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Five Questions with Sally Sutton

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1. What is your writing day like? When and how do you create? I have a terrible lack of routine! I write whenever I can fit it in around my other responsibilities. Sometimes, this is four in the morning, but my best writing time is usually mid-morning, when my brain is at its least flabby and the coffee has hit! I’m not the sort of writer who can achieve a daily word count or a certain number of hours at my desk. I write very slowly and edit sentence by sentence as I go, as well as at the end. I don’t necessarily recommend this, but it seems to be how I do it. Also, this might shock you, but an afternoon spent staring out a window daydreaming can actually be far more productive for me than writing screeds of empty words which I’ll only delete later. Thinking is working too! I’ve learnt to be kinder to myself and trust the process. That said, there are also times when I just need to force myself to sit down and get on with it! The tricky part is knowing the difference between creative b...
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Writing Poetry for Children - Sherryl Clark

  While there have been a few notable collections of poems in the past few years, overall the market for single poems is a bit dismal! These are a few resources for you to consider. There’s a tendency for writers/poets to try a picture book text instead (not that these are any easier to get published, but at least we know the readership is keen). However, rhyming texts are very hard to get ‘right’. The rhythm (meter) has to be perfect, and the rhymes need to work strongly (rather than be predictable). Combined with that, you still have to tell a really good story. The other tendency is for some to try and write verse novels, usually in free verse. These are rarely published in NZ for some reason (rarely written?). Again, it can’t just be chopped-up prose – there has to be a strong poetic element, as well as a good story.  The main thing, I think, is to keep writing poems – the more you write, the better your poems will be. You should also read a lot of children’s poetry to get...
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Five Questions with Katie Furze

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Katie Furze writes children’s non-fiction and fiction including picture books, short stories, articles, plays, readers and novels from her home in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She has a master’s degree in creative writing and is fascinated by science and nature. Her books include PEKAPEKA, Secret Forest Bat (2025), RURU, Night Hunter (2024) and TUATARA, A Living Treasure (2023) all illustrated by Ned Barraud and published by Scholastic NZ. You can also read her work in The New Zealand School Journal or in The School Magazine in Australia. Katie has also written stories in anthologies and readers and plays for educational publishers. She loves spending time in nature and you’ll find her outside whenever possible. What is your writing day like? When and how do you create? Even if it is just a sentence or two jotted in my journal, I write every day, wherever I am. I like to process my thoughts, ideas and first drafts the old-fashioned way with a pen on paper. When my children were young, ...
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What is Children's Book Week in Australia?

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By Sherryl Clark Probably the question before that is: what is the CBCA? It’s the Children’s Book Council of Australia, which has been going now for 80 years! To quote from their website: The CBCA was founded in 1945 in a time when Australian children’s books were few, and Australian authors and illustrators were virtually unknown. The following year, 1946 the  The Book of the Year Awards , an annual award to promote books of high literary and artistic quality was established. These awards are now the most influential and highly respected in Australia. Its key purpose of promoting children’s and young adult books has been made possible by thousands of volunteers over the years, as well as sponsorship. The awards are very influential, but also can have the inverse effect (as we see in NZ) of the shortlisted books being highly promoted while everyone else’s books miss out and fade away. However, a few years ago, some of the committee realised that they needed to make more of the Nota...
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Recollections and reverie with Ruth Paul

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We recently enjoyed an interesting and engaging session with award-winning Aotearoa author/illustrator extraordinaire Ruth Paul, in which she shared many fascinating insights gleaned from her celebrated career as an author and illustrator. She took us on a short virtual tour showing her semi-rural Wellington farmhouse, studio and ever-expanding area of native bush which has recently become home to around a dozen relocated kiwi! (Ruth explained her participation in the Government’s emissions trading scheme helps to supplement her book-industry income.) After starting out illustrating three picture books written by others, Ruth has since worked exclusively on books she both writes and illustrates and now has more than 24 of these picture books to her credit. Ruth's titles have been published in New Zealand, Australia, USA, Canada, the UK, China and Korea, with translations in five languages. We heard about some of the books she has coming out this year, including fiction pictur...
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Deborah Hinde works from her home based studio in rural Waikato. Her studio is a converted double garage not far from the house, with garden and rolling countryside views. Pheasants, hares, hedgehogs and rabbits, plus a multitude of birds are often seen enjoying the garden. Her surroundings often provide great inspiration for some of her characters. Deborah is the illustrator of more than 100 books, both fiction and non-fiction, with over 45 of these picture books. Her illustrations for  The Spaghetti Giraffe  (Flat Bed Press) was awarded the 2018 Storylines Notable Book Award (and more recently in 2023,  A Kiwi Night Before Christmas  (Scholastic NZ), the first book she ever illustrated, received the Gaelyn Gordon Award for a well-loved book.  In 2016 Deborah ventured into independent publishing with  Hare.  Since then she’s produced another 5 books working on her own text as well as bringing other authors stories to life. She illustrated and pro...
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Writer's Retreats - give your writing a massive boost by Sherryl Clark

One of the hardest things about writing is maintaining focus. It seems the writers who have no trouble with this also often have no other job. Or they are so committed to their novel that they get up an hour earlier to write – every day. The rest of us continue to struggle. We have to work at jobs we usually don’t enjoy much for 7-10 hours every day, we have family to spend quality time with, chores, bills to pay… The time for working on our novels gets squeezed from every direction and it’s hard to find the time and energy to write. That’s why writing retreats are so beneficial - and often downright amazing. Not just because you have a week or a month (or perhaps three months if you are lucky) to do nothing but focus on your novel and write. But because of what it creates for you in other ways. A writing retreat is the perfect opportunity to grow your writing, and to grow as a writer and learn what that means for you. Time There are 24 hours in a day. You might spend 8 of those sleepi...
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