The Saturday

            The festival was pretty amazing, the weekend in particular just blew my mind. As I mentioned before this was the first time I'd been to a writing festival and I loved it!

            I got super spoiled with my first session of the day, it actually turned out to be the highlight of my week. I came away from it with a book written by one of the authors, signed with a lovely message. The amazing session I attended was 'Girl, you'll be a women soon' and consisted of a panel of three author all with recent books with teenage girl main characters, all interview by Julie Proudfoot. The three amazing authors were Nicole Hayes, Kirsten Crawford and Jenny Lowentish. All these three raised some amazing points, and all played off each other to make a really fascinating and engaging dialogue. I cannot recommend any of these authors more highly, in particular the amazing Jenny's novel, Cherry Bomb. The general discussion centered around coming of age stories for girl. I got this wonderful quote from Kirsten which was "Why does a 14 year old girl have to wear the responsibility of the men around her." That really encapsulated the theme of the session to me, and appeared to be one of the prominent questions her book sought to provoke. There was discussion about the vast imbalance of coming of age stories directed at girls in comparison with those targeted at boys. There is a distinct lack of stories which are targeted for the girls who are struggling to find themselves, with most of the coming of age genre being target at boys how find themselves on the outs. All in all it was a brilliant session and really set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

            The second session continued the trend and was incredibly informative, if a little confronting. The session was called 'Fighting back', and was about bullying in the early high school years. Much of the discussion was very emotionally charged, and  while I didn't agree with everything that was said it was all thought provoking. Discussions of how people learned to deal with the trauma of being bullied, such as with aggression or humour. Keith Austin raised an interesting point, using a  word from the old testament, and has two different translations from English to Hebrew. Timshel can be translated as either 'Must do evil', or 'May do evil'. This pushed conversation about wheter people have a choice or if we are fashioned with a predisposition for evil. It was a great session that had some unexpected twists and turns, and was something that's going to stick with me for a while.

            After a bit of a schmozzle getting lunch, the third session was not quite what I expected it to be. The session was 'From Victor to Hugh', and centered around the recent exhibition in Melbourne. It featured the original manuscript of Les Miserables, which left France the first time to be present. Not much to say about this one, it centred mainly around the organisation of the event itself. While it was interesting, it wasn't for me.

            And finally, the day came to a close with the fourth session 'The Toughest Genre', another truly amazing lesson. The session was about crime writing, and the assumptions about writing in particular genre. Crime writing in general tends to be disreguarded as a soft sort of genre. The panelists all were brilliant and engaging and lend to me taking home another book.

I left happy but exhausted, and excited for the next day.