Young Writers is a program run in partnership with The Literature Centre. It offers an open and encouraging space for young writers and creatives to learn from award-winning Australian authors and meet a group of like-minded young people.
The program is designed to give each student the experience of working with acclaimed authors across diverse genres and creating styles.
“The opportunity is given to students to listen to authors from across Australia, hear their creative journey and their highs and lows of achievement. It also gives the opportunity for students to write under the guidance of authors; to create, embellish and develop work with expert support and encouragement,” said Teacher Librarian, Ms Jan Pocock.
This program runs for a full day to enable students to immerse themselves into the creative space and to develop writing that has depth and significance.
Recently our Lishman Library hosted acclaimed authors, Chenée Marrapodi and Brendan Ritchie who ran Young Writers Collective session with students. Young aspiring authors had the opportunity to learn first-hand the ins and outs of all things writing and publishing, and even got constructive feedback on their own work.
Ms Marrapodi and Mr Ritchie share about their experiences with the sessions.
Chenée Marrapodi :: With my sessions, we dance with words because my background is also as a dancer, and the whole idea of dancing with words or playing with words even, is that we get them out of our heads. We just get creative and we have fun, with the knowledge that we can always edit something later.
After, I walk away feeling really motivated to get back to write because I am inspired by the creative students. They have not learned to be scared yet about putting themselves out there and I think that is a really beautiful thing. So, if I can encourage them to write as much as I can now and not be scared to be creative, I think that is a pretty golden thing.
Brendan Ritchie :: I aim to give the students plenty of advice and tangible kind of writing exercises. These are generally things that might be able to kick start their writing projects which are within the framework of themes in my particular sort of novels and my approach to writing. For this session, we explored dystopian fiction and how to go about writing that., I also looked at helping students understand how writing can enable us to include social and political themes.
These sessions really give students great access to a range of published authors who are willing to talk about their process and their journey and listen to students read their own work. Hopefully it makes the idea of potentially being an author one day seem a little bit more feasible to these aspiring writers.
