Oy Yew - author workshop.

About three weeks ago, my friend Teika, the woman behind Mother's Milk Books, publisher of the fantastic Oy Yew, got in touch with me.  She told me that Ana Salote, the author of Oy Yew was going to be in the area and asked if I thought there would be interest in the home ed community in an author workshop.  I was pretty sure that there would be, despite the fairly short notice and I was really keen to try to organise one.  In short there was and it took place this afternoon with ten children aged between nearly 8 and 12.  I think with more notice we would probably have had quite a few more.

Although everyone had either read the book already or at least started to do so, it really would not have mattered if they hadn't.  Ana started by reading the first couple of pages of the book, where we meet Oy and learn that he has no family nor even a proper name and that he exists mostly on the smell of bread.  After a little bit of discussion and smelling of bread, we moved on to the part of the book where the waifs are measured, to decide whether they should remain and continue to work as servants or whether they had grown enough to be set free.  In pairs the children made their own measuring lines, marking them with thighs and oggits (the units used in the books) and adding the lines that the boy and girl waifs needed to reach, before measuring themselves in thighs and oggits.

Making the measuring lines.

F will have to work and grow a bit more!

This was followed by a reenactment of a scene from the book where the waifs are measured, something that happens once every yonk or four times a year.

The second half of the workshop was not specific to the book, with some creative writing exercises.  We were given a good amount of time to have a think and come up with our ideas and get them down on paper at each stage.  

We started by breaking up words (places and animals) and putting them back together in different ways to come up with a name for a character.  Mine was Mrs Hepzibah Canguin (from Canberra and penguin), but I think the agreed favourite was Mrs Belhuahua (from Belgium and chihuahua). Next we were asked to think of an item of clothing that our character might wear.  Afterwards a talent, skill, hobby or superpower.  Finally an object, and Ana suggested going with the first thing that popped into our heads.  At this point those who wanted to could share what they had come up with and there were some very interesting ideas.

The next step was coming up with some kind of problem for our character, as that is the basis for most books.  The main character comes up against some kind of problem, and in the course of the book overcomes the problem or difficulty and is changed by it in some way by the end of the book.  We were given some more time to either dive in and start writing our story or to develop the character we'd come up with some more.  Once again, those who wanted to shared what they had written and we just had a short amount of time left to ask Ana a few questions.  The first one was when is the next book coming out, to which the answer was September.

Although there were some children who did not want to share their ideas, nobody who didn't want to was pressured to do so and everyone was very engaged in the writing activities in their own way.  The feedback that I got was universally positive and one of the children told Ana that her suggestions had been very helpful and she was excited about writing now.  Her mum told me that she had never ever wanted to write a story before.

I was really pleased with how well it had gone and when we gave Ana a lift back to the busstop, she told me that she thought it had gone very well and she had enjoyed it more than when she'd done similar in schools. 

On the practicalities side of things.  We were very fortunate to have the offer of a free room in a community hall, so only had to split the cost of Ana's fee (£50) which made this extremely good value.  With a bit more notice, it would have been somewhat less stressy for me, as I could have made sure I collected the money a bit further in advance and probably had more people making it even better value!  It all worked out fine really well in the end though.  If you are interested, you can find Ana through the Oy Yew page on Facebook.