What got me started as a writer:
In 1997 I began working as a voice coach at both the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and as Head of Voice at the South African School of Film & Drama (now known as AFDA). I quickly saw that across the board actors, presenters, newsreaders, politicians, businesspeople and anyone called upon to use their voices publicly seemed to suffer from a serious dose of vocal self doubt. And in the multilingual and multi-accented South African environment this was even more pronounced when it came to using our natural voices, accents, dialects and so on. Our fear of our own voices frustrated me in my work and I became quite troubled by how our rather well developed sense of political freedom, our desire to communicate and our passion for broadcast and theatre did not necessarily translate into a sense of freedom to stand up and speak. To stand up and be heard! To stand up alone and own the space! To be ourselves.
Even more troubling to me was that the fear was not unfounded. Along social, racial, language, class, economic and cultural lines we are a somewhat divided and judgmental society! And so I found the resistance to vocal freedom and self expression a daily battle.
You see I want people to enjoy the freedom of using their voices without fear of vocal judgment. I want us to embrace our own thoughts and voices and to use them dynamically. I want us to speak from within our life experiences. I want us to embrace our diversity in sound and to celebrate our racial, cultural, class, gender, sexual, and political differences.
But how I hear you ask did this spur me on to becoming a writer? Well, its simple. In February of 2002 I had a huge and very public argument with someone about how vocal expression in South Africa is still so governed by old fashioned views of language usage. The man, who was a vocally changed immigrant to South Africa from the Netherlands, just couldn’t get his head around the fact that if he had chosen to bend and alter his accent to speak English like a middle class white English speaking South African, that other South Africans had not! And he was decidedly rude about it. And as he went on about it, so I grew more and more incensed! So much so that I stewed over it all night and all of the next day, wondering what I would have to do to teach people that its okay to be accented any-which-way you are. The next day, still seething with anger, and gardening at a furious pace and with therapeutic intent, a story came to me. Now not being a writer at that point I tried to ignore it. But it would not go away. And the story began to interfere with my anger and my gardening. So to get over the little hurdle of ‘the story’ so that I could get back to my frustration and gardening therapy I eventually put down the spade and shovel and picked up the pen. Well, the computer actually! And the rest as they say is history! The story that came out was called The Boy Who Sounded Different, and the ones that came after that all have their titles too, as you can see on this website.
At first I simply thought the process was quite interesting in a therapeutic sense. Like gardening, only completely different. But as I kept writing and as the stories piled up and as my frustration began to ease I decided to show stories to my close friends and family, starting off with Pauline who’s birthday party I had ruined in the name of ‘vocal freedom’. And a good thing I did too, as I have since been invited back to several birthdays. Anyway, the response from my friends and family was rather enthusiastic and stupidly they encouraged me to take the process further. At first I chose to just keep on with my new found therapy at the keyboard, tapping away at new stories and revisiting them all.
By now I had left AFDA and had also been thrown unceremoniously out of the training department at the SABC. My savings dwindled (and there is another story there that has been well covered by the Sunday Times), the months passed and as I wondered what to do about all my problems, I started to think about the advice of friends and family that I should try to get published.
Hmmmmm. In retrospect I am suspect about that advice. Have you ever tried to get published? Its not easy, its not fun and its not pleasant! But I am pleased that I foolishly went ahead thinking that something might happen. Because it did, but not from the publishers side. I met illustrator Catherine Falconer (nee Feek) through my Mum who does some education writing, and Catherine and I set about exploring a way forward with the work and with getting published.
Catherine first saw the stories in mid 2002 and began experimenting with illustrations for All the People of the World almost straight away. After an early long distance co-creative misfire, and an early lack of direction on my behalf, Catherine and I finally set about defining a style, a vision and a way forward! With style and brief in hand Catherine began the long slow process of bringing All the People of the World to life. We bounced ideas and drawings back and forward for many months until we found ourselves with a product that exceeded my expectations and filled me with energy to take the process forward.
By the beginning of 2004 having banged my head with a few publishers (for 18 months and with tons of delicious discouragement) I found myself still very much in love with All the People of the World and still very keen on getting it and its message out into the world. So I gave up on the local publishing scene. And one day in July 2004 I suddenly decided, (much as I had suddenly started writing) to self-publish.
All The People ff the World came off the printing press on 03 September 2004.Thandi Counts To Ten came off the press on 30 May 2005. He Sneezed On Me made it into my hands in finished form on the 14 September 2006, and Palace Malice presented itself to the world on the13th of June 2007.
Today I am a multi published author of some glorious books that I am terrifically proud of! And the first run of the first edition of All the People of the World has sold out. And so the messages I so desperately wanted to get across to my colleagues at the SABC and my students at AFDA have taken on a life of their own and are sharing themselves with readers I may never even meet. And I say it is marvelous and I’m loving it!
