"My love of words began on my mother's knee when she read to me, stories, fairy tales, folk legends and the poems from AA Milne's When We were Very Young, "I went down to the shouting sea, Taking Christopher down with me ... We had sand in the eyes and
For the Love of Books: Author Deborah Shepard
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"These days my love of words and books flow into my teaching of memoir. I use excerpts from autobiographical literature for group discussion and to inspire the writing because I believe if you want to be a writer it helps to be a reader too. I think I am happiest when I am teaching. I love it when a new voice emerges, or when an experienced writer deepens her craft. I love to witness the pleasure on a writer's face when he reads his work and it reaches the listener and makes a connection.
"I am also deeply happy when I am journalling. Recently I learned about the power of words to heal. In 2011 I had an operation to cure a chronic back pain that failed. The day following the surgery a friend gave me a journal, and said "Write, Deborah. Write your way through." Was this possible? I felt fully extended trying to breathe through the moment, and woozy on the drugs, but I wrote three lines and the following day I wrote another entry and slowly the journal grew. As I wrote I began to notice that when I am journalling about what is directly in front of me, what I can see here, right now, slowly I relax and begin to feel more tranquil."
20 January (excerpt)
It is early morning and I am standing typing at the kitchen bench with the sliding door wide open so that the outside is coming in. Up against a blue sky I see the gum and the pohutukawa and the jacaranda. A light breeze is ruffling the leaves. The cicadas are singing. What happens to cicadas in the other nine months of the year when they are silent? What happens to wings in the rain? A bumblebee is sipping nectar from the sapphire blue flowers of the salvia that grows joyfully in the big terracotta pot by the window. The cats are fed and settled, one on the chair, assiduously cleaning his ginger fur, the other on the wooden floor, spread flat like a piece of golden pastry ...
- VIVA