: About Me

I'm a writer, visual artist and professional educator with over 15 years experience working with people on creative projects in both educational and community contexts. I run a writing and mentoring consultancy COOLERPLANETWRITING

( http://www.coolerplanetwriting.com )

for artists, designers and performers, on-line and face-to-face.

Born and educated in the SW of England, I spent 12 years teaching in tertiary education institutions in South Devon before travelling to live and teach in other countries. I have a Masters degree (Creative Arts in Education) from the University of Exeter, UK.

Married, with three children - ridiculously widely spaced in age - I am, currently, living in the beautiful city of Wellington, NZ, and working in a university as a Post-grad learning advisor. I have a special interest in writing about creative process and in supporting other artists through the process of describing what they do creatively in text.

I'm passionate about the world of ideas and have a particular interest in exploring ways to write about creative practice that feel authentic and meaningful. I have written papers and articles for conferences that have articulated my interest in journal writing, and critical self-reflection in its widest sense, including Blogs and other forms of creative non-fiction, as a means to navigate and structure the journey from the studio, or any place where practice is sited, to the thesis.

Earlier in the year, for example, I had an article published by Intellect Publishing, UK, in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

I am currently working on image/text/soundart project Lightwife, a response to the life of Mary Jane Hebden Bennett the first lighthouse keeper in New Zealand

I was commissioned to produce TRIG a multi-site image/text residency in response to the life of the explorer/navigator William Wills - for the Exeter tEXt Festival, UK, 2006.

TRIG and The Fractal Case were published in The Journal for Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian poetry, 2007. Examples of these works and other works can be found at

http://www.coolerplanetwriting.com 

My passion is ...

the world of ideas

I know too much about ...

too little

My parents always told me ...

as long as you are happy about it, we will support you

My childhood ambition ...

was to save someone from certain death before I was eleven

My favorite memory ...

every one is gold - but Christmas Eve at my Grandmother's house takes some beating

Why I write ...

to try to make sense of the world and to give me access to the best version of myself

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Gaston Bachelard, arctic monkeys, leonard cohen, Agatha Christie "Miss Marples" DVDs with my 9 yr old -TV in NZ is not worth plugging into the mains...

My first job ...

Saturday girl on Woolworth's haberdashery counter - calculating the cost of fractions of a yard of elastic in my head

My best moment ...

I'm trying to attend to every single one

My inspiration ...

landscape and the secret biography of places

Education > Education (Other) Tips for helping students make connections when reading about distant cultures and time periods

9 of 10

It is one of the privileges of living in here in NZ to be exposed on a daily basis to Maori culture, within this bi-cultural nation. Through the generosity of Maori colleagues, I have learnt a little about how important a knowledge of ancestry is to their culture, how, for example, no individual Maori will ever take any personal credit for any achievement, when speaking in a public forum, but will instead transfer the honour to their parents, grandparents and all their relations from previous generations, as far back as they can remember. Genealogy (whakapapa) is sacred knowledge, and many...

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