Reoccurrence

Attending the Mildura Writers Festival through Writers in Action is actually a return for me, because I took this subject last year. Why then, you may be asking, am I taking the same subject twice?

Well, I truly loved it so much that it became one of the – if not the – best university experiences I’ve had. And though the subject and the framework are virtually the same, the writers are different, the other students are different, and so the experience will be different.

I also, when one of my lecturers proposed taking this subject again, realised that I had unfinished business with the Mildura Writers Festival, and that doing Writers in Action would actually be a perfect way to address that. See, last year, because it was my first time taking a subject delivered in a format like this, I was so focussed on the assessment tasks related to the subject that I never really uncoiled from that focus and relaxed. I enjoyed the festival immensely, but I sensed it all through this very highly-strung filter. This year, now that I know how the subject and the festival both operate, I can push the assignments out of my head and just enjoy being around all these wonderful people and writers.

However, I will still be going in and observing the events through a particular lens. This year I’ve been particularly interested in the imaginative space or ride that a reader experiences with a narrative, in which the author engages with the reader and conducts them through this alternate universe born from the text and the reader’s own consciousness. As a result, even though the text is always the same, this space is always unique to the reader according to their particular quality of perception. A narrative in this sense can encompass books, films, television shows, music, art pieces – anything that serves to open up this alternate, fictional reality.

This year I’d like to investigate how the Writers Festival interacts with this imaginative space. Because, as I allude to above, I believe that even in reading groups, the act of reading is one performed alone. To then superimpose such an activity upon an event defined by its group setting and its interactivity is, I believe, like bringing all of these different universes that each of us have formed with a text together and learning something from other people. The same, I believe, can be said of life – we each have a different experience, and when we come together and share those experiences, we gain insight and knowledge that we could not have acquired by ourselves.

Semester Two of this year is the final semester of my degree, and I intend to go out on a high. As such, Writers in Action is the beginning of the end… and I couldn’t think of a better way to start taking it all home.

Here’s to the exciting future!