Philippa Werry
Writer
Biography
When I was a child living in Wellington, the Evening Post used to have a special Children’s Page on Saturdays. I can still remember writing out my poems and stories and posting them off. Every Saturday night, I would check to see if any of them had been printed. If they were, I would carefully cut them out and stick them into a special exercise book.
I still have that book, and I sometimes take it along to show children when I do school visits. It reminds me that even when I was very young, I always wanted to be a writer.
After my first daughter was born, I spent a lot of time reading to her. One day, I came across a newspaper article about the School Journal, and I decided to have a go at writing something for them. My early attempts weren’t very good at all, but the Journal editors were always helpful and encouraging. With their support, I kept on trying until my first story was accepted.
Since then, I’ve written more than 70 stories, poems, plays, and articles for the School Journal. I’ve written lots of other things, including several children’s novels, but the School Journal is still very special to me, and I’m very proud of the material I’ve had published there.
One question I often get asked on school visits is “Do you do your own illustrations?” I have to gently explain that I’m no good at art. I wrote one article on walking school buses, for which I took my own photos, but it was hard to take notes, take photos, and try to keep up with the walking school bus at the same time! Working with a photographer on our story about the Gladstone scarecrow festival was quite a different experience.
Photographer Mark Coote and I went to Gladstone School together and spent the morning out on the tennis courts in the midst of all the scarecrow-making activity. We worked mostly with one class of seven- and eight-year-olds. It was good to be able to concentrate on talking to the children while Mark recorded it all on film. I found it interesting to watch how much time he spent lying on the ground, getting the right shots!
Mark later provided me with some of his photos on CD, and I kept them in mind as I wrote the article. In particular, I tried to make sure that there were photos to support what I was writing about and that I wasn’t going into too much detail about anything that couldn’t be easily illustrated.
Working with a photographer meant I could concentrate on writing without having to worry about anything else. And I could be confident that the photos were going to capture the colour and excitement of the scene.