I was probably born scribbling. Certainly by my teens I was a compulsive writer; and when I was asked to be the founder editor of our school magazine, I was hooked. A couple of years later, doing A-Levels part-time and working as well, I limited my output to a diary. That hit a quarter of a million words by the end of the year, and I'd learnt something very useful: a diary makes you live an interesting life, in order to have something worth recounting each day. Shortly after this, adolescent angst led to a couple of volumes of passionate poems, followed by a brief spell as one of the founding editors of a college literary magazine.
Naturally, my first proper job was in a bookshop, whose owners were wise enough to allow their young staff to develop burgeoning literary interests, by involving us in the process of dealing with publishers and selecting titles to stock. Author visits, reading circles, writing circles, book reviews, window displays and trade publications fed and informed this process, as did the daily flow of customers necessarily interested in the power of the written word.
During a pause in my literary career for the rearing of small children, pre-school playgroups diverted my energies, as a means of earning a crust while being there for my children. In no time, I was writing newsletters for playgroups and toddler groups, taking minutes of meetings, producing leaflets and flyers. My audience grew from playgroup to branch level, from branch to county, and finally from county to national, with occasional articles in the playgroup association's magazine.
In turn, this led to a role in the first North Devon Children's Book Festival, which brought 50 children's authors to over 100 events in schools and libraries throughout the district. Authors included top names like Ted Hughes, Michael Morpurgo and Val Biro, and the festival was so successful that we repeated it a couple of years later. As festival chair this time, I took responsibility for the publicity, writing press releases and features, and giving radio and television interviews. I was offered a weekly column in the local paper to promote the festival in the weeks running up to it; and afterwards this became a children's column, and later a children's page.
On the crust-earning front, my work with the under-fives moved on into school administration as my own children grew, and my incidental literary output diverged abruptly. On the one hand, I was producing complex formal reports and documents; and on the other, I was extensively involved in the creative enterprises of the pupils and the larger school community. There is nothing so challenging as pupils with boundless enthusiasm and dedicated teachers who wish to encourage them: any talent or skill spotted anywhere on the horizon is dragged into the school and instantly sucked into the maelstrom of Inspiring Artistic Expression. Nor is there any critic so merciless as an unimpressed child: you soon learn to sharpen up. (Teachers can sometimes forget to leave their red pens behind when dealing with adults, too).
Exhilarating but exhausting. It was with profound relief that I moved on out of schools when my sons did, and I took to the road (well, the long-distance trail) to clear my head and decide what to do with the rest of my life. And while I was thinking, naturally I was writing too...
Contributor to: