I forgot my travel mug, so bought a glass one in Woolies and grabbed a coffee from the Urban Bean on the way to the Margaret River Cultural Centre for the first day of the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival. Thanks War on Waste Episode 3 for putting this purchase in the centre of my thoughts..

Being Friday, with many people yet to travel down from Perth, there was just one track of sessions all day. Sessions about:

• the beach and surfing (is poetry, photography or prose the best way to capture the experience?)
• best ways to write a recipe in a cook book (Stephanie Alexander suggests not presuming that readers know things like “only to use the leaves of parsley” and to respectfully include this kind of information)
• what it is like to write a novel when one is a Young Adult, but then to read reviews that the novel seems to break the conventions of YA writing, although it is about that demographic ?
• why it is important to focus education about sustainability and the environment on the positives of what one will get out of it, rather than use scare tactics ?
• how one writes about making one’s own path and leaving the influence of one’s family, while also dealing with the family stories that continue to intertwine one’s experience ?

But the session that stimulated me the most, where I wanted to say “wait, hold on…just let that idea sink in before you go on to the next one…” was one called “The right to belong“, with William Yeoman facilitating a conversation between Tim Costello, Abdi Aden and Isabelle Li . Too much to totally unpack in a single blog post, but I will try to touch on the important bits tomorrow.