While at Bookaroo Festival of Children’s Literature, I was interviewed by Malini Sen of The Times of India.
You can read the interview HERE
While at Bookaroo Festival of Children’s Literature, I was interviewed by Malini Sen of The Times of India.
You can read the interview HERE
Dear Gabrielle Wang,
For the first time, via Five Senses Education in Sydney (my publisher), I’m reading a book of yours: The Wishbird. It’s so brilliantly conceived that I don’t want it to end! Goodness knows why my many sources didn’t alert me to you long ago. Yes, of course, I’m going to star it in the 4th edition of my Aussie first, What Should My Child Read? And I’m going to read more books of yours–certainly the Pearlie series.
I may well be the oldest person to write to you, since I’m 75. For many years I taught Children’s Literature to prospective Secondary teachers and, once, prospective Primary teachers (in a course with numerous lecturers). In my literature elective I always had outstanding prospective Infant-Primary teachers. For 14 of those years I supervised student teachers all over Sydney. I’m in Australia because I met my Aussie husband at a party at Harvard, where we were both students (he in Theoretical Physics). Mine, apparently, was the first PhD in Eng Lit at USyd (revised and published as a book by UPQ–on Henry James).
My teaching method is Socratic. These days I’m working with a Year 12 boy at Redfield College in Dural–brilliant but lazy, with significant writing problems that he is rapidly fixing under my tutelage. I also do some guest teaching: HSC English (e.g. a ‘revision’ of the poetry of Gwen Harwood and much else). For 7+ years I WAS the Education Policy Unit of the Institute of Public Affairs in Sydney (!)under Dame Leonie Kramer (now 90 and very ill), with Tony Abbott running in and out of the office, as I also was doing (a block away from the recent Sydney Siege). They knew I voted Labor at that stage in my life! Bob Carr’s dear late parents lived behind us when our kids were growing up in Matraville.
Please forgive the personal details, but I think it helps if writers know something about whoever writes to them. I don’t often do this, but I can’t get over the imaginativeness of your conception and your drawings. Frankly, I don’t know how a short description (which is what I always write), with some kind of accompanying drawing (preferably by you), will do you justice; but I’ll do my best.
So far, we’ve 5 grandchildren, 4 boys and a girl, ranging in age from 18 years of age to 5 months. The two youngest, our son’s, are in Christchurch. I SKYPE with the NZ part of my family (a major familial branch is still in America), but not as often as I’d like to!
If I could, I’d sign this note with a blue feather.
All the best to you forever and ever—Susan