It is lovely to have your attention for a moment! 

Will it be a 'moment' though? I am a writer... this may go on a bit :) 

 

I am the Founder and Creative Director at Boogie Books. As the creator and driver of the Child Writes programme, you can see that I am a sucker for picture books and I am fortunate now to work with picture books all the time, especially now with The Lighthouse Toowoomba as my main preoccupation!

 

I have to say thought, it was a less than salubrious start to my career as a writer, an illustrator, a publisher and a teacher than this fabulous place you find me in right now! You see, I started writing when I got the sack… True. I had finished a marketing degree and was relishing being involved with a business in its growth stage. I worked with my husband, and whilst he was delighted I was interested, I had taken the marketing planning as far as I could given my very limited real-world experience.

 

My husband fired me (I was manning the reception and kept commenting on how many chocolate biscuits he seemed to be eating!) His redundancy package was he encouraged me to keep the baby-sitter (I thought it was more as a safety measure - in case the new employee who was replacing me didn’t work out! I call that an ‘each-way’ bet, but I digress…)

 

I didn’t want to do anything ‘practical’ with my newly realised available time. I didn’t do anything social. I just wanted to have some fun and I was inspired to paint! Besides, why commit to something when it possibly could have been only short term?Little did I realise that the next stage in my life was to span from then until now. So much for short term!

 

With one of my favourite photos of my family in hand, I purchased a canvas and on my first ‘babysitter’ day, I roughed out the portrait of Dave with our three daughters. I was so immensely proud of it, but there were a couple of reasons why I didn’t ever finish it. Firstly, It was too hard to be at home, when the babysitter was there, I was behind a closed door, listening to my children laugh and cry. Secondly, it was too hard to move the canvas. I had used pastels, the most uselessly beautifully fragile medium and one sneeze and it all could disappear! Finally, I had actually have a project I could work on that ticked all the ‘fun’ boxes. I written a list of things to remind my second daughter she was actually a big girl and big girls went to school  (she was reticent about going to school and ‘being lost’) She quickly tired of the list, so I took some photos, printed them on the little black and white printer at home and wrote sentences under each; then I clipped it all together like a book.

 

Having rediscovered my inner-artist I used my next ‘babysitting day’ to turn the photos into hand-drawn illustrations. It took weeks. Fortunately, the new marketing employee at work proved to be an absolute dynamo and I now had all the time in the world, yet I worked like crazy because I wasn’t sure when the rug would be pulled on the babysitting deal. 

 

When I look back now, I started writing because I started painting.

 

I muddled through the process of setting up the book and finding a printer and launching it – I was too impatient to even try and find someone else to publish the book and I started Boogie Books, a small press publishe in the same year. I Can Do Anything was released in 2003. I loved the experience of creating a picture book so much and I was amazed it was so ‘doable’ I was determined to write and illustrate another the following year. The first version of Lily Fabourama Glamourama was released in 2004.

 

Through a friend, I donated a copy of my first book to a fundraiser for NAPCAN – the National Association of Child Abuse and Neglect. My relationship with NAPCAN started when I showed them Lily as a work in progress and they loved the positive parenting message in my second book. We included NAPCAN information and the organisation’s logo on the inside back cover and now I had a real reason to beat the drum for this book. I then read the NAPCAN commissioned paper, ‘Towards a Better Future’ which linked the simple fact that a community that listens to its children values its children and therefore keeps them safe.

 

I was completely hooked.

 

Now I was determined to write a picture book each year, but my girls (age 2, 4 and 6) ‘had a meeting’ and informed me I wasn’t allowed to because ‘it took me away from them.’ I could have cried. I am sure I did! As I was working on the second book, I couldn’t see how consuming the whole project was, and it took a delegation and a statement like that to force me to take stock of my priorities. I was also renovating at home, sinking into depression. My brother came to live with us to help and it was during this dark time I wrote a short story called ‘Sam, I am’. I entered it into a competition, a first for me. It won and it was published in a collection of short stories called ‘Time Will Tell’. Amazing. 

 

I was now a published and a self published author – and both felt great in equal measure. I had a fabulous session with a psychologist (who happened to also be a yoga master) and when I described my days, her advise was ‘look for help from those around you’ and she taught me how to make eye contact again with those I care about, and to ask for help. This simple act of asking for help was one of the keys to getting out of that hole! I changed my expectations, slowed down a tad, and I was able to ‘see’ opportunities, which arguably, were staring me in the face all along…By way of compromising – after this, when our children were still little, and there were moments, I wrote when they were asleep and gradually, one by one, they started school. I have folders of picture books busting to be finished, but I also have an amazing group of talented creatives to work with. (Ironically, the incredibly talented graphic designer I work with is in the same spot I was ten years ago, now has the same very, very busy life!) Back though to those spare moments, and I presented for free at a librarians seminar (and was completely hopeless), but I learnt a huge amount and was subsequently kept ‘working’ by Jan Watkins, never paid, yet paid-in-full by her unflinching support.

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The second significant event when I was to be invited to be a literacy champion by Jill Temple at the Middle Ridge State School after the release of Lily Fabourama Glamourama. I did a speech (everyone could see how terribly nervous I was!) and then read my books to the children in the lower primary classes. It was fun. I loved doing the ‘author’ visit. I wanted to run a workshop, a few days where we would focus on the craft of writing and illustrating children’s picture books. We did. It worked. The workshops extended from the proposed three weeks to eight; the children wrote and illustrated their own picture books; the last money in the P&F can was drained and committed to printing book covers. My husband’s work photocopier ran hot as we printed the guts of the book... The logistics were a pleasure – simply because the whole thing worked.

 

Imagine how wonderful it was to run the workshops again the following year (and the next and the next!), with a little more experience and a little more planning each time. The output each time was incredible. The seed was sown!

 

I badly wanted to increase the volume of the children’s voices beyond the printed page. I knew the technology was evolving for what we describe quite nonchalantly these days as eBooks. When we started, I couldn’t have forecast the impact the iPad, the ‘i’ anything, is having on the reading landscape, therefore the potential for sharing the voices of the children, but it is exactly what I needed to hand the authors their megaphone. Having worked out ‘how’ to do a fix-layout page eBook and therefore load it onto Amazon means every child who finishes their book is now part of a substantive library of books written and illustrated for children by children and Boogie Books is now the largest publishers on Amazon of children’s books written by children in the world.

 

I may be sounding greedy now, but this may well be just the beginning!

 

My vision for the books Child Writes authors create in the future is not only their stories and their illustrations, but also, I imagine those eBooks also having a video of the author, comfortably in the big red chair belonging to the upholsterer on James Street, reading their story… or a video they have taken of their homes or their schools, of insights from their world, sharing more than the pages.

I have added this to my to-do list!

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Of course, no-one can manage a ‘to-do’ list without support.

 

Boogie Books and Child Writes has support. Not only in terms of program material and trained tutors, but from external forces. From passionate literacy advocates who have been strapped in for the ride from the beginning, like teachers Jill Temple and Jan Watkins who are incredible patrons of Child Writes to a patient family.

Financial support in the form of bursaries for students who haven’t the means to participate in the workshops have been raised by teachers; businesses have printed additional copies of books and donated them to locations beyond Toowoomba. Child Writes also had the support of Jetstar  as they had at least twenty books each month as part of their inflight entertainment offering available on the iPads and they have done so for nearly five years (2011-2016).