Now I’m home from teaching in America, back to snow on the hills, the fire going and writing in gloves, I have time to reflect on what it means to teach in that country. There’s the gap between my experience of America – always summer, watching fireflies from the porch with friends on balmy evenings, […]
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Choosing Stones & Sorting Words
“Sorting words,” poet and neighbour Brian Turner said, “is like choosing stones; setting some aside, discarding some, placing others with care in the right place, to make something of craft and beauty that will last.” We talked about this business of word selection while cementing in the last selection of stones, collected in haste at sunset […]
Teaching and Workshops
Teaching and upcoming workshops Teaching for 2012 For Central Otago writers – I’ll be teaching two workshops in Wanaka: a Hero’s Journey Workshop, August 16th, and a workshop on Character and Dialogue, August 23rd. Hero’s Journey workshop: All of us, at some times in our lives have to be a hero. For each of us, when […]
The Magic of Writing
Writing is magical. I can think of four ways to explain this. The first is mythological. As Joseph Campbell said, we cannot manufacture the symbols of mythology, or suppress them, for they arise within us. They’ll appear unbidden on our pages. And as the ancient myths show, when we set out on a journey, such […]
What Drives Me
A student writer asked me the question “What drives me?” for an assignment he was doing. It was an interesting question to reflect on, to consciously look at what I often subconsciously create. In my writing for young people and for adults I’m passionate about how people treat others – first, that children have the […]
Stillness
Rain is coming, it said on the news, and outside there is a stillness in the air above the mountains and a hushed light, as if all is waiting. Meditating before you write is like that quiet time before the rain falls. It’s a way of stopping one life – that of jobs, family, friends, […]
About Jillian
Jillian Sullivan writes fiction and non-fiction for children, teenagers and adults. Her work has been published for over twenty years and includes four novels, three collections of short stories and over sixty short stories for children and adults, published in New Zealand and America.
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