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Five women smiling at the camera. Two are standing at the back behind three who are sitting on a light-coloured cement bench.

2021 black&write! team: (L-R) Bianca Valentino, Jasmin McGaughey, Grace Lucas-Pennington, Nadia Johansen and Allanah Hunt. Image: Joe Ruckli, State Library of Queensland

Threads have been pulling me into the world of storytelling and books from a young age. If we start from my beginning, it was my mother’s love for words and how we made books together—her clear teacher’s script alongside my dodgy little illustrations. She read out loud to me and it was the taking off point for lots more reading. At bedtime she made reading fun and not a chore. My dreams were full of Junie B Jones, Cathy Freeman’s 400 metre sprint and even unsettling fairy tales with warnings hidden somewhat didactically. How did that family live in a shoe? How did that woman swallow a fly? Would my future really spoil if I always chose the biggest slice of pie? I went to bed dressed in my best sleep clothes—basketball shorts and some top handed down through my family with love—hoping Peter Pan would rock up and whisk me to that second star to the right.

When I stayed at Dad’s house, my sibling, also a huge reader, and I would tell bedtime stories to each other. Our verbal fan fiction would entwine our real selves with fictitious people from the page. We’d lie in our twin beds talking of sparkling vampires and protagonists who were precious about their books. Unknowingly, we were attempting to twist the stories we loved to turn them into something we could see ourselves in. Something that could happen to two black kids in the small northern beaches of Cairns.

To find the beginning of this beginning, we could go further back to my mother’s father, my Athe, and his love for words. His English upbringing gave him an eclectic taste. Mum told me he loved science fiction, and anything mystical or spiritual. He liked reading about people who may have experienced things out of the norm—like clairvoyance. He also read religious texts, as he’d attended a seminary as a young man. He had his own reading chair in his shed, and my Aka would get frustrated because he would always be reading. ‘This place could blow up and you’d still be reading.’ Mum remembers her saying often.

Mum didn’t read in high school. But she loved ‘mythology’—history of the Greek and Viking Gods. She had a big book of fairy tales and remembers being a library monitor as a child. But she can’t remember what drew her in as an adult reader—what led her to being one of the most vivacious readers I know, and embedding the importance of reading into her child—me.

Through song, art, dance and even through non-verbal actions we have told stories not just for survival and necessity but also for entertainment.

My Aka too loves storytelling, though she doesn’t read like Mum and me. Her love for it is seen in the way she can spin a yarn, her laughter sometimes masking her words but only highlighting her meaning—infectious laughs, big-bellied laughs that shrink the diaphragm because you can’t even gasp for air. She threads stories within her music and has passed that trait down to her children and grandchildren. She comes from Poruma and Warraber and many of you readers will know that my people have told stories for millennia. Through song, art, dance and even through non-verbal actions we have told stories not just for survival and necessity but also for entertainment.

Honestly, it was never hard to believe in magic and love and futures because of these experiences. When my sibling said they’d seen leprechauns outside our window, I believed them. When my uncle announced that he was a Jedi I nodded, because of course he was.

All these things have made me realise I have loved story from before I was even born. Practically, when I left school, I knew I wanted to work in the field of books. But I didn’t know how I would be able to do this.

I ended up studying psychology and justice—an interest fuelled by my love for the TV show Criminal Minds. But after graduating from a degree that no longer interested me, my mum convinced me to complete further study. Creative and Professional Writing. This path, though tumultuous at times, was a blessing. It was hard because I felt behind my peers, hard because I wanted it all so very much, and for the first time in my life, I realised there was a possibility of me having it. In the end, it led me to the black&write! Editing Internship program.

I wanted it all so very much, and for the first time in my life, I realised there was a possibility of me having it.

The workplace of black&write!, in the State Library of Queensland, seems almost mystical to me now, as I am an alum of sorts. A team of First Nations editors who love story, working on and learning about editing work by First Nations writers who love story? And are paid to do it? I am privileged that this was the workplace to introduce me to the publishing industry.

