Our second event was held at Epsom Girls Grammar (thank you Michele Coombridge and Debbie Horrocks), “An evening with Anne O’Brien”.  Anne is Festival Director of the Auckland Writers Festival and she entertained us with stories about writers, and how she and her team put together the Writers Festival each year.  The work and planning is enormous, and being able to negotiate with publishers, writers, patrons, sponsors and festival attendees is a huge task. Anne was an entertaining speaker and we all enjoyed hearing her speak.  This year’s festival takes place from Wednesday May 16th to Sunday May 20th.

​This year, the first PD session from SLANZA Auckland was  Not – “Just Another Display”  on 21st February. This practical, hands-on workshop was taken by the inimitable Annie White from Takapuna Grammar and kindly hosted by Joanna Baynes at King’s School in Remuera.
Annie acknowledged the work and inspiration of Rachel Van Riel and used some of her concepts and examples in the slides that accompanied her talk. The presentation was followed by demonstrations of Annie’s handcraft prowess punctuated by witty and amusing comments that kept the audience highly entertained. We were all “wowed” by the amazing large posters Annie had created using the Rasterbator site (http://rasterbator.net ) to enlarge and print a picture onto multiple A3 sheets which she had then joined with double-sided tape (see photo below). Paper sculpture also provided materials for displays – some patterns are available on the Net. Large inexpensive wooden letters available now from stockists of cheap imported items can also be effective either on an empty shelf or within a display. Lastly it was our turn to fashion rats out of plasticine (see photo below), flowers from pipe cleaners and tissue, 3D displays from cardboard etc in order to give us some confidence in trying to be more imaginative.
Other lessons/reminders to take away from the session were:

• “selling the sizzle, not the sausage” – say what the book can do for the reader in order to sell it
• You can’t beat face-out display
• Using reader comments with display books can help sell them
• Be imaginative with what you include in topic displays e.g. mix fiction and non-fiction
• Have more generic display themes. (I particularly liked a display headliner G.R.I.T. Guts-Resilience- Initiative-Tenacity which immediately translated to a booklist from my catalogue.)

My head was spinning with all the things I wanted to do as a result of Annie’s session and that’s the way you know that you’ve been professionally developed! Great work, Annie.