So, continuing on from my last post on zooming to PNG for a most memorable book week, here is more about the classroom itself. This image is what it looked like from the point of view of the students in the main zoom room, before we were allocated to our learning zoom room with the students and their teacher.
Image Courtesy HOPIS school
So how did we end up with a confident performance of a group poem by the end of book week (despite the challenges of working via zoom and classroom learning space combined) and a wall full of beautiful art and sense poems?
This is where the immense dedication of the teacher, her assistant and children, going with the flow of a physically distant author communicating and coming to terms with being on a large screen, and stuck there, makes a massive difference.
I never expected that my first trip back to Papua New Guinea, since I moved to Australia as a one year old, would be in my fifties and via zoom and would be working with writers based in three different countries.
Yet, none of us knows our future, and so it was that the last week my first ever Book Week experience, occurred this way.
I was invited by Tina Marie Clark, to join a CYA team, including her, Albert Nayathi, Phil Kettle, Caroline Evari (and works from Michelle Worthington and Dannika Patterson) that has been mostly going to a school there in person for the last ten years.
The last two years they have had to conduct the visit via zoom, because of COVID19.
Although I haven’t done Book Week before, I have done several workshops in libraries, environmental centres, and schools, to mentor creatives of all ages from kindergarten through to people in their seventies, in poetry. Something which became such a passion I ended up writing and publishing a poetry book, Magic Fish Dreaming, for children.
I wrote Magic Fish Dreaming, to express a sense of the place I was living in at the time, which was the Cassowary Coast, in Far North Queensland, as well as to demonstrate different poetry techniques which might appeal to children but also extend them. At the time of composing this work I was facilitating workshops in the community and needed to create original materials not just use what was already out there.
Magic Fish Dreaming, represents all the beauty, grandeur, magic, and heartache and I saw whilst living in that area, all captured for families to relive some of that and hopefully fall in love with poetry.
During this visit, I was able to bring all the experiences of the last few years, in designing workshops, as well as my recent enrolment to teacher train together into my contemporary practice.
I was delighted to see the effect of the workshops on the students and their teacher and teacher assistant. I can truly say I had as much of a feeling of joy out of this as out of being published.
My heart soared to see them engaged with the activities and WRITING! And finally confidently performing work they had collaborated on composing together.
What did we and the school do during the week to reach this point?
I’m listening to the rain on our tin roof and watching a pigeon sheltering on the back porch top stair.
It’s there all day.
Today it is pouring. Today there are floods.
I have favourite spots around my house, where I can peek out the windows at greenery.
Find a snatch of a cool breeze.
I’m digging deep and delving into life, lived, wisdoms learned and inspirations from historical and artistic figures.
I’m watching as my fledgling children begin to leave home. Stretch their wings. Find their vocations.
I’m pondering mysteries.
Beautiful, ugly, mundane and fantastical, full of dreams and practicalities.
Seeing homeless people on the street.
Reading, and finishing books, like All Our Shimmering Skies, Phosphorescence. And the language is shimmering. The sadness is being flooded by kindness…
I have been striving to transition from poems to novels for years. I was in despair of ever succeeding at this. I fell into limbo. But I never ever stopped writing.
I’ve adventured with genres such as: 500 word flash fiction, 100 word flash fiction, short stories, poems and poetry with puppets for children, picture books, blogs, non-fiction short articles, memoir drafts, and narrative poems. Now this mission ‘to be a novelist’ seems possible.
It’s not that I don’t love poetry, and won’t include it in some way in all that I write, in style or technique, it’s just that I have to move forward, into a novel, with hints of the poet I once was, and flourish.
I am good at starting novels but won’t tell you how many I have begun, that’s going to forever remain my secret. World building intrigues me, and sometimes I even have characters I absolutely love, but it’s going that step further to FINISH something that eludes me.
This time I am working with a mentor, and everything seems possible. Not one detour prior to now has been wasted, rather they have led me to epiphany. The detours were good training and opportunities to discover what does and doesn’t work for me. Now though, I am truly ready to listen to someone who knows how to make this journey from start of manuscript to the end!
This time I have a mentor who believes in me and let’s me be myself not only that she is also a skilled coach. It makes a huge difference to work with someone who encourages you to reach your full capacity, by first seeing your strengths but also pushing you to challenge yourself and go further.
But also this mentor is combined with a genre that truly calls to me and says it is time to realize its potential to be a vehicle for my stories.
We work together with another writer who inspires me with her story in progress.
I will catch the full idea for this one (as my mentor teaches me how to navigate by the knowledge I already have and the wisdom and knowledge she shares) and step by step reel it in!
A huge thank you to Share Your Story But I know the biggest thank you I can give is to write this novel with confidence, skill, joy and bring that story out into the world.
I like instrumental music with atmosphere. Violin, Cello, Guitar especially. Impressionists on the Piano are also quite beautiful.
Lindsey Stirling is one of my top picks on the violin.
I love that she is sometimes inspired by Writers, as with Song of the Caged Bird. She also has no limitations to what kind of music she plays, classical, rock, and more.
Writing with music gives me, a speaking beat, a mood, changes in pace and the ideas for story.
Sometimes my characters have their own music.
Imagine you have a character who is Jazz speaking to a character who is Rock and Roll.
Perhaps you have a Celtic Folk mother with a Punk Rocker son.
As for Lindsey, her music videos, with their dance, narratives, costuming, lighting and artistry can add another layer of inspiration to the writer.
June Paisa Perkins 