A comment on self-publishing and a word of encouragement
The decision I made to self publish was the best decision I ever made. It started me off on a crazy journey that I am still on today. And more importantly it gave me creative control of my product and it allowed me to make all the right decisions about everything I wanted from paper quality through to book size, layout etc. And today I have finished products that match my vision and that please many many people who read my books. So all said, done and experienced, I strongly recommend to any children’s authors out there with a product that they are in love with but that they can’t get published, go it alone. The experience is empowering, the creative satisfaction is enormous, and in this era of computers, the internet, ADSL, eBooks, print on demand and the global village, its so much easier than you think! |
What got me started as a writer:
In 1997 I began working as a voice coach at both the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and as Head of Voice at the South African School of Film & Drama (now known as AFDA). I quickly saw that across the board actors, presenters, newsreaders, politicians, businesspeople and anyone called upon to use their voices publicly seemed to suffer from a serious dose of vocal self doubt. And in the multilingual and multi-accented South African environment this was even more pronounced when it came to using our natural voices, accents, dialects and so on. Our fear of our own voices frustrated me in my work and I became quite troubled by how our rather well developed sense of political freedom, our desire to communicate and our passion for broadcast and theatre did not necessarily translate into a sense of freedom to stand up and speak. To stand up and be heard! To stand up alone and own the space! To be ourselves.
Even more troubling to me was that the fear was not unfounded. Along social, racial, language, class, economic and cultural lines we are a somewhat divided and judgmental society! And so I found the resistance to vocal freedom and self expression a daily battle.
You see I want people to enjoy the freedom of using their voices without fear of vocal judgment. I want us to embrace our own thoughts and voices and to use them dynamically. I want us to speak from within our life experiences. I want us to embrace our diversity in sound and to celebrate our racial, cultural, class, gender, sexual, and political differences.
But how I hear you ask did this spur me on to becoming a writer? Well, its simple. In February of 2002 I had a huge and very public argument with someone about how vocal expression in South Africa is still so governed by old fashioned views of language usage. The man, who was a vocally changed immigrant to South Africa from the Netherlands, just couldn’t get his head around the fact that if he had chosen to bend and alter his accent to speak English like a middle class white English speaking South African, that other South Africans had not! And he was decidedly rude about it. And as he went on about it, so I grew more and more incensed! So much so that I stewed over it all night and all of the next day, wondering what I would have to do to teach people that its okay to be accented any-which-way you are. The next day, still seething with anger, and gardening at a furious pace and with therapeutic intent, a story came to me. Now not being a writer at that point I tried to ignore it. But it would not go away. And the story began to interfere with my anger and my gardening. So to get over the little hurdle of ‘the story’ so that I could get back to my frustration and gardening therapy I eventually put down the spade and shovel and picked up the pen. Well, the computer actually! And the rest as they say is history! The story that came out was called The Boy Who Sounded Different, and the ones that came after that all have their titles too, as you can see on this website.
At first I simply thought the process was quite interesting in a therapeutic sense. Like gardening, only completely different. But as I kept writing and as the stories piled up and as my frustration began to ease I decided to show stories to my close friends and family, starting off with Pauline who’s birthday party I had ruined in the name of ‘vocal freedom’. And a good thing I did too, as I have since been invited back to several birthdays. Anyway, the response from my friends and family was rather enthusiastic and stupidly they encouraged me to take the process further. At first I chose to just keep on with my new found therapy at the keyboard, tapping away at new stories and revisiting them all.
By now I had left AFDA and had also been thrown unceremoniously out of the training department at the SABC. My savings dwindled (and there is another story there that has been well covered by the Sunday Times), the months passed and as I wondered what to do about all my problems, I started to think about the advice of friends and family that I should try to get published.
Hmmmmm. In retrospect I am suspect about that advice. Have you ever tried to get published? Its not easy, its not fun and its not pleasant! But I am pleased that I foolishly went ahead thinking that something might happen. Because it did, but not from the publishers side. I met illustrator Catherine Falconer (nee Feek) through my Mum who does some education writing, and Catherine and I set about exploring a way forward with the work and with getting published.
Catherine first saw the stories in mid 2002 and began experimenting with illustrations for All the People of the World almost straight away. After an early long distance co-creative misfire, and an early lack of direction on my behalf, Catherine and I finally set about defining a style, a vision and a way forward! With style and brief in hand Catherine began the long slow process of bringing All the People of the World to life. We bounced ideas and drawings back and forward for many months until we found ourselves with a product that exceeded my expectations and filled me with energy to take the process forward.
By the beginning of 2004 having banged my head with a few publishers (for 18 months and with tons of delicious discouragement) I found myself still very much in love with All the People of the World and still very keen on getting it and its message out into the world. So I gave up on the local publishing scene. And one day in July 2004 I suddenly decided, (much as I had suddenly started writing) to self-publish.
All The People ff the World came off the printing press on 03 September 2004.Thandi Counts To Ten came off the press on 30 May 2005. He Sneezed On Me made it into my hands in finished form on the 14 September 2006, and Palace Malice presented itself to the world on the13th of June 2007.
Today I am a multi published author of some glorious books that I am terrifically proud of! And the first run of the first edition of All the People of the World has sold out. And so the messages I so desperately wanted to get across to my colleagues at the SABC and my students at AFDA have taken on a life of their own and are sharing themselves with readers I may never even meet. And I say it is marvelous and I’m loving it!
A comment on self-publishing and a word of encouragement
The decision I made to self publish was the best decision I ever made. It started me off on a crazy journey that I am still on today. And more importantly it gave me creative control of my product and it allowed me to make all the right decisions about everything I wanted from paper quality through to book size, layout etc. And today I have finished products that match my vision and that please many many people who read my books. So all said, done and experienced, I strongly recommend to any children’s authors out there with a product that they are in love with but that they can’t get published, go it alone. The experience is empowering, the creative satisfaction is enormous, and in this era of computers, the internet, ADSL, eBooks, print on demand and the global village, its so much easier than you think! |