Am I barking up the Wrong Tree?

This year marks my tenth year as a teacher of a specific brand of creative writing, the Born Storytellers. The Born Storytellers is primarily directed at school students, beginning with upper primary students, but fairly quickly engaging middle years high school and even adult programs.



Over the years, the program has developed in terms of its rigour and degree of sophistication, but has remained consistent in the structure of the program itself. It begins with a development of what I like to call 'a theory of story', primarily a range of theoretical approaches to the key elements of story creation - story design if you like - and practical writing exercises to develop both knowledge and application of those theories.

This theoretical approach is applied in a range of planning sessions: students plan their story, then they write the story they plan, then they edit their work and rewrite to improve it. It is pretty much a writer's practice and it is not taught in schools or university creative writing programs, where the focus is much more on the words on the page, the image that is portrayed, the syntactical and linguistic mastery of language and, to some extent, grammar. Oddly enough, students - both in high schools and university creative writing courses - are frequently asked to write a story, yet no one has ever taught them what one is, what its characteristics and components are and what a writer needs to do in order to create one.

Unless, that is, they have been fortunate enough to have been through a Born Storytellers program.

The end result of the Born Storytellers program has always been a final publishing of the work. But, like all good books, the work undergoes an editing process for publication to ensure that it is a good read, that it can sit - at least at a technical level - on the shelf next to any other book produced for the readership of children. And that the voice of the author - in this case, unlike any other work produced for child readership, the unique voices of child authors - rings true in the work.

So in the end, we have books of collected stories in the unique voices of child authors whose schools have had the foresight to see that the gift of story writing deserves specialist attention, whose parents have supported the not inconsequential endeavour of producing a substantial piece of work.

The Born Storyteller series of books are always of a high standard of production, with superb typography, elegant layout and cover design and quality paperback print production. There's a lot to find that is different, unique and engaging. The books are often avidly read by young readers when they can get their hands on them because they engage in issues they can relate to, in ways they can enjoy, in language that is their own but in a quality that mirrors the experience of any other reading they do.

A limited number of classroom teachers have found the Born Storytellers books to be useful classroom resources. They offer students genre choices in bite-sized chunks of reading that explores engaging issues as seen through the eyes of a child-author rather than the eyes of an adult author trying to see a child's perspective. I can tell you, from editing more than 500 young writers, no adult writer can ever hope to re-enter the space of the child as writer and any attempt to do so will never ring with the authenticity of the child. The Born Storytellers books offers readers what no adult writer can.

You would think that those issues alone ought to be enough to engage the interest of those who would choose the reading for children: teachers, parents, librarians. You would think that the parents of these young authors would want to read the work their child has produced with some interest, share it with other family members, particularly other children. You would think their teachers and school librarians would have similar curiosity. But it seems to be a brick wall that I will remain forever at pains to break through.

If this year's experience is anything to go by, a sad reality is that many parents have shown little interest in such endeavours by their children; the schools and teachers and librarians similarly so.

Celebration

It has been our habit to stage a celebration of our young authors' works at a gala book launch event at the Perth Writers Festival each year. This is an important event in our calendar for several reasons, not the least of which being the sheer joy of seeing students realise their work in its final physical form, watching them as they read to an audience of a couple of hundred people and more. But it's also been an important opportunity to promote the program and stress its importance in contributing to education and providing a vital stepping stone for students in their creative literacy. Sadly, we were unable to stage this event this year.

Make no mistake, it was a heart wrenching decision to not proceed with the book launch event for 2014. But it is an expensive exercise and in past years we've had generous support from the Association of Independent Schools (AISWA) who would purchase collections of books for distribution to libraries of schools that struggled for resources. The money was mostly put to the costs of staging the event and reducing the costs of a personal copy of books to our young authors.

The reality struck home when the deadline for book orders in time for the launch event approached and our expectations of attendance were dismal to say the least. At least when people order books for collection at the book launch you can expect them to be there. In this instance, after a series of direct emails to families and our young authors, we had less than 10% of our young authors indicating that they, or any other family members, would be attending the book launch or purchasing books. As the deadline day arrived and we had the sum total of 13 books in orders placed and one family of 3 indicating their attendance by way of RSVP, it was a pretty clear indication that the launch event, were we to proceed, would in any case be a financial disaster and in all likelihood an attendance disaster as well.

I know many of our young authors and their parents are disappointed, but in the circumstances I could see no way to cover my costs. The books have been available for order from Born Storytellers since 1 February. At the time of writing this piece, some two weeks since books have been offered for sale, and several more direct email notifications, around 40% of our young authors' families have placed orders for their books and none of the schools involved.

The point of this, of course, is that I have seriously misjudged my market. After spending around 120 hours editing and producing books, spending money on their print set up, and finding that less than half of the parents of my young authors - and none of the schools - appear to demonstrate an active interest in the purchase of the books, let alone reaching out into other schools to try and make the program financially viable so that it might one day return more than mere gratification to our young authors, all of whom have worked hard to produce a work they can be proud of, makes me wonder at the point of it all. It disappoints me enormously that some of these students don't even get to celebrate their work with their families.

The lesson from this, perhaps, is to not publish the work. But to find another way of growing an interest in writing and telling stories, and teaching a valuable skill that, in all honestly, is not taught by anyone else.

Or am I simply barking up the wrong tree?