Wendy Phillips

Wendy began her first novel at the age of 11, climbing the hills behind her hometown of Kamloops, B.C. to scribble in notebooks. Her love for words has led her into jobs as a journalist, a bookbinder, an English teacher, and a high-school teacher-librarian. She holds degrees in Journalism, English, Education, and Children’s Literature. She has lived in Ottawa, in Lesotho, Southern Africa, and in Australia. She and her husband currently live in Richmond, B.C., with their two children.

Fishtailing is her first book.

Interview with a prize winner!      

WritersWebWorkshop’s April newsletter features an excellent interview by Alison Acheson with Wendy Phillips, a writer-teacher-librarian from Richmond, BC, who won the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Fishtailing. Here is an excerpt I would like to share.

Alison: Welcome to WritersWebWorkshop, Wendy! To begin, how has being a teacher and librarian contributed to your writing?

Wendy: As a teacher I become involved with my students’ thoughts and voices not only through their presence in my classes and my library, but also through their writing. I learn about their home lives, their passions, their hopes, their torments through writing exercises, and when they learn I won’t broadcast their confidences through the staff room or other classes, they relax into honesty. Though the characters in my books are not based on any one student, I get a general sense of what my audience is experiencing and what conflicts they have to resolve, and those transfer to my writing.

I also read the books they care about, and that suggests to me not only of what they’re interested in reading about, but what kinds of writing appeal to them. A final consideration—both my students and I hate books that “talk down” to students. It’s a very fine balance to let the reader do the work to put the story together without making it too convoluted for an adolescent reader to understand. My work keeps me in touch with their thinking as they read, and the kids’ reactions help me find that balance.

Alison: What thoughts would you share with a young person who says they want to write? And to a 40-something who says the same?

Wendy: For both young and old, the best advice is to keep writing. As long as you write, you are a writer, and writing, as much as basketball or piano, needs practice. You may be developing, but you’re still a writer. You only fail as a writer

if you stop.

Alison: Thank you, Wendy. “You only fail if you stop”—good words! We look forward to seeing your new work in the world.