Vanda Symon’s candid admission in last week’s blog prompted me to review my past year in the light of the “y” word and the more reluctantly offered “no” because this year I have said “no” to quite an uncharacteristic degree. I have said “no” to class trips, book tours, poetry readings, blogs… to name a few. This didn’t come out of any sudden resolve to shift from being agreeable, but from what I can only describe as a sojourn in the margins of possibility. A mammogram last November picked up something uncertain with only the faintest statistical indication that it might be anything sinister. But as I moved from one appointment to the next, from one operation to the next, and from one radiotherapy session to the next, I kept finding myself in the margin; in the tiniest percentage of women that this or that happens to. And so out of self-protection and a desire to preserve time and energy for my family, I began to say: “No.”

Yet there, are of course, other ways for your resolve to melt. I am always curious about why we write and the origins of what and how we write. I say I write out of love and out of need, but there are countless other reasons. The prompt to write a particular thing can come from anywhere, and I am usually startled by its arrival in my head. And this is how, against all expectation, I found myself saying, “yes,” this year. Stories landed in my head, feeling like they were completely out of the blue, begging to be written. After the intimate poetry that formed Making Lists For Frances Hodgkins, I found my head filling up with ideas for children. And then I found myself writing them.

Each statistical margin I occupied seemed to give rise to another story, another character, another “what if?” Somehow or other I entered the world of extraordinary possibilities where real life was/is observed through colourful filters or peculiar re-actions or a belly full of laughs. Don’t get me wrong though, this demand to start writing children’s stories didn’t just pop into my head as an (very fitting!) antidote to surgery and radiation. I think the impulse to write children’s stories has been waiting in the wings for ages. I went to Wellington Teachers College and expanded my love of children’s literature, I taught in London where telling stories was a sure way to keep a class’s attention, I have told stories to two daughters.

Writing for children is so challenging… and in that challenge I experience supreme fun. And then of course there is the live audience. Children’s stories have a life on the page, but they most certainly have a life spoken in the air. My daughters act as guinea pigs to most things I write, but I also like to test out my poems and stories on children at the local school. This is always a slightly scary experience to begin with, yet children make an unbelievably rewarding audience. Children love to laugh. They love to predict. They love to feel concerned or to feel empathy. They love the glorious feats that words can do when you place this word against that word in some kind of gentle tremor or crazy spark or head-zinging explosion. Children love the way your story can open up new possibilities for their stories so that their stories begin to fill the room and your story moves into the background.

Saying “yes” to unexpected things takes me to unexpected places. These places are often scary, often demanding, often involve something I have never done before but are always satisfying. Next year I will be back into the routine of class trips, book tours, poetry readings and blogs along with all the domestic activity that holds my life together… and I will also celebrate the publication of my first children’s story with Random House. So yes, as my daughter says: “It’s all good!”