Clockwise from top: Jack, Kathleen, Colin, Beverley, James, Sophia
A relative of mine thought it strange that I would write my father’s story as fiction. It makes sense to me, I told her, as he was with us for just a few years, and I was looking back on our time together from many years later. What would the truth be, if I wrote the work as non-fiction? I had to call on my memory as a child to put together the essence of my father’s life, and to also borrow my siblings’ memories to complement my own. It is known that memory is both fallible and selective and fiction is always based on some version of fact. Continue reading
I know many authors who have tried publishing their writing through various online sources, and have found the experience, difficult, tedious and frustratingly slow. It needn’t be that way.
Last week I had a folder of artwork returned to me from a publisher who was moving premises. It was the first book I had illustrated, and I never expected to see the illustrations again, as royalties were paid in advance, thus becoming the publisher’s property. I had enjoyed drawing the illustrations, which were of a young Vietnamese New Zealand girl. However, I had always held a gripe about the finished cover, showing an image which was not what I actually drew. I had drawn two images of the girl inside the plane, one at the beginning, minus the box, and the other at the end holding the box. Both images I drew with the girl’s eyes shut. So what had happened here? 
ARTISTRY 