With participants in a poetry as a tool for navigating change for Pasifika peoples who have always had ancient storytelling, song and dance.
The Australian Pasifika Educators Network conference was an empowering experience, encouraging participants to move even more firmly into the arena of ‘transformation’ of and through education. One approach to this is through decolonising and, Indigenising curriculum pedagogies and practice for the sake of ALL students. Another is entering and encouraging youth, acknowledging those who we cite today were once youth.
Wonderful to meet Malaeulu Seuta’afili Patrick Thomsen, PhD (one of my editors!) in person And thank you to all those who have joined my quest for poetry advocacy and literacy,and the connection to the ancient and the new, and taken Magic Fish Dreaming into their hearts and into the homes of young readers. I am eternally grateful to you and wish you well in your poetry hunting and travels.
Another highlight was of course meeting the fabulous APEN team for the first time in person. Many thanks especially to Ruth Faleolo for encouraging me to participate in this network and to Bronwyn Williams & Tofa Amanda Moors-Mailei for creating the network Australian Pasifika Educators Network
Also thanks as always to Helene Magisson Artist for the magical illustrations she did for this project
Nearly 100 books were gifted to the conference participants to share the power of poetry.
I wanted to do something worthy of the remembrance of my Dad. I’ll share more about him over the next few months. I know Dad would approve, because he had such a big heart.
So I chose to do a few months of Fundraising for Love your Sister. Sam Johnson’s sister, to be exact, but also all the sisters and brothers everywhere who have cancer, or whose families have lost them to cancer.
Samuel Johnson’s story since his sister’s terminal diagnosis is incredible, raw and epic. He broke the world record for longest distance travelled on one wheel. He put on the Big Heart Project which raised a very twinkly $2.55M. He won a Gold Logie for his portrayal of Molly Meldrum, held the mirrorball trophy aloft in Dancing with the Stars and was awarded the Victorian Australian of the Year in 2018.
For those of you who may not know Sam,
“In the 2000s Samuel Johnson rose to fame as an actor and in 2013 he captured the nation’s heart when his sister Connie’s terminal cancer diagnoses prompted him to unicycle around Australia to raise funds and awareness for medical research.
Love Your Sister is Australia’s hardest-working cancer vanquishing charity, and since its inception in 2012 has raised nearly $20M for medical research. Founded by Gold Logie-winning actor and Victorian Australian of the Year 2018, Samuel Johnson OAM, Love Your Sister is a million-strong village of everyday Aussies committed to vanquishing cancer with hard science and the best new technologies.
Love Your Sister supports Precision Medicine for ALL cancer patients, whatever the cancer, regardless of location, age, income, or status. “We strive for the right treatment for every cancer patient, first time, every time. We proudly pass on 100% of every donation received to scientific research.”
I follow Sam’s community – read all his posts, and the touching comments on them, but with the passing of my Dad the time to be a keyboard supporter has passed, time to put in a fundraising effort for the community that has been building.
I am not a huge business – but the truth is all authors and artists are businesses and life, well life is about community building. Every little bit adds up!
Sometimes the smallest donations can have the biggest heart, the most epic story, and from “little things, big things grow.”
I think that’s what attracted my to Sam and his sisters Mission so much.
So here’s for Love your Sister – Three months, all the sales of Magic Fish Dreaming will be devoted to vanquishing cancer! I have to subtract the postage (if only I had a contact at Australia post or a couriers), but the rest, will be put towards your quest.
Thanks Love Your Sister, for accepting my offer, and here’s to hoping with your help I can make this goal, with the help of my community of readers and fellow children’s authors. And maybe also the help of Dad wherever he is right now!
Nature art frames are really simple to make, fun to play with and create some wonderful images. They also encourage creativity and fine motor skills in children of all ages and abilities. You just need a recycled piece of cardboard, a pen and some scissors. We hate to waste anything and recycling and reusing materials is one of many small things we can all do to help the environment. So instead of throwing away oldcardboard boxes we like to find ways to use them in crafts and activities.
To make your nature art frame you first need to draw a simple shape or picture onto the cardboard. Your shape or picture should have at least 1- 2 easy to cut out sections that you can then look through. You could draw anything from hearts and triangles to animals,, objects and people.
Presenting at OzComicCon Panel on Authenticity of Women’s Voices in Writing March 2022
To young writers everywhere
looking for your authentic voice
and to create authentic voices
look into herstory for inspirations
listen and observe your
mothers, sisters, daughters, and yourself
Ask questions
whatever gender you are
you can do the following (see poem).
Authenticity
To write with authenticity is
choosing
to write with truth
putting aside any
shackles, biases, and oppressions
being honest, courageous,
creative, skilful, and
brilliant.
It’s moving to where there is
balance
finding our voices in all their
diversity
winging their ways into
every writing genre;
popular to poetic,
academic to artistic, protesting,
questioning
and free
respecting and remembering those
paved the way for us.
(c) June Perkins
Phyllis Wheaton, First African American Woman to earn something from her writing. She was a poet.
To find out more visit the reflection on the panel at
Delighted to be on a panel with these two insightful women, Sharon Orapeleng, and Dimity Powell, to discuss the challenges and gifts of Diaspora to – community, writing, and publishing.
The session is fully booked out, and is happening before the Queensland Writer’s Centre, Christmas Party in a couple of weeks.
