Storylines Festival Reflection

The Storylines Festival turned out to be pretty successful. I definitely enjoyed the show and the authors who presented. However I liked last year better, the audience was more involved and the authors were connecting with us. Not that this year was terrible, it was really educational.

Juliette McIver and Jill McGregor were probably my favourite authors during the festival. Juliette was incredibly funny with her bubbly personality and her books and stories were really out there. She liked to rhyme a lot and she even created her own words to match her story, much like Margaret Mahi who she looked up to. She read aloud one of her many books, Queen Alice’s Palaces. The graphics stood out to me a lot. The illustrator had used iconic buildings to incorporate Queen Alice’s many Palaces and that made the book even more interesting.

If I were to present at the festival, I would really interact with the audience. Paula Green had gathered some students to create a poem on the spot. They each had a line they would say directly after the person before them. I thought that was a great way to get involved with the kids and teachers. Another way I would do to get the kids intrigued is get some kids up to act out the story as I read it. That would be pretty funny since they are just improvising.

I would’ve loved to have seen the authors collaborate to create a wonderful masterpiece. That would’ve been amazing. I would like to give a great big thank you to the authors and to the Storylines Festival holders because it’s such a great experience for kids everywhere. Their stories and backgrounds gave us a look at what an author really endures to make their stories the best it can be. Cath Mayo traveled to Greece where she got lots of information for her books. That’s just plain awesome.

Storylines Authors 2014

This Thursday, the extension team are attending the Storylines Festival. Similar to last year, we are going to be hearing from some authors. Many of the authors this year are New Zealanders which is really cool.

Juliette MacIver is a children's book author who grew up in Wellington. She went to Victoria University where she received a degree in Linguistics. Juliette had various jobs; teaching English, working as a tour guide, travel agent and a few more. She has written a total of twelve books and is quite well-known for one of them, Toucan Can.

Born in Auckland, Catherine Mayo is a Young Adult writer. Not only that but she is currently in a band named Gentle Annie. She has written only two books, Murder in Mykenai and The Bow.

Out of all the authors, I'm looking forward to listening to Jill MacGregor. Although she was born in Dunedin, she spent a reasonable amount of traveling through the Pacific Islands. For two years, she worked as a VSA teacher in Tonga. Because of this, she writes Pacifica Books, four of them being about Tonga.

Paula Green seems to be the only poet who is attending the festival. Only a few of her stuff are children books but most of the things she has written are poetry collections. She is also a reviewer, anthologist and book-award judge teacher. Ms Green also has a PHD in Italian from the University of Auckland.

So as you can probably tell, there are a lot of things to look forward to at the Storylines Festival. I definitely have some questions for these authors and I can't wait to ask them personally.