Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

Writing for children is fun, exciting, and wonderful. My children wrote their stories in their grade five composition class at Waigani Primary School. Their stories were edited with illustrations by Peter Ella and Thomas Ella, artists famous for the mural walls of the Sir Hubert Murray Stadium.     These books bridge the gap between these young children in the Middle Fly schools and the rest of the world.     It was a dream to see books written for children end up in their hands. It is as beautiful as the water lilies in the lagoons of Balimo.     The children’s books that my children wrote and published are now in the hands of the children of Balimo. At Auwaba primary school I witnessed school children read my book   Muruk na Pato   and daughter Cheryl’s book   Two Sisters and Nokondi’s Head . The children at Miti Primary school read   Jupi and the Magic Feather,  and   Two Brothers and a Wild Dog    by Langston Winduo.     The children read the books in front of their schools, teache

UPNG Bookshop and Press is active in publishing PNG authors. The Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler said in From Where You Dream (2005) that one must never under estimate the powers inside of oneself that would have one flinch and convince oneself that one is doing the right thing. His reference is to the powers of reading a good book. “Now, of course you must read in order to be a writer, and read ravenously. But there are points in your writing day, and even in your life, when you run the danger of hiding in somebody else’s voice, somebody’s else’s vision and sensibility. A moment comes when it’s time to find your own artistic identity and find a way into your unconscious. And then you will need to manage your reading carefully,” are the wise words of Robert Olen Butler that had me thinking about what to write this week. I have to write three or four articles for this column a month ahead. After that I follow the tradition of leaving the journalistic fi