Sharon Orapeleng is a behavioral change expert and a mental health professional. Through Psyched Solutions Training and Consultancy – Sharon is on a journey to create a much more compassionate community that cares by embedding the African philosophy of ‘Ubuntu’’ – I am Because We Are, in all she does. A renowned speaker and community advocate, Sharon works with workplaces, businesses and communities delivering workshops on mental health awareness and wellbeing as well as facilitating cultural diversity conversations. She also works for the Queensland Government as a strategic policy and…
It’s a thing, the online launch. Such is the times. Videos submitted, and then scrolled through. Here is my latest, participating in the launch of Once Upon a Oops.
I have another one in the book, which if you purchase it you can read. It is inspired by guinea pigs. There are lots of fun and cool stories, and poems, including some from young people.
They will amuse, inspire, and often make you laugh. Good for these times when our spirits need lifting.
Congratulations to all the featured authors and artists as well as to Anthology Angels for all the great work you do giving authors opprtunities and bringing good cheer to readers and causes!
Work from the students of the Higaturu Oil Palm International School which became a class anthology, Escape to Wonder
A recent week of Book Week workshops via zoom, at the Higaturu Oil Palm International School, was wondrous.
Students were willing to imagine and open their eyes to a sense of wonder, to explore other worlds within worlds, from nature, to rivers to the moon and outerspace.
We began with learning about cheeky Cassowaries hungry and looking for food after a cyclone, and imagining what they might say or think, and advanced to humourous dialogues within the river and exploring a sense of wonder, through sensory adventure poems.
Students learnt about the power of working in pairs and in groups and how many voices combined can create, extend and then joyously and confidently perform their creations.
Creativity is joyful! Students in action creating.
Throughout I used my own illustrated poetry book, Magic Fish Dreaming, as the main mentor text with a storytelling session also of Michelle Worthington’s Book, Possum Games.
Both had kindly been posted and provided to the school by Tina from CYA. This meant we could read together, and as I have dialogue poems and question and answer structures this was fantastic to have each student have the book on the other side of the zoom.
I was impressed by how the students worked with each other on some in the river dialogues and their humour and inventiveness throughout the week began to shine through.
Work from Stone and Seaweed Anthology, by Students of Higaturu Oil Palm International School
I am delighted the school community (families and staff) gave permission for me to share their work.
More important than products though, is the process of creativity that the children undertook within their classroom. By reflecting on that stories can come from that which you know through your senses and take you to places you might only imagine.
I hope these children, will create many more poems or stories and strengthen and contribute to building a publishing community within Papua New Guinea, beginning from anthologies within their school and moving beyond the anthologies for their communities. Building perhaps collectives for theirs and future generations.
With many thanks to the school, students , staff of the Higaturu Oil Palm International School, and Tina of CYA.
Photographs courtesy of the Higaturu Oil Palm International School, shared with their permission
So, continuing on from my last post on zooming to Higaturu Oil Palm International School, 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.
Zooming Book Week 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.
As I communicated, using voice, slide shows, and virtual white boards, Ms Gwendalyn, and Ms Cynthia, her assistant, would further explain it to the students. Zoom can be tricky as I couldn’t walk around the classroom, nor easily read the body language of students, like I normally do. The students could only walk up to the front to ask me questions, and sometimes felt a bit shy of the screen.
Although by the end of the week they knew to keep an eye on the whiteboard for surprises, such as Riddles!
It helped that they had the focus texts, of Magic Fish Dreaming and Michelle Worthington’sPossum Games with them to work from as well. These had been posted to arrive before Book Week in PNG began.
They became mentor texts for the students, to also learn about publishing, illustrating and cover pages.
We had a prior meeting on zoom the week before, with all presenting authors, Tina, Phil, Caroline, Albert and myself, meeting the teachers, and working out how we would proceed. I asked Ms Gwendalyn, to please put stickers on the children with their names, and she sent me a class list as well.
I ran the program by her, to check if it would be helpful for the students, and had a mix of activities to go with the books, such as art, drama, writing, all complementary to the text, as well as readings.
Although I have done many workshops this was my first time doing a sequence for a whole week, and in Papua New Guinea too, as normally I just have had two hour workshops so that was a blessing and a new challenge.
As part of the process we decided that each day it would be helpful for me to email Ms Gwendalyn, and just check in on how she felt the children had responded, as well as observing that during class time myself.
These consultations sometimes led to modifications for the next day which were beneficial for all. Although sometimes the messages took longer to arrive then we anticipated. That’s the internet for you.
I gave the students a sneak peek reading of a new anthology I have some new poems in which is edited by Michelle Worthington. We also spoke about the power of anthologies.
The immense benefit of working over a whole week with the students and their teacher was we could use each earlier class as a foundation to the next class and creative task.
We could expand and apply new concepts into their work from previous sessions. The main challenge, was just making sure to go with the flow of what was engaging the students, and extending them to just the right balance.
This meant every now and then, me or Ms Gwendalyn, making on the spot easy to implement decisions to alter previous plans.
By the end of this post series, I’d like to feature some of the work of the students, the school is just doublechecking with their parents that this will be okay as it is my hope to introduce these budding authors to you through their work. Perhaps some of them will choose the pathway of authors, designers, artists or playwrights!
Another amazing thing, was the warmth of the author team and some of the zany things we decided to do, like change our head gear everyday…
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 the Higaturu Oil Palm International 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.
Screen shot of zoom of bookweek
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 all backgrounds 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 with a sense of the place I was living in, 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 training as a teacher (although for highschool) 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?
Magic Fish Dreaming 