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.