We had Grizzly Bear roars and Lioness hugs aplenty today at my Dunedin City Library ‘Meet the Author’ event.
We designed a jazzy pair of togs together that would make sure our Grizzly Bear was the trendiest in the woods.
The shorts now take pride of place on my office wall.
Thank you so much to everyone who came along and joined in and to the staff at Dunedin Library, with an extra special thanks to Jackie and Ali, who made me feel so at home at the library.
Thank you to everyone who came along to join Barbara Else, Kitty Brown and I for our ‘Pathways to Publication’ panel today. It was a hugely enlightening conversation about our publication journeys which were very different but started in the same vein of trying to fill a gap in the market.
Kitty’s journey began with creating Te Reo Māori board books for babies. With a complete gap in the market for these books, she teamed up with cousin Kirsten Parkinson, a fine artist, to create the beautiful Reo Pepi books and would go on later to team up with Allen & Unwin on the series.
I’m not sure I would have had the same perseverance and I’m glad in many ways that entering the Greenhouse Funny Prize was my way in to publishing. I’m not sure I would have carried on submitting if the competition hadn’t come up when it had but Kitty’s story taught me to definitely have more faith in my writing abilities.
The panel goes to show just how many different routes there are into publishing.
In the afternoon, I joined Ella West, Emma Wood, Gillian Torckler and Kitty again as we talked about why we write for kids and the importance of literacy. We all shared the same values of wanting to create high quality books for kids because kids deserve great literature. We also agreed that access to books was essential for making sure kids became readers, including protecting school libraries and librarians and public libraries from budget cuts, ensuring kids had books at home to read and adults in their lives modelling good reading habits.
Thank you so much to everyone who watched the My Mum is a Lioness event at the Reading is Magic Festival 2022. I hope you all had huge fun listening to the story and drawing your very own lioness with Dapo.
Do send us any pictures of your creations and I’ll absolutely add them to my roarsome gallery.
To celebrate National Reading Group Day 2022, Team Chatterbooks have chosen the books that make it into this year’s yearbook and I’m chuffed to bits to see Bad Panda was chosen as the book most likely to ‘make us giggle’.
Have a look at all the yearbook celebrations here. Thank you, Chatterbooks!
And Bad Panda has been selected as part of BookTrust’s Great Books Guide for 2022 too! Thank you, BookTrust. You can have a look at the fantastic guide here.
It’s been an awesome three days of storytime with Team SuperGrans and fellow author Emma Wood at kindergartens across Dunedin.
We visited six kindergartens in total where Emma and I shared our picturebooks with the children. The brilliant team of grans then took over in the storytime corner and Emma and I created lots of new looks for a Grizzly Bear dad and a potato called Doug in colouring-in bonanza.
I had an absolute blast with all the wonderful mini readers we met this week. I loved all their recommendations for fun things to do in Dunedin, including finding the best ice cream in ‘Albie’s Mum’s Freezer’ and all the fantastic stories they had to tell us about their favourite pairs of togs.
Thank you so much to SuperGrans Teresa, Helen, Shona, Diane, Anne, Anita and Rosie who joined in this week and HUGE thanks to the brilliant Debbie and Sandy who set up the SuperGrans events.
The UNESCO International Literacy Day highlights the importance of literacy as a human right so it was wonderful to spend today with The Rotary Club of Dunedin talking about the books I read as a child and the journey I have taken since as a writer.
It’s been a few years since Dave Pigeon and best pal Skipper went off on a holiday and they are FINALLY back with their very own World Book Day book! Out in 2023, this is the story of Dave versus Bookseller and it promises to be as epic and as feathery as all the other books in the Dave Pigeon series.
I’m so honoured to have been asked to write a book for World Book Day and I got to work with pigeon-illustrator extraordinaire Sheena Dempsey. We can’t wait for you to be back in the world of pigeons and jammy biscuits. Check out the awesome trailer:
So start working on your pigeon costumes, Readers and remember to swap your World Book Day voucher in bookshops and supermarkets for your copy of Dave Pigeon (Bookshop Mayhem!) from February 2023 onwards.
After having to cancel my book week events at Kaikorai Primary School due to COVID, I was finally able to visit today to make up for lost time.
It was wonderful to be back at the school where my own mancub had been a pupil and to see their brand new hall.
I started my day with the Juniors and we had a Grizzly Bear-tastic event, hearing My Dad is a Grizzly Bear and drawing bears of our very own.
I then met with Years 3 and 4 and we created 100 brand new ideas for Bad Panda which is quite handy because I may have a couple more books in the series up my sleeve. We heard about Lin meeting heavily-moustached men and water dragons and riding rafts to the middle of the Amazonian river.
The Seniors did not let down with their imaginations when it came to an afternoon of creating new Dave Pigeon stories. I let them in on some top secret Dave Pigeon news and they created some new adventures for Mean Cat which saw her meeting a new enemy in a character called Greedy Cat and investing in a fleet of supercars to drive down the streets of Dunedin.
Thank you so much to the staff and pupils who made my day at Kaikorai Primary so fantastically fun.
The Dunedin Public Art Gallery hosted a Meet the Fellows forum with Nicholas McBryde hosting and inviting the public to ask questions about the Fellows’ work.
We spoke about our creative processes and how we hoped our art would engage with the community. With us all at varying stages in our Fellowships (in fact, mine was completed in July), it made for interesting discussion about how we dealt with refilling our creative wells and where we were in our careers.
Thank you so much to everyone who came along and for those who couldn’t make it, a recording of the event will be made available via the University of Otago website.
Today, I got to spend my morning with the lovely school librarians in Dunedin as part of their SLANZA and National Library Day of Goodness. My entire love of books and writing started with libraries and kind librarians who put aside Sweet Valley High books knowing I would want to read them first, so it was quite a feat not to spend the entire morning fangirling this brilliant group of people.
Instead we talked about seeing ourselves in books, what to do with too many ideas and Sweet Valley of course.
Thank you so much for having me and for a yummy morning tea.
