How to Write a Life – Bob Brown at Blue Mountains Writers Festival

What powers of perception, reflection and remembering are needed to craft a truly great memoir? And what tools can life writers use to extend memoir beyond memory to create literature that challenges, inspires and speaks to our times?

Drawing on 50 years at the front line of the environmental movement, Bob Brown’s Defiance gathers stories of nature's defenders, shares reflections on the people and places that have shaped him, and makes the case that courage, persistence and community can still win. 

Author Debra Dank has penned two illuminating and at times devastating memoirs about family, culture and the Gudanji Country to which she belongs: Ankami and the multi-award-winning We Come with This Place. 

In Mother Shadow, journalist Cynthia Banham uncovers a family secret — that her great-grandmother was not an orphan but a foundling, abandoned by an unwed mother; she follows the trail across continents and generations to reckon with what it means to mother, and be mothered, on your own terms.

Together, these acclaimed writers reflect on how the craft of memoir can illuminate both oneself and the society in which we live.