Write about what you love, or not...

Alex Miller, award wining author of Journey to the Stone Country said it best when he described his experience at the Bendigo Writers Festival.

"A writers festival is more than just talking about your book, it's about talking of the things you love, the things you value, your beliefs."

And that is exactly how he got onto the subject of Australian politics, and his opinion that reconciliation is simply a "white persons idea".

I found Mr Miller's comparison to the attempted extinction of Indigenous people upon European settlement in Australia, to the Holocaust during the second world war, interesting.

It led me to think about individual perception of events.

Sitting there in the large packed theatre, I wondered what everyone else around me was thinking. A hundred minds in the one room, running at full speed ahead, listening, interpreting, contemplating, and interpreting.

I began to explore my experience at the Bendigo Writers Festival.

Without knowing it, Mr Miller gave something to me, he gave me food for thought.

"Write about what you love" he said.

I do not necessarily agree with this notion, in fact I think one of the most valuable aspects of writing, is having the freedom to explore the things you love the least, fear, hatred, regret, resentment, whether through characters or poetry.

At the ages of fifteen and sixteen, I regularly wrote down my feelings in the form of poetry. For me, it was a coping mechanism for the depression I suffered as a teenager.

It really it hit home for me when award wining bush poet, Les Murray, said that he too, felt writing poetry healed him through difficult times.

It would seem, I wasn't the only one.

For years I have felt lonely in my longing to write. It's a bizarre emotion, difficult to explain. All I know is that I have not been able to pick up a pen and write fluent poetry for eleven years.

In essence, I have not been able to heal myself for over a decade.

After my second day at the Bendigo Writers Festival, I felt the urge to write, and every rhyming word came freely, as the my fingers could not scribble the pen fast enough.

The me that I had lost was found again. And I no longer feel so alone.

So what did the Bendigo Writers Festival do for me? It give me the space to find myself again.