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I managed to get to a few sessions at this year’s Writers’ Week in between work and the heat to hear Charlotte Wood, Madison Godfrey, Pip Williams and a stellar poetry line-up.

I’ve read a few of Charlotte’s books and heard good things about her latest, Stone Yard Devotional, that she describes as one of her deepest and most personal ones she’s written to date. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022, along with two of her sisters in a bizarre twist of fate, Charlotte explores the psychological collapse of the protagonist that was somewhat synonymous with her own and without giving too much away, introduced the mouse plague after hearing about a friend who heard their piano playing one night during an infestation. Charlotte stressed the importance of readers to writers like her and explained how she learnt to write by looking at other writers.

I brought Madison’s latest collection, Dress Rehearsals, from the book tent before I went along to hear her speak about it as I recalled reading some of her poems in an issue of Jacaranda Journal and loving their vividness. This stunning collection is split into three parts that explore love, desire and gender, with Madison explaining how her poetry was born in the mosh pit, the merch girl a prominent figure throughout, and how she grew into queerness through a constant negotiation of self. Madison teaches at Curtain University in Perth and likes to disrupt classical poetry for her students, always having a poem of her own on the stove in the back of her head.

After falling in love with her first book, The Dictionary of Lost Words, I felt compelled to hear Pip talk about her second, The Bookbinder of Jericho, and was not disappointed. These companion books explore the women’s perspective of the publishing industry when it was dominated by men, with the second evolving while she researched the first after seeing a 20-minute film of which ten seconds showed a woman gathering papers that made Pip imagine her boss saying, ‘your job is to bind the books, not read them.’ Pip spoke of books being artefacts, but that she’d never considered how they’re made and actually learnt this skill at the State Library to bind seven of her own.

A Revolution in Poetic Language was the final session I went to, a panel discussion with amazing poets Evelyn Araluen, Madison (again), Ellen Van Neerven and Jill Jones, facilitated by Jessica Alice, former head of Writers SA. Challenging the role that words can play in a climate of change and conflict, each poet shared a reading, some new work, others from existing, but all with a sense of place, belonging and the continuous struggle to.

I also managed to squeeze in a workshop, Writing Place in Poetry, with another fantastic poet Sara M Saleh that explored where we come from, losing, finding, beginning again, combined with some great prompts and time to free-write that I really must do more of because it produces some interesting results. Unfortunately, Sara’s collection, The Flirtation of Girls, was sold out at the book tent so naturally I consoled myself with others.