Children's bookwriting workshops and publishing

Dangerous Devotions features hero-characters who live with a diversity of passions, interests, attributes, traits and disabilities. Which pretty much describes my family as well. With the book was coming out, I figured it was time to expand the life story and narrative workshops I'd been using in my professional practice and come up with some workshops that might enable people with neurodiversity to author books. Hence the Dancing Wombat Workshops - see rockingboat.au

Writing a book for children opens up possibilities for authoring in non-traditional ways - using spoken word (recorded by others), performance, collaborative discussion and editing and so on. These alternate ways of authoring enable people who have great ideas but literacy challenges to develop these ideas, choose their words and form them into a story. Writing for children is also great way to learn about narrative structure, characterisation, generating suspense, and so on. So that's what we did in Dancing Wombat. The workshops were soooo much fun, the participants soooo inspiratonal and their work soooo worth publishing that that is what I did next - became a publisher.

Rocking Boat Books, then, was brought into being to firstly publish the four 'dream-come-true' illustrated children's books, authored by the four fabulous, neurodiverse young adults who attended the Dancing Wombat Workshops, which were hosted by the wonderul Blackheath Area Neighbourhood Centre. Pretty soon it became obvious that it was a good idea to continue with more workshops and, hopefully, publications. So, Rocking Boat now -

• offers further creative writing workshops for people who want to stretch and express their ideas and their imaginations but are facing literacy and other social barriers, and
• continues to provide a platform for the publication of books for children authored by, or starring characters living with disability (including autism, cognitive impairment, physical and sensory disabilities) and other social barriers (including educational barriers, incarceration, language other than mainstream English, living in a regional or remote communities).

For more information, please go to rockingboat.au