by his publishers to provide an autobiography. He said he was ‘in a constant battle with himself’ over this proposition: ‘how much of your private life to leave out, and who to offend’ were the main problems. Obviously, I thought, but again didn’t say (wimp), he must publish posthumously. But then he’d be the wimp I guess.

Finally, it was a great rounding-off of a intellectual feast of a day to see Stead in the Janet Frame documentary on Saturday night. I felt fairly visited by angels ...

Now Michael Leunig. It’s hard, very hard not to get all Titirangi hippy on it and use words like Enlightened, and Prophet. But stay with me.

Leunig’s been writing for the Melbourne Age for years, has many, many books to his name, including some poetry, and has been on TV in Australia for the last year. I’ve loved this guy’s work for 30 years, since my cousin and I used to weep and hold our stomachs from laughing at his very silly cartoons at age ten.

He’s got a lot older and wiser and sadder since then. This gentle, electrifying person held the biggest audience Going West has ever seen utterly spellbound. You could have heard a pin drop. He’s uncomfortable under praise, and consistently self-deprecating. But he has a message, and when boiled down, it’s ‘don’t forget the little person’.

It’s that little person with the big nose that appears in all Leunig’s cartoons. The Leunig little person is the underdog, the small, the poor, the weak, the needy. It’s every single one of us – the uncertain, bewildered Charlie Chaplin child in all of us, however high-powered, who thinks ‘I don’t understand what’s going on here,’ ‘did I just say something really stupid?’ or ‘I just wish I was at home with my duck’. And – he is implacable on this – the little person principle applies even to people who blow up children in Beslan or fly planes into buildings. Once we were all children. Then the world happens to us. There’s always another story, and in this media-ravaged environment we will never know the truth of it.

Leunig has a new book, Strange Creature. It’s political, very, and it’s anti-Howard and anti-Bush. A lot of what he is saying is being said in newspapers and magazines all over the world. But it’s the way he says it.

A little person, sitting on a pile of corpses, gazes at a TV which is sitting on a pile of corpses showing piles of corpses. Bombs rain from the sky from planes while their pilots say ‘That’s the trouble with these terrorists, they don’t fight fair.’ Two little people drinking tea converse: ‘I wonder what the Butcher of Baghdad is getting up to these days?’ ‘… last I heard he was at his ranch celebrating with the Suckhole from Sydney.’ Darkly funny stuff. But there are still whimsical moments of lighthearted silliness, never fear …

If you want the next best thing to live, try the audio interview with Peter Gooch of Brisbane’s ABC radio.

The Going West Fest ain't over yet by the way. This weekend there's Storyfest for the kids at the Kelston Community Centre – a brilliant event (go early) and of course, the fabulous Steam Train trip for which the Festival is named. Tickets still available I'm told. And next up on the litfest map is the Nelson Readers and Writers Festival, starting next week. Go forth and blossom.