Joanne M. Weselby

Michele - my Dad doesn't exactly have a way with spelling!

I grew up a stone's throw from Sherwood Forest - my early childhood was a careless haze, full of the stacks of storybooks I kept at the foot of my bed, the chalked pictured drawn on the pavement, the bike rides with no destination in mind, days of grass-stained kneecaps and gleeful laughter, the bliss of homemade Cola lollies and sprinklers in the garden. With such wonderful distractions, I never thought about who I was; who I wanted to be.

It was at age 11 that someone saw the writer in me. A secondary school English teacher used to kids reading Shakespeare with dead eyes and slack jaws, he saw something different in me; a quality of 'writerliness' (as he once put it). He told me something else that day: that, as a writer, I read with the eyes of a thief - that we were all thieves, looking for shiny things to pull apart and put back together in a way that was different, that was ours. He taught me that day that all writers are magpies.

I have never forgotten this childhood revelation - it has become an integral part of my understanding of who I am as a writer; my purpose, my function, and why I love it so damn much!