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For those who don’t know, the editing internship with black&write! is usually a year long. You and your fellow editing intern (mine was the multitalented writer and editor Allanah Hunt) spend a year learning the ins and outs of editing. You learn this within a realm of cultural safety, under the generous guidance of a First Nations senior editor. For Allanah and I, it was editor and poet Grace Lucas-Pennington.

It was an easy thing, slipping into the team of Grace, Allanah and I. We fit, rotating around one another, when I had come from a job that was the complete opposite. At black&write! I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop—surely a workplace couldn’t be this safe, encouraging and downright inspiring! We met each week to talk over a list of articles and books that Grace curated. It was exhilarating getting to talk for hours on the things I had been obsessing over for almost a couple of decades, and new books and words that I never would have stumbled over otherwise. In this workplace, I was given the tools—the words—to explain why I looked for myself in stories in which there were no black girls. I was shown questions to ask oneself about appropriate writing and cultural steps as an editor and writer myself. My thoughts on the industry as a whole were formed here—and this, I know, is a very lucky thing. Not everyone is gifted with the opportunity to enter the publishing world in such a culturally safe place.

I was shown questions to ask oneself about appropriate writing and cultural steps as an editor and writer myself.

Here I was able to be a reader for short story awards, editing children’s manuscripts and short non-fiction pieces for this very journal, Kill Your Darlings. I went to writers’ festivals, found new writing competitions. Met writers, agents, and publishers.

Because my internship was just pre-COVID, we were able to travel to Sydney to spend a week with Hachette to delve deeper into traditional publishing. The winning black&write! fellows were Lisa Fuller and Tania Crampton-Larking. Their stories still linger in my mind as I await their publications. I would have devoured Lisa and Tania’s manuscripts as a young reader. Their characters felt relatable in a way only a First Nations person could write. Their novels meant more to me than I knew how to explain.

But my favourite part of the experience was the deadly staff I got to work with. Scrolling through my emails, I recently read an article by Associate Dean of Indigenous Engagement at UQ, Sandra Phillips in The Conversation. She highlights why we need more Indigenous editors. She says, ‘Publishing Indigenous voices in books is complex—culturally and interculturally.’ Phillips discusses things many First Nations writers have written and talked about before—that the necessity of First Nations editors is necessary to appropriately edit work by First Nations writers. This is such an important piece of knowledge. But I would hate to be the only Island woman working in traditional publishing—and expected to know all. One of the beautiful experiences of working at black&write! was the sense of community and the absence of pressure to be The One to know all about Indigenous writing.

It gave me time to not only learn the industry, but it also held space for cultural learning. As a young mainland Torres Strait Islander who lives separate from most of her family and her islands, cultural knowledge is something I have been leaning into for years—something I am still and forever learning. I can’t count the times I have been expected to know all on a subject because I am the only First Nations person in the room. I can’t count the times I have been burned because I am the only one to notice microaggressions and racism in the workplace, both before and after working at black&write!.

I can’t count the times I have been expected to know all on a subject because I am the only First Nations person in the room.

Now, I am still new in the field of editing, and I am challenged in being, usually, the only First Nations person on a project or in a workplace. I’ve felt a loss for something I made sure to never take for granted at black&write!. I recognise the touch of Grace’s edits in my own work and always feel myself reflecting on what she taught me. I see similarities in the edits of other black&write! staff too (those who I have been lucky to be edited by).

Like when I was a child, story and magic still sustain me through life. I write in a journal most days and fiction is always escapism for me—whether by reading the words of others or by the worlds at the end of my own fingertips.


​​This piece was commissioned and edited by KYD First Nations Editor-in-Residence Bianca Valentino, in partnership with State Library of Queensland’s black&write! Indigenous Writing and Editing project.

Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writers can submit pitches to KYD’s First Nations Editors-in-residence here