|
Jennifer Jane Blackman Jenny lives at Sydney's North Shore with her husband. She has a son and a daughter and three grandsons. She studied for an Arts Degree at the University of New England from 1959 to 1961 and completed Registration Certificate of the Library Association of Australia in 1963. Since then she worked in Technical Libraries - Grace Bros, Broadway, Maritime Services Board of NSW, CSIRO, Divisions of Energy and Earth Resources, College of Law, Macquarie University Library and Chatswood High School. Jenny became interested in writing for children six years ago when she was on chemotherapy for breast cancer. Since 1995 she attended children's writing courses at the WAE with Diana Bates and Jeremy Fisher, and at the NSW Writers Center with Moya Simons, Libby Hawthorn, Stephen Measday and Duncan Ball. In 1999 she won the Children's Book Council Frustrated Writers competition with her story "Wirreebilla" and worked on her manuscript with Susanne Gervay as her mentor. In 2001 she was awarded a fellowship at Varuna Writers' Center in Katoomba for the same manuscript where she worked with Jenny Pausacker as her mentor. She was advised to rewrite her story in a diary form and in December 2001 was contracted to rewrite it for the My Story Series by Scholastic. This time it will be titled "Who is my enemy". Jenny also attends fortnightly Creative Writers Group with Don Rowley as a tutor and is at the present writing a Life Story. Jenny's interests are: Yoga, the Theatre, Probus Club, volunteer for cancer Support at RNS Hospital and Committee of Friends of Elizabeth Farm. She is also on the Committee of the Children's book Council and has been asked to join the Network, a group of published children's writers who meet once a month. It's 1915 and Australia is at War. Young man are being wounded and dying at Gallipoli. For the local boys home, the peaceful village of Wirreebilla in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, the war seems far away. But is it peaceful in Wirreebilla? Anger brews as families lose sons at Gallipoli and in France. Mr. Shelldrake, the minister, brings the news of their deaths and tries to comfort parishioners. As she writes in her diary, Emma Shelldrake discovers there is a newly perceived enemy in Wirreebilla. The German settlers, who migrated to escape religious persecution in their country and settled in the Hills in the mid 1800's, are increasingly being treated as aliens by some local people. New battles break out in the quiet hills as families divide to discover that their German neighbors are the enemy. But are they? My Story The Great War and the German Questions is Emma Shelldreake's story, written as a diary. A tale woven around her family and friends in Wirreebilla. Australia during the Great War. The Germans are the enemy. A coming of age novel, part fact part fiction. |