News

Wow! I can’t quite believe this has happened.

It is going to be a busy next couple of years.

All the candidates were immensely talented, experiences, and any one of them would have made an excellent contribution (and still can), including the outgoing chair, and yet I am grateful for this opportunity, as a woman of colour, of faith, and mixed heritages, and of place – to take on this role and see what I can bring to the table and who else I can bring to the table with me.

When living in a regional area, QWC helped me locate a local writing group, later they sent workshops, poets and others to our area.

I pitched an article to Writing Queensland on Blogging Cyclones – which they accepted, and later articles of Poetry Advocacy through poetry in galleries, and most recently guest edited. Other involvements have been participating in videos for kickstarters to assist for raising of scholarships of students, and submitting books to Books in Our Backyard Catalogue. From time to time I have been to a workshop when it’s up my alley.

Yet, also there are so many others who have also inspired me as a creative today QCAN (sadly no longer in existence), Cassowary Coastal Writers, Queensland Music Festival, QAGOMA, QLD Poetry, Share Your Story, ASA, Write Links, SCBWI, Tropical Writers in Cairns, Townsville Writers, Interplay 1994, Illumine Team, Kookie Magazine, Australian Fairy Tale Society, ABC Open, CYA, and the Ink of Light Team (and many more). Engagement with these various groups, their members and readers, and institutions and publications has enriched my life.

It is just too difficult to name individuals – and without stories for each of them I can’t do their role in my life justice, but there are many! You might find their stories on my various blogs! I could feel this post with many delightful moments.

Memories of Festivals in Cairns, anthology launches, readings, book shop launches – and then Brisbane, and an explosion of things to go to, and be part of. So many writers, well known, emerging, striving, regional, global- met read, appreciated, including the dear, dear children’s and young adult writing community.

I love the writing community of Queensland, and have long found writing like a light in my life, especially in the aftermath of great and little traumas as well as mega and micro joys. So if you hear a little less from me on my blog you will know I am busy seeing what else can happen for those with stories in their hearts and fire in their fingers, to share the visions, dreams, herstory, history, memories, a very special part of the world.

It’s the journey not the destination, sounds like such a cliche, but really it is just that – how we do things not just a brilliant outcome needs to be the goal. As for the role of stories in all of that, stories that excavate and understand the past, that communicate to the present possible futures, that imagines, extends, and reinvigorates.

This is the day for the stories that will move us, shift us – to connection.

And whether the form changes, from spoken, to written, to filmed, gamed, online, on a gallery wall – combining multimodalities, it is the heart of the story that illumines and elucidates for us the human conditions – loss, grief, hope, and more.