Writers In Schools – Tim Jones

Tim Jones running a Writers in Schools workshop at Motueka High School

In early August, shortly before large parts of the country went into COVID lockdown, I visited 5 schools in Nelson-Tasman on a visit organised by the Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Writers in Schools scheme and sponsored by the Rātā Foundation.

Writers in School is a very worthwhile scheme that connects schools who want writers to visit, with writers who are keen to visit! I’ve done some individual school visits under the scheme before – the most recent, a very enjoyable visit to Wellington East Girls’ School to do a Q&A with a class who’d been reading my climate fiction novella Where We Land – but never a tour.

The trip was initiated by Motueka High School, who asked whether I could come to the school for a series of talks and workshops with their students on writing climate fiction and non-fiction. I said I’d like to do that if the trip could be combined with visits to other schools in the region, and thanks to excellent cooperation between Nelson-Tasman schools and ReadNZ, I ended up visiting five schools in three days:

Nelson College
Tapawera Area School
Motueka High School
Waimea College
Waimea Intermediate

I ran workshops and gave talks on writing climate fiction, writing fiction in general, and writing opinion pieces (“columns”), with students ranging from Year 5 to Year 13.

What did I take away? First of all, much as I enjoyed the visit, I was shattered after three days – I have no idea how teachers do it for week after week! Both the students, and the teachers and librarians, I met inspired me.

Talking of teachers, I very much appreciated the lovely hospitality I was offered, which kept me fed and watered throughout my tight schedule. My lunch wth the English teachers at Motueka High School was a particular highlight.

My final session finished the tour on a high note. I had only an hour with this self-selected groups of keen readers and writers in Years 7 and 8 at Waimea College, and my energy was down by the time I got there, but the group’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for writing was remarkable. When we did a brainstorm on “what makes stories work well”, one young student replied “foreshadowing and foretelling”, and when I asked her what those were, she gave a much better explanation than I could have done, with relevant examples!

I loved seeing the enthusiasm of the students, yet I couldn’t help asking myself: what sort of future are these young people facing? More and worse storms. More fires. More floods – all of which have hit the Nelson-Tasman region in the last couple of years. And the sea creeping ever upwards, ever inwards. It isn’t their fault. It isn’t even our fault, unless you happen to be, for example, a senior oil company executive or a coal mine owner. But it’s up to all of us to demand and take action to cut emissions sharply now, because if we don’t, an already dangerous future is bound to become much worse.

Herald of Poseidon: Here’s how I appeared to one student at Motueka High School. (For the record, I am flattered by this portrait!)

Handwriting and hand-drawn image of Tim Jones by a Motueka High School student

Photos and image credits from my day at Motueka High School: https://www.facebook.com/motuekahslibrary

Unless I’m spruiking a new book, this blog sails along in parallel to my writing, sometimes close but never together.

So it feels like time to give an update on what’s been happening with my writing, and what’s coming up.

The Immediate Past

I started this year aiming to finish two manuscripts: my third poetry collection and my second novel. I’ve met one of those two goals: my third poetry collection, the one I’m calling “Men Briefly Explained”, has now been completed and sent out to its first port of call (I hope it’s the final port of call, but it is never wise to get one’s hopes up too far in such matters.)

The novel isn’t quite so far along: I have put it through several revisions, and I have some more revision tasks to do before sending out to those who have kindly agreed to be first readers for me – of which more later.

A lot of what normally qualifies as my writing time in the second half of last year was taken up with doing promotional work for Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, the anthology co-edited by Mark Pirie and myself. The work – notably the book tour organised by Voyagers’ publisher Interactive Press – paid off: Voyagers has sold well for an anthology of its type, and it made the Listener “100 Best Books of the Year” list for 2009.

This year, my writing time has indeed been taken up with writing – OK, when I haven’t been distracting myself with Twitter – but I did have a very enjoyable change of scene with two visits to Newlands College over the past couple of weeks. The first was to present the prizes in a Poetry Day poetry competition I’d judged, and the second, with the financial assistance of Creative New Zealand, was a full-day Writers In Schools Programme visit arranged through the New Zealand Book Council.

I’ve been on the books of the Writers in Schools programme for a while, and had even done some school visits outside that programme, but this was my first “official” school visit. I spent the whole day at the school, running mini-workshops and giving talks. And, despite a nagging cold which necessitated the frequent intake of Strepsils, I had a really good time. The teachers were friendly, the students were interested, and if given the chance, I’d love to do it all over again.

The Foreseeable Future

My main writing focus for the rest of the year will be to get the novel manuscript to the point where I can send it to those kind souls who have volunteered as first readers – at least one of whom has been waiting for an unconscionably long time now! Right now, I’m on the last few chapters of the third full revision. After that, I need to:

take all those pesky square brackets which say things like [check this] and [add para here] and replace them with things that a reader might want to read. (Or maybe I should just leave these square brackets in and “crowdsource” the answers? What would Jane Austen do?)
do a “dialogue run”, in which I’ll go through each character’s dialogue in turn and say it out loud to check that it sounds like them and not like me.
and read the whole thing through once more for luck.

Also, maybe I should finally give the novel a title. I’m given to understand this can be terribly effective.

Once that’s done and out to the readers, I’ll be able to turn my attention to the short story ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for a while now, waiting for their turn. I haven’t written many short stories since Transported was published, and it’s high time I did.

There’s also Au Contraire to look forward to at the end of next week, with its full hand of literary events including the launch of short story anthology A Foreign Country; the October launch of New Zealand cricket poetry anthology ‘A Tingling Catch’; and a poetry reading I’ll say more about soon. It should be a good few months.

Tag: Writers In Schools

Climate Fiction, Climate Fact: My Writers in Schools visit to Nelson-Tasman

Status Report! Status Report!