Suitable for Years 4-6

August 24  Chinese brush painting class

August 27  Chinese brush painting class

August 28 Speaking session Dream Myth Imagination – Gabrielle Wang and Ambelin Kwaymullina

August 29  Speaking session East Meets West – Gabrielle Wang and Kate Forsyth

I just finished reading Little Paradise and I loved it! I adored every single character, both primary and secondary. I’d just like to ask you a few questions:

What happens to Rose, Dave, Jock, Murray, the Hartmanns and Stefan? Edward and Chrissy? I teared up when the Hartmanns left for Australia. Does Mirabel ever see them again?

Thank you so much,
Tina

Interview with author and illustrator Gabrielle Wang

After she left school, Australian author Gabrielle Wang studied and worked in Graphic Design before deciding to delve deeper into her Chinese heritage, which led her to study Chinese painting and calligraphy in Taiwan. She lived there for five years and then moved to China to continue her studies at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou, China.

When she returned to Australia, Gabrielle began teaching Chinese. Originally intending to work towards creating a picture book, she discovered in herself a gift for writing novels: her fist published novel The Garden of Empress Cassia was published in 2002. It won numerous awards and has been published in the US and the UK, and translated into Spanish and Korean. Since then, she has written other acclaimed middle-grade and YA novels, as well as the text for the picture book The Race for the Chinese Zodiac. Her latest book,The Wish Bird, is due out later this year.

You started out following a career as an artist — please tell us about your journey to becoming an author.

A lot of it came down to luck and timing. For as long as I can remember I had wanted to be an artist, so I studied Graphic Design at RMIT University in Melbourne then worked in the industry for a number of years. At the same time I became interested in discovering my ‘roots’. On my mother’s side I am fourth generation Chinese Australian. My great-grandfather came here during the gold rush in the 1850s so my siblings and I grew up not knowing much about Chinese culture. We couldn’t speak the language and we didn’t celebrate Chinese customs. I remember when I was young being ashamed that I looked Chinese. I was the only Asian kid in my whole school apart from my sister, and there were not many Asian people in the streets.

It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I wanted to learn more about China, so I went to live in Taiwan to study Chinese language, painting and calligraphy. While I was there, I wrote and illustrated a picture book which I later sent off to several publishers but without success. The years passed. I studied painting in Hangzhou, China for a further two years, returned to Australia, had children, taught Chinese at RMIT University.

If you are interested in reading the rest of the interview you can view it HERE on the Paper Tigers Website

I have written seven novels but I think The Wishbird  is my best so far. Still, I don’t want to jinx myself by saying that.

As it contains thirteen full page illustrations and a number of half pagers, it has required a lot more work than my other novels.

Yesterday I received the first set of pages which is always exciting. It is the first time you get to see your work laid out roughly in book form, which gives you a much clearer way into close editing. The chapter heading font will change, so too will line spacing, and the illustrations still need to be added. Also at this time, there is back and forth discussion with publisher and editor over cover design.

This phase in the life of a novel is one of my favourites. To sit down with a cup of sweet smelling tea, a pencil and an eraser, with the manuscript laid out before me is one of life’s small pleasures.

I know I am almost home.

The Wishbird will be published on August 1.

Sometimes while I’m busy writing and being distracted by other things, I turn around and find these curious little drawings on my desk.

It must be time for a doggie walk.

I bought a new bicycle. It reminds me of when I was young.

It smells of clinkers, sherbert bombs, snakes and honey bears,
of freedom and adventure and riding no hands down steep winding streets. Of a best friend called Wendy and our tame little budgerigars, Lucky and Santa. Of sleepovers and giggling under the bed covers, of tiffs and secret letters and …

I wonder what you are doing now, Wendy.

The two photos are part of a long hand scroll that I had to copy of the famous painting Ching Ming Shang He Tu, (Along the River at Ching Ming Festival) by Zhang Ze Duan 1085-1145. It is 6.5 meters long and took me about 3 months to complete because the more I practiced, the better my linework became and I would have to start at the beginning over and over again.

But what a revelation to read an article in Writer Unboxed that the same principle can be applied to writing. Read the article HERE

Hairy birds, Missoni birds, Batman birds, chicken pox birds, holey birds and stripey birds.

I was wondering if there was one which had unusually beguiled them, teased their imaginations, haunted them in some way, showed them what they wanted or needed; a story which had penetrated them so deeply that it might even have lit steps towards their future achievements. To my surprise, the 25 people I questioned knew instantly what ‘their’ story was.

When a story is very special to a child, it seems to cast a long, discernible shadow into the future. If the story inspires a child, it tends to be predictive of an element noticeable in his or her later life. If it consistently and abnormally terrifies, then there is a strong possiblility that it is diagnostic of serious future trouble. I notice too, that most of these stories make their impact when a child is about eight years old.

I was thinking about the stories that had a strong impact on my childhood when I was around eight years of age and the ones that immediately come to mind are The Faraway Tree and the Secret Seven books.

I wasn’t the type of child who gobbled up loads of books or read under the bedcovers at night, for I was a very slow reader. I loved books yet found reading difficult. But when I did find one that captured my imagination, I read it with delicious intensity again and again and again.

I loved The Faraway Tree books because the words on the page filled my imagination with wonderful images of strange lands. But more than that, the stars of the show, Peter, Janet, Jack, Colin, George, Pam and Barbara were ordinary children just like me.

The same thing applied to the Secret Seven. Here too, were ordinary suburban kids who solved mysteries in the local area. And that’s exactly what my best friend, Wendy and I did. Or thought we did. We were the Secret Seven. We formed a secret club and held meetings in the woodshed in my backyard. I even had a golden cocker spaniel just like Scamper. We were tomboys and proud of it and we scoured the neighbourhood in search of mystery and adventure.

My dog Rusty.

I became a writer almost by accident and didn’t discover my love of words until much later in life. What the Blyton books did do though was to influence the type of books that I would one day write – adventure stories set in an ordinary world where magic is possible.

Pat Williams concludes by saying,

Every child I have known, myself included, is well aware that huge other worlds, and their many landscapes, lie behind the phenomena of daily life. They long for the maps, implicit in metaphor and story, which can help them navigate in the linked worlds within, and outside, themselves. The forward shadows exercise has served to reinforce my understanding that, on the one hand, stories nourish, sustain, illuminate and heal and, on the other, that they can spotlight psychological weakness and forewarn of future difficulty. So we must tell them and tell them and tell them.

As an adult I am still aware of those other huge worlds that overlap what we call the ‘real’ world. I know they exist. I have experienced them. I am still a child, a teenager. These states exist in the ‘now’.

They exist in all of us.