It was a magical day of discovering and hunting for poems at Riverbend bookshop.

Vicky from Riverbend books gave a warm introduction, and shared that our book was crowd funded, beautifully done, and well supported by the local community.

I let our audience know where the book was set, but think maybe next time I might need a compass for this.

I found out that nearly all our audience loved fishing!  Which is great as we have two poems on fishing in the book.  I read ‘Wishing for a Fish’.

It was lovely to hear some laughter when ‘Discovering Magic’ was read!  To have the jokes of this poem appreciated was awesome.

When I asked them what they would wish from a fairy’s tooth, one child said she would love to fly.

The perfect opportunity to read a poem about birds next.  I chose ‘Tawny.’

The audience loved nature, and knew a lot about cassowaries and Tawny Frogmouths, and maybe some learnt about the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) and quolls for the first time.

Some had Tawnys in their back yard and others had been on nocturnal walks to see them.  We could have talked all day about Tawny, but just one more poem – on ‘Hunting for Poems’ and time to go hunt for some of our own. Time to use the imagination we use when playing games of deciding what a cloud might be when it forms a shape in the sky.

Thanks so much to Vicky at Riverbend for preparing the workshop space for us and for photocopying the education materials that I had developed.  And thanks to all our enthusiastic participants.

It was lovely to have a bit of a chat with children, parents and grandparents and to sign books for some of our lovely guests.  It means a lot when people buy your book!

The children loved Helene’s illustrations and I told them I would pass this message on to Helene, who would have just loved this adorable audience.

Well done to all our young poets!  Just loook at some of the beautiful work.

(Thanks for the kind permission of our participants to share photographs of our first event for the year. Thanks to my daughter Sheridan for the photography and helping us pack up afterwards)