Finis.

Day 6. Time to go home. 

All good things must come to an end, but I was surprised at how sad I was that this adventure was coming to a close. As something that I imagined to be a long week of hard work, I would pleasantly surprised to find that it didn't feel like work at all. The people I met over the week were so smart, insightful and funny that I would have happily spent another week doing the same thing over. 

Another surprised was how close our group of students had become. On the second last day, after we nervously presented our awards to the writers and officially finished all lectures, we piled into two cars and drove out to the Perri Sandhills. The sandhill's are located outside of Wentworth, across the New South Wales border. For the first time, I saw the mighty Murrey River and wondered in awe at the long flat expanse of the Australian terrain that surrounded us. The earth beside the road was a rich red sand, and the fields were filled with orange trees and strange vines I had never seen before. The sky seemed to be this huge overwhelming blue; I had never been able to see so much of it before. It dominated the entire world, dictating all the colours below it. As we arrived at the hills, some of the smarter students had stopped at a bottle shop to get beer and cider and we wandered up to the top of one of the closer hills and gazed out at the strange land around us. The sand was a vibrant dark orange and the vines grew busily across the hills, sprouting small round melons. A few people tried eating them but to our amusement and their disgust, they were not edible in any way. We stood drinking on the hill, shaking off all our earlier nerves by cracking jokes and laughing with gusto. The sun burned hotly on our shoulders, easing the crispy cold winds that blew in our hair. The air was so silent around us that every breath felt loud and imposing and we laughed at the idea of filming a horror movie out in the sand. It was only after the sun had set and the cold became too much that we reluctantly returned to our cars and drove back to Mildura. We finished the night with dinner and more drinks at the only pub open on a sunday night and returned home when the barmaid kicked us out. 

The following morning we packed up all our stuff, went to our final class and eventually bid each other a final goodbye. If anything, I was sad to go home, sad that the experience was over and sad that I would probably never experience a writers festival in such an intimate way again. But I am excited to take everything I have learned from those 6 days and use it all in my own writing. I am excited to attend more writing festivals and I am excited to read everything I can get my hands on. 

I would like to thank Sue Gillett for creating this fantastic subject, it really was an amazing experience and Sue's enthusiasm for teaching is really exciting for students. I would like to thank all the writers, organisers and volunteers who worked on the festival and made it such a welcoming place to students, and finally I would like to thank Jenny and Brian Murphy who generously opened their home to me while I was at the festival and made sure I was fed and watered the entire time. 

 

Per.

Day 4 and 5. The festivities. 

Over the next two days I fell into a chaotic routine. Wake up early, pick up various people in my car, attend various lectures, eat hurried lunches and eventually having a knock off drink at one of the Mildura pubs. It was absolutely enjoyable to be away from home and all the stresses that go with every day life and simply take in all the talent, knowledge and wisdom that was being thrown at us hour by hour. While I could go into each individual session with great detail and enthusiasm, it would not be very interesting. Instead I would like to talk about a few key moments that stood out to me personally. 

Firstly I will begin with a session between Sharon Olds and Peter Goldsworthy. After reading both of their work and hearing them both individually speak during the festival, I found that these two authors have a kind of charisma that makes them stand out from the crowd. There is a certain confidence to them that gives you the feeling that they are aware of their gift, but that doesn't mean they are going to stop striving to be better. When asked about her early years as a poet and how she began, Sharon told the audience that she had studied poetry for years but when she decided she was going to start writing her own, she was willing to forget everything she had learned as long as she was able to find her own individual voice. She did not care if it was bad, and she admits freely that even now much of her poetry is not good, but as long as it was her own individual voice, that was what mattered. I found this willingness to pursue something that you do not succeed in nine times out of ten was really honest, powerful and insightful. I think like all new writers, there is a great fear that if you write something that is bad, thats it, you should never write again. It was inspiring to hear that an award winning poet like Sharon Olds does not write well all of the time. 

The next moment I would like to talk about occurred during a session with Eileen Chong and Anthony Lawrence. When Eileen was asked about how she came to write poetry, she told a story about her first full time job and the way that she found herself feeling physically sick after not being able to read anything for 8 hours at a time. Eileen then went on to explain that she is an obsessive reader and will literally read everything from the ingredient list on a packet of biscuits to instruction manuals. She told us how she is constantly reading and constantly absorbing new information. I found that a lot of other authors had also touched on this, saying that being a poet was as much about reading poetry as it was about writing poetry. I have come to realise that a lot of inspiration and motivation to write comes from reading. 

And finally,  I would like to mention Anthony Lawrence in the talk he gave the morning after he won the Phillip Hodgkins Memorial medal. He went into detail about his writing process and gave the audience some very personal details about exactly how his writing comes to be. He told us that he cannot force himself to write and that his inspiration generally comes from nature and he is physically overcome with the urge to write. It was interesting to hear that unlike most other professions, a lot of writers can not simply sit down and write. I guess this kind of inconsistency would make it quite a stressful and uncertain job. I imagine there would always be a fear that the inspiration would simply stop and you would never be able to write again. Anthony also talked about how he feels the default emotion in his life is melancholy, and that when he is not writing he is unhappy, but when he is writing he is also unhappy. It sounds like an utterly miserable existence, but I can understand what he means. As someone who is highly in tune with the world, it would be difficult to only see the good and ignore the bad. The bad is what makes the world interesting and where inspiration comes from.