This year marks 50 years of Read NZ Te Pou Muramura, founded in 1972 as the New Zealand Book Council to promote reading and literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.

As part of our ongoing recognition of this milestone, our Programmes Manager Kathryn Carmody (photo credit: Capital magazine) wrote this piece about our Writers in Schools programme for the Autumn 2022 issue of NZ Author magazine.

Thanks to the NZ Society of Authors, we are re-publishing Kathryn's piece here. Click here to subscribe to NZ Author.

Recently I met someone who named his cats Dit and Dah because the idea of standing at his back door and calling them in for dinner using morse code entertained him. Friends from his navy days all know what “dah dit dit/dit dit/dah dit/dah dit/dit/dit dah dit” means, and so do his cats.

No matter what form of technology we’re using to communicate, whether it's tukutuku or sign language, semaphore, braille, hieroglyphics or morse code, once someone understands the meaning behind the symbols we’re using then they’re away on their own explorations and adventures. They will find and create their own stories of the world around them and they will unlock meaning from those stories with others.

Since the very first days and nights, stories have been at the heart of what it is to be a human being. Stories are how we share knowledge and change destinies, they give us access to a better understanding of the world around us and stories help speed each individual towards their own form of self-actualisation. Research tells us that it is vital for every person to have these skills. Research also tells us that we learn these skills a lot faster when we’re doing something we enjoy, which is where the idea of school visits comes in.

This year (2022) is the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the New Zealand Book Council, or Read NZ Te Pou Muramura as it is now named. The organisation was created in response to the United Nations’ International Year of the Book in 1972 and the Writers in Schools programme came along a couple of years later in 1974. Our beautiful new name is a metaphor for what happens during the process of reading. Muramura is the word for a glowing ember, flame or even a blaze. Pou is the name of an upright supporting post or pole. Together, Te Pou Muramura speaks to the sustenance of a blaze in the way that reading can spark a glow or light in our minds.

There are many organisations working in this space. Thank goodness, because there’s a lot of work to be done. Libraries, Duffy Books in Homes, Storylines, all the different festivals, Reading Together, Book Awards Trust and many others all have a part to play and there is room for us all. The Writers in Schools point of difference is that our author visit bookings are driven by school demand.

When I look through the documentation that’s been kept from over the years I can see that many of the original ideas remain at the heart of the programme today. Our schools identify what they would like to achieve and our staff then find the guest to match that. We meet the schools on their terms wherever they are.

There are as many reasons for a school to work through Read NZ Te Pou Muramura as there are schools themselves, but in general they tend to be looking for their students, and staff, to be inspired for a particular purpose. We encourage schools to invite any author, illustrator or storyteller that they would like. We offer to make contact and make payments to their guests on the schools' behalf.

Our ability to do this work is reliant on both funding and guest availability which in turn are reliant on our providing a service that receives consistently glowing feedback. This means that we cannot take many risks and we need a high level of confidence about both the school's request and the guest’s ability. As part of our internal housekeeping, we review the programme annually. It’s also going through an external review currently with Auckland based Point & Associates. In the past, Point has reviewed the Storytime Foundation and National Library’s Communities of Readers programme so it will be interesting to see their final report and to see how our funders will respond. We can all imagine the programme expanding until there’s a room full of people working on bookings for all ages all around the country constantly but we’ve a wee way to go yet.

In a handbook for Writers in Schools from 1993 Apirana Taylor, Tessa Duder, David Eggleton, Tim Jones, Cilla McQueen and Barbara Neale (Else) are just some of the authors listed who are still available for school visits today. This speaks to the potential longevity of an author’s career.

The first author visit that I remember from my own school days in the 1970s was Mona Williams and in her response to the questions from Point recently, Mona said, “I am both a Storyteller and an author. I charm children into reading.” Another of our stalwarts, and past President of Honour for the NZSA, David Hill while announcing his retirement from writing novels in the Herald in 2019, said how lucky he felt about doing this work: “It’s hard to think of a more worthwhile act than getting kids reading.”

How does one become a Writers in Schools author? The formal intake is an annual process with application forms and reference checks. It takes a while to work through but our staff accept applications from authors throughout the year and analyse them at calendar year-end in preparation for the new school year ahead. As mentioned, authors do not need to be a formal part of our programme for a school to request them but it does help with our overall administration long term. Priority for the formal intake is given to authors who best match the trends that we see in requests from schools. Slam poets and graphic novelists have been particularly popular for a few years now.

For the first 30 years at the Book Council one staff person did everything. Their title was Secretary and it wasn’t until the 1990s when there was an extra staff person who could help. Right up until 2007 some school bookings were still confirmed by fax but it looks like the first virtual sessions were also happening around then too, with a video conference series of writers workshops called Word Space being launched. Technology has moved on again in quite a big leap recently with circumstances driving us all to find new ways of working. Our current roster of Writers in Schools authors are finding as many different ways of bravely approaching the digital world as there are different types of author and we are seeing the schools engaging with them.

Even in these last few extraordinary years, with all the extra stresses that Covid has wrought, our schools have continued to book between 300 and 400 author visits through our systems each year. For those 100 or so visits that have had to be cancelled or postponed each year, we still paid the authors an honorarium for their time.

- Kathryn Carmody has been looking after the Writers in Schools programme since 2016. As part of preparations for our 50^th anniversary she started checking in with some of her predecessors in the role. They include Lynette Hartgill-Haack, Emma Gallagher, Sarah Forster, Susanna Andrew, Theresa Crewdson, Esmé Gibbins and Philippa Christmas.