Nurturing creative storytelling, particularly for marginalised children, has been the life work of newly published author and educator, Lachlann Carter.
He’s also a specialist in helping educators teach creative writing.
While from a creative background largely based around theatre and writing, and having worked in marketing for a spell as well, Carter always had an interest in working in an education space and bringing creativity into that - not necessarily through being a classroom teacher per se, but using classroom experience gained over several years and an understanding of a teacher’s perspective to best advantage.
“It was also about understanding the context that teachers are working in, so all of the challenges that children might be bringing into their learning, the personal blocks that they might have around engaging in creative work, the challenges that teachers have in doing that work within the context of their remit..." Carter shares.
“[And learning] where there often can be conflict between standardised testing models and all of the different aspects of the curriculum that they need to teach, and then trying to embed creative thinking into that can often be challenging.
"So, having that experience is really valuable for me," he adds.
In the mid 2000s, through placements, various relief teaching experiences and chats with his partner, Jenna Williams, who’s also in education, Carter came across the plethora of challenges that kids bring to the classroom.
“… and so often it was a case of children not having a sense of themselves as a creative individual,” he says.
“…there were a lot of reasons behind that, but also not (being) willing to take creative risks, and sometimes it seemed like that was driven by a fear of getting things wrong, or not understanding the frameworks around creative work, and [being] caught in trying to second guess what the teacher might be asking them to do as opposed to feeling free to explore and develop ideas.”
From 826 Valencia to a 100 Story Building
Having sat in on a session at the Melbourne Writers Festival with renowned American author, editor and publisher Dave Eggers, the pair learned about Eggers’ organisation in San Francisco called 826 Valencia, a creative writing centre for children that was connecting kids with professionals in school projects.
Not long after the pair were lucky enough to arrange and undertake a three-months internship with the innovative company.
“We got to do heaps of cool things over there, we worked on publishing programs, ran workshops, I got to hide up in the attic above the workshop space and play cranky publisher, Mr Blue, screaming down at the children, “you can’t write stories, children can’t write stories!”, Carter laughs.
Suitably inspired, he and Williams returned to Melbourne and over several years evolved the idea of a creative writing organisation for children and young people in the city’s western suburbs.
Initially titled Pigeons, a not-for-profit delivering creative publishing programs for primary school students, it later morphed into 100 Story Building, which has specialised in creativity and storytelling programs now for more than 50,000 children since 2012.
Inspired by a three-month internship at American creative writing centre for children, Valencia 826, pictured above, Lachlann Carter and partner Jenna Williams founded an Aussie version, 100 Story Building.
“We worked very deeply in partnership with schools, community organisations, communities, children, young people and families – and the space that we created was co-designed with kids,” Carter shares.
“So 100 Story Building is just that – you would walk in off the pedestrian mall in Footscray onto level 100, and a trapdoor in the back corner would provide access to the 99 floors underground – but we kept it locked because we didn’t want to lose any more kids down there.”
Warmer climates and fresh frontiers
Somewhere “between (COVID) lockdown five and lockdown six in Melbourne” the couple decided they wanted to have their own kids, but close to Williams’ family in Cairns and so moved up not long after.
Since then, Carter has spent a few years working out the lay of the land, so to speak, and understanding the education context in far north Queensland, largely through volunteering at his kids’ local school and being on the P&C.
He’s spent a good deal of time supporting teachers in exploring creative approaches to learning through narrative.
“Because that’s the easiest space to apply some of this thinking, but also it offers the opportunity for me to open up my own creative process and creative practice and use that as a model to support teachers in just understanding what a framework of creative thinking looks like,” he says.
The creative and critical thinking general capability in the curriculum applies across all areas, Carter explains, but it’s not really defined in a way that a lot of teachers actually feel sure that they understand it, or understand how to teach or assess it.
“Primary school teachers are generalists, and many are not comfortable in that space … (and) can often feel that they’re not fully equipped to teach those skills, and they can sometimes feel like they’re put in that position of having to be a creative expert or finding a creative expert to then use as an exemplar and then say to the children, ‘we need to create something that looks like this’, which is not really the point of it,” he says.
