Emma Stevens
Contact:
Website: walkingonice.co.nz/ |
Storytelling has been at the heart of my teaching throughout my forty-plus years in education. No matter where in the world I taught, students loved hearing stories—especially personal ones that seemed to transcend cultural boundaries.
In the 1990s, while teaching in Sydney, a series of stories I shared about my childhood proved so popular that parents urged me to write them down. An Australian publisher expressed strong interest—on the condition that I "set the stories in Australia." Having grown up in Whanganui and Christchurch, I couldn’t oblige, and the stories remain unpublished. More than a decade later, after returning from six years of teaching in remote bush Alaska, I found time to write again. My experiences became the basis for my first book, Walking on Ice (2013). Due to popular demand to know "what happened next," the book grew into a trilogy, followed by Nesting on the Nushagak (2015) and Dancing on the Tundra (2017). Since the release of Walking on Ice, I’ve travelled extensively across Aotearoa, New Zealand, giving hundreds of talks, storytelling about my Alaskan experiences. That busy schedule delayed further writing, but I’ve recently completed my first novel—still untitled—and while navigating the pre-publishing process, I’ve returned to writing poetry, which I’m thoroughly enjoying once again. |
