Kellie Nissen

As a primary school student, I wrote and wrote and wrote. Long stories that went on for pages and pages. I ‘published’ them with a cardboard cover and staples and promoted them during school assemblies where I proudly read my manuscripts in front of the whole school.

As a primary school teacher, nothing gave me greater joy than nurturing this love of writing in my students. The last words I ever wanted to hear were ‘Ugh—writing!’ or ‘I don’t know what to write.’

Now, as an author and editor, I love living in my world of words. I’m an active member of SCBWI, Write NSW and the ACT Writers Centre. I sit on the Australian Literacy Educators Association (ALEA) local council in the ACT where I see my role as promoting our local authors to schools and inspiring teachers and students to write.

I’ve spent a number of years playing with the craft of picture books and junior fiction through forums like 12×12, StoryStorm, ReFoReMo and 52 Week Picture Book Challenge, and I love my monthly Sunday online sessions with my critique group where we read and critique my other passion, supernatural young adult and adult short stories.

I’ve been honoured to place in two Creative Kids Tales’ competitions with Ambush in the Forest (2016) and Geckos Can’t Be Superheroes (2017). Four of my stories have been included in Sally Odgers’ Prints Charming anthologies. In 2019, I was awarded the Anne Edgeworth Fellowship to work on my narrative memoir about the impact of Asperger’s and last year I had a flash fiction story published in Trickster’s Treats #4.

My favourite quote, courtesy of Roald Dahl via Willy Wonka, is:

We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that. Reverse it.

Willy Wonka

It really sums up my ongoing writing journey.