Dominic Creative Writers at the Melbourne Writers Festival

On Monday morning 29 August at 6.15am a group of ten Dominic creative writers left Hobart for the annual Melbourne Writers Festival and reported on their return to our community in the newsletter below.

We had sessions with famous authors: our favourite was the session with Rainbow Rowell, author of bestselling Eleanor & Park and Inky Award winner Fangirl.

Rowell gave us some tips and tricks for writing and allowed insight into the life of an author. Students said that Rowell is ‘very inspiring, humorous and an entertaining person who we look up to as a role model.’

We attended the official unveiling of an anthology of stories, edited by Alice Pung, written by many young teenage aspiring authors, entitled My First Lesson. Some of the featured authors read out their stories from the book, and Pung spoke about the book herself and about what it was like growing up Asian in Australia.

For dinner, we enjoyed Papa Ginos’ pizza and pasta and watched a movie followed by delicious ice cream.

We had pancakes at the pancake parlour after taking a leisurely stroll through the streets of Melbourne Tuesday morning. Continuing the Day 2 of the Festival at Federation Square, we attended a workshop where we made a creative journal to inspire our creative writing, called Redactive Writing.

We learned to combat writer’s block, by taking the words of another and picking out selections. When words had been chosen, they could make sense in the form of an expressive poem, and all the words removed from the written piece could be covered with artwork and scrapbooking. We also attended an author session about the stolen generation and what it was like to be a member of the Aboriginal community.

It was an amazing experience and we would like to thank the politicians who supported our learning enrichment. Thank you to Mr Matthew Groom, Ms Madeline Ogilvie and Ms Elise Archer. Our deepest gratitude also to Ms Gilligan and Mrs Marcenko for organising and making this wonderful experience happen.

Sidney Smith, James Lane-MacDonald, Thomas Atkinson, Emmett McShane-Goldsworthy and Ursula Harris, for the student group.

You can see more photos on the gallery: Melbourne Writers Festival.