An invaluable few days

The past few days have been a truly invaluable experience.

Em and I travelled down to Byron Bay for the Writers' Festival. As budding writers we thought it would be a good thing to do and that it was.

While the event ran for three days, we only went to the Friday and Saturday sessions.

Friday was our busiest day going from 9am to 5pm. We started by going to a session about food writing with Adam Liaw, the second season winner of Masterchef and chaired by one of my favourite TV chefs, Janella Purcell. As there wasn't anything we really wanted to go to next we ended up going to a talk about writing for the physical space with actor & author Brendan Cowell.

After that we went to one of the funniest talks of the day with Frankie editor Benjamin Law; comedian, Talking 'Bout Your Generation team generation X leader and 7pm Project host Charlie Pickering as well as comedian & author Fiona Scott-Norman. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard. Since we had a two hour gap between this talk and the next one we ended up going back into town and having lunch and going shopping for a bit. The final talk of the day was with Benjamin Law (amongst others) about the new media revolution in writing.

The highlights of the day would have to be talking to Adam Liaw about cooking duck while he signed his cookbook for our parents, discussing Beneath Hill 60 with Brendan Cowell while he signed the program for me, talking to Charlie Pickering about dad jokes which included him writing "I hope you enjoy the dad jokes" in his book for me and having a 10 minute conversation with Ben Law on the way to the carpark about being a student writer and getting your work out there.

While the second day was as entertaining; talks with former NSW Premier Bob Carr, illustrator for The Australian Bill Leak, comedian, satirist and author Libbi Gorr, as well as Charlie Pickering and Benjamin Law; the first day was definitely the most fulfilling.

All in all it was a great weekend and I learnt that I am definitely now doing the right thing.

Thanks to Apartments Inn for some fabulous accommodation and to Ben Law for the great advice.