On the 20th of May, we got to see an author called Phillip Gwynne. He had a talk with us about his life story and how he became an author. It was very fun to do and very entertaining. Firstly, he started off by telling us some interesting stuff about his life, like how his town was racist, his dad wasn’t very nice, how he liked football, how his teacher when he was nine said “you could become a writer one day”, how he grew up with no books in his house and things like that.

From my perspective I believe that this little talk with Phillip was very fun to listen to and very entertaining to watch. My class and I are very grateful we had got to experience something like this and are keen to find out more about his new book called “The Break’.

Aleesha

After lunch, students were given the option to attend a writing workshop with Phillip.

When we arrived at the workshop, Phillip was standing at the front with a giant whiteboard, he told us to take a seat. After we all stopped talking he started talking about how you can grab a sentence and put your own little twist on it. For example, one of the ones we did was, my sister is so selfish and he asked us to put a twist on that sentence. After a while he asked us to share our ideas, one of them was she’s an actual shellfish and another one was she hiding something and she’s being selfish to hide it.

After that he asked us to write three things that happened to us in the past year. He gave us five minutes to write some things and then after he told us to switch with someone else and they have to put a twist on it. Near the end of the lesson, he told us we can write our own story, and everyone got to work.  Everyone had great ideas like two people wrote the same story but from someone else’s perspective, and some people got ideas for their story from the previous activity. At the end everyone said goodbye to him and thanked him for the great time they had with him and wished they can do this again.

Hayden