A lot of the work Carter has been doing has been supporting teachers to open up to vulnerability, and one way he's doing that quite powerfully is by taking teachers and kids on his own book series creation journey – warts and all.
The first book in the series – and Carter’s writing debut – is Big Trouble with Angry Chairs, a delightful, hilarious and downright spooky story aimed at early and independent readers aged 5-10, that will have them giggling, gasping and guffawing as they join Maddie and Clare navigating their strange neighbourhood, Dead End, a place where mutant fart gas, zombified family members, and even a villainous chicken threaten to take over.
“I did a lot of play with world building and character development and everything came together around these two young children who lived in a dead-end street lined with palm trees, much like the street I lived on in Cairns, where the chairs, sick and tired of being sat on, decide to hold the great chair uprising in revolt,” Carter says.
With fast-paced storytelling and comic-style illustrations, Big Trouble is perfect for fans of laugh-out-loud, illustrated series like Bad Guys, Dog Man, and Treehouse.
Published by Hardie Grant Children's Publishing and illustrated by million-copy bestselling artist Douglas Holgate (Last Kids on Earth), the series combines the eerie humour of Goosebumps with the surreal twists of Twilight Zone, making it a must-read for kids and families alike.
“The world of Big Trouble reflects the everyday adventures and challenges children experience,” Carter says.
“It’s meant to be spooky, funny, and empowering.
“I want kids to see themselves as adventurers who can solve problems, take risks, and create their own stories.”
Carter’s creative process is somewhat unorthodox, with the budding young author inviting teachers and students along for every bump, breakthrough, thrill and reality check of the book publishing process.
“I’ve been taking the teachers and the kids on the journey of the creation of my books from kind of initial idea through to publication,” he says.
“And that includes sharing with them all of the messy stuff – the ideas that don’t go anywhere, a lot of the feedback from my editor and my publisher, and taking on their feedback as well, and coming circling back.
“So it’s actually been a live process with a lot of these kids, which has been really useful in understanding what teachers can then take out to reframe in an education context.”
Carter explains that a lot of that is about honouring the process more than the product, and so looking at how educators can use all of the different aspects of the creative process to help inform what the thinking might be behind that, so that teachers understand not just the application of skills, but the acquisition and development of knowledge and understanding.
“With creative work, it can be a challenging thing to really do a valid assessment of a student based on a piece of writing that they’ve only had five weeks to work on,” Carter says.
“So if we’re asking students to do a piece of creative work, draft it, redraft it, submit that, and then we will assess that product in a summative way, for me, it can take me 40 drafts to really nail what I’m trying to do!
“I know what I’m trying to do, I know the effect that I’m trying to have in my writing, but I just can’t get the words right to have that effect - and so I have to go through a really deep process to get to that.
“If we’re only assessing what students create during a short period of time in creative work, then we’re kind of doing them a disservice; so it’s about, again, supporting teachers to understand how to assess the process work.”
Not surprisingly, after a couple of years of play-based work with kids in his school, and working with the head of curriculum and a number of teachers, an opportunity has now taken shape for Carter and Williams to develop something similar to 100 Story Building with his Queensland community, but done in a way that is responsive to his new context as well.
Carter, pictured above, says horror is “a really great space for exploring larger human themes, particularly around power and control and paranoia, and so those were the stories that always captured my imagination and kind of scared me at the same time”.
“It is a different education context, it’s a different cultural context, it’s different geographically – and so the next stages that I’m going to be going through are community development and co-design and program design process,” he says.
“One of the things is a centre doesn’t necessarily make sense here, because it’s not the densely populated metro space that Footscray in Melbourne is, and so it’s about how do we create a model where there’s still all those opportunities for creative learning and engagement to happen in a way that maybe is more decentralised."
Carter has been working on a pilot project with the Queensland education department with several schools, exploring how that creative learning can be taken up and then embedded into their approach to learning, particularly as Version 9 of the curriculum comes in.
“Alongside developing my relationships with schools just through sharing my books and my writing, we’ll also be looking to work with more schools next year,” he says.
Big Trouble with Angry Chairs is available now at all good bookstores.
