THE Bendigo Writers Festival is just around the corner, with 51 events taking place from Thursday, 6 May to Sunday, 9 May.<\/p>\n
Chewton poet Tegan Gigante will join Ben MacEllen and four other top wordsmiths from regional Victoria for the conversation as part of the Off the Page event.<\/p>\n
Gigante said she is also grateful for the chance to do a live reading in person from her latest release All Things Flow.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThere obviously hasn\u2019t been a lot of that in the past year so there\u2019s a sense of not taking that for granted,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cPoetry is well represented, a dear friend of mine and I are reading at the same event, the Off the Page event, and that\u2019s great.\u201d<\/p>\n As the operator of an indie publishing company called Birdfish Books, Gigante said she enjoys being on both the performing and publishing side of poetry.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m often promoting other people\u2019s work and other poets and it\u2019s kind of great to be just representing myself,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The poet has released two books and said she can really see how she has grown in her writing.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I\u2019ve spent a lot of time refining the craft between those books.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile I was on the right track in terms of idea and feeling, I spent a lot of time working on the technical side of the craft and I think they\u2019re more accomplished poems,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Often found performing her poetry with a band, Gigante said the musical side of poetry is important to her.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m really passionate about the melodic qualities of poetry.<\/p>\n \u201cWe set poems to music so I\u2019m really aware of what the music qualities of sound in a poem are how they can serve the poems,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n With the tagline for this year\u2019s Bendigo Writers Festival simply \u2018Strewth\u2019, Gigante said idea resonates with her, especially after last year.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the connotations of that is we\u2019ve come out of this year with that buzzword of things being essential, so of course it\u2019s not just food and shelter, it\u2019s art and writing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n