Reward

On Saturday I was sitting in ‘Prose and the Poetry of Life: Nick Gadd and Olga Lorenzo’, listening in a state of bliss to Olga reading from her novel The Light on the Water, when I suddenly realised that I had been approaching this convergence of minds in a way that was far too convoluted to draw any productive conclusions about the Mildura Writers Festival.

As with most new realisations, I was excited and I began to think about it: all of these writers have walked in with vastly different bodies of work. Tony Birch prefers writing the short story to the novel and is an academic writer in the field of climate change, while Olga Lorenzo prefers the novel and is informed by her background in journalism. Sunil Yapa wrote about the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, and Emily Bitto wrote about the lives of artists in 20^th-century Australia in The Strays.

Jan Owen and Les Murray are both poets, though with vastly different styles and preoccupations. Richard Denniss is an economist who utilises writing to break down complex concepts and terminology and inform the average reader about the state of the financial/political sphere. Nick Gadd is immersed in the fascinating world of psychogeography, and David Malouf flits between the poem, the short story and the novel with the grace of an Olympic skater throughout his body of work.

In a broader sense than I’d been thinking before, I realised the festival celebrates the unique individual mind: each of these writers bring something different to the festival, and throughout the weekend each writer is valued for bringing that unique thing from the solo space of writing and reading into the social arena of the festival where their ideas and perspectives can be shared with, and can inform an entire audience of people. Likewise, the audience is valued for their distinctive perspective through the Q&A sections of each event, which give readers an opportunity to offer their thoughts and opinions on the works and topics being discussed.

I felt so good after this thought crossed my mind. It was such a life-affirming thing, to realise that in a world that is quite genuinely and constantly attempting to fit people into a particular mould, the writers festival remains this sanctuary where everyone is rewarded for being just the person they are.