Dalry School

 

The Wigtown Book Festival is a book festival where schools from across Dumfries and Galloway come together to hear writers talk about their books and then get to do a bit of writing as well. We had talks and workshops from writers including Maggi Gibson, Julian Coulton, Alan Durant and a cartoon writing team named Metaphrog.

The writers shared ideas about how they became writers and then they read excerpts from some of their books to the audience. There was also a PowerPoint shown of a cartoon character which Metaphrog had produced. Then we had some lunch.

Lunch was good. We sat at the bowling green watching a cat rubbing against a tree. It was a nice cat; it had soft fur and it was quite cute. We named it Jeff. I had a chicken sandwich but it would have been better if I had had a bacon one instead. On the way back to the tent, we encountered Jeff again, who was rolling in some leaves. I patted him on the head and carried on.

Once lunch was over we came back to the main tent and then we split off into groups with different writers for workshops and we were soon heading off in different directions. The group that I was in had to go outside to a small area and write about what we could hear and feel in that area for a time limit of twenty minutes. We then gathered back together and Julian Coulton, the poet, helped us make what we had come up with sound better. It was good because we could reflect on where we could improve our writing in the future.

We all met back in the big tent and we had a small talk for a while before departing for our schools.

Overall, I think that the Wigtown Book Festival was a chance to see how writers make their living and it helped us to reflect upon whether we might want to become a writer when we are older.

Marc (S4)