Duck for a Day

Okay, I know I talk a lot of talk about ducks, about Duck the First and Duck the Second as if they are actual books, rather than just ideas quacking softly in a corner of my brain.

But over the last few months I have been watching quietly while Duck the First came into being. I have seen pencil sketches of a little girl working at her desk, of a slightly grotty boy hanging over her backyard from a branch. I have squeed over colour roughs of Abby and Noah and Mrs Melvino and most of all, Max - the difficult demanding different duck who takes up residence in Abby's class.

I have been thrilled and delighted by the work of the wonderful Leila Rudge. It's not that the characters are as I'd imagined them, that I feel satisfied seeing 'my' vision come to life. The truth is that I'm not much of a visual thinker and am not sure I had imagined them in any great detail at all. It's rather that they are just so absolutely right for the book. Illustrators are wizards, I tell you.

And now I have something marvellous. I have an officially approved and definitely final cover. Ahh. I love covers; somehow for me seeing the cover is the moment when the book comes into its true bookness. And bookness, as we know, is a very fine thing.

In related news, I have just learned that Duck the Second is also on its official way. But in an unexpected twist, it may end up being less about ducks and more about not-ducks, except not quite in the way I had planned.

Hold that bemused look for a while. All will be revealed at a much later date.

Premier's Summer Reading Challenge

Over the last week I've visited libraries from Mandurah to Morley, with a Fremantle stopover closer to home, talking to kids about books and writing and the fantastic Premier's Summer Reading Challenge. I love carrying my little box of bits and pieces into the cozy corners of libraries and seeing who's waiting for me there, especially when they turn out to be as delightful and creative as the groups I met this year.

Thanks to everyone who came out on very hot days to hear me talk, and help me plot (in every sense!). I hope you were all inspired to take up the reading challenge, not just over summer, but always. Remember that you can keep reading until 8th February, but make sure your entries are in by the 15th.

Oh, and don't forget - that trip to Broome is mine!

Is a Poem a Frog?

I've been thinking lately about poetry. I've been thinking about it and reading it but what I haven't been doing is writing it. In fact, it's been well over a year since I wrote a new poem. And I'm acutely aware that this is not a good thing, in ways which can be difficult to define.

In my rambling thoughts about poetry, and my own lack thereof, I found myself thinking about something Mark Tredinnick said at a workshop I attended at the Apropos Poetry Symposium here in Perth last year. I can't recall exactly the words he used but he spoke about the notion of a poem itself - the work that appears on the page - as being an indicator species for the whole landscape that is the poem. I found this idea immediately compelling, and true, and filed it away in my brain under 'quirky ideas I may return to later in unexpected ways'.

Now, in thinking about not writing poetry, and the malaise that comes with that, or of which it is perhaps itself an outcome (not sure yet of the slippery relationship between these two things), it occurs to me that for me, poetry itself is an indicator species of the whole landscape which is my writing. In much the same way that the presence of frogs indicates a healthy environment, so the production of poems, the delight in poems, is suggestive of the general health of my own creative life in a broader sense.

To stretch the analogy further than any reasonable writer ever should, clearly I need to rid the soil of chemical fertilisers and/or pesticides. I'm just not sure what they are yet.

In the meantime, I keep slogging away at narrative, trying to carve out a home for myself, all the while wondering whether I might not be better off just spending some quiet time in the garden.