Last week, red pod classes participated in workshops with Anh Do and Sally Rippin as a part of the State Library of Victoria’s Book Bash. It was exciting to see and listen to some fabulous Australian authors.

Anh Do was very funny and spoke about where he gained inspiration for his stories. He spoke about how his children helped to come up with some of the powers for his Mythix characters and how they had inspired Wolf Girl during a conversation. He also talked about how WierDo was often informed by events in his own childhood. Students got the opportunity to create a character with superpowers of their very own.

Sally Rippin spoke about some of her stories such as Billy B Brown. Sally talked about how nervous she was to illustrate her own books, Polly and Buster. She introduced Chris Kennett, the illustrator of the School of Monsters series, and spoke about how the characters in this series were developed in collaboration with the illustrator. One of the School of Monster characters kept interrupting and glitching the live stream.

Some classes have also watched Amelia Mellor’s presentation about researching historical fiction this week. It is inspiring to see real authors sharing about the different ways they are motivated to write books and the processes they use for developing storylines and characters