This second issue of Word Oysters has been several months in the making. I hope you find – as I do – that it represents a wonderfully rich and engaging portfolio of writing. It gives us just a glimpse of the different voices and perspectives, the commitment, interests, passion, and the courage, of home educated kids’ and teens’ writing. As an editor, it has been a privilege to read the submissions, to undertake the work of preparing them for publication and watch the magazine’s own personality take shape as the distinct character of each writer’s voice comes together.
And yet, as proud as I am of this issue, its potential can only be realised if more young writers and readers encounter it. The magazine as it appears here represents the work of a relatively small bunch of home educated writers from around Australia. Indeed, the most challenging aspect of bringing this magazine to life has been bringing it to the attention of prospective readers and contributors. There are some 45,000 registered home-schoolers across Australia. And yet, I suspect that knowledge of Word Oysters has reached only the tiniest fraction of these children and their families. Given my own rather modest marketing experience, I really do welcome your support in spreading the word so that more young writers can experience the benefits of contributing to the magazine.
Despite its modest reach so far, Word Oysters has already shown me how meaningful publication can be for young writers. The magazine exists first and foremost to support young writers: to offer them a respectful, encouraging space in which their work is taken seriously and their efforts valued. Publication can be a powerful moment for young writers, shaping not just what they produce, but how they see themselves as writers and readers. By participating in Word Oysters, young writers can gain a range of experiences and opportunities. Click here to discover some of the benefits of publication in Word Oysters magazine for your young writer.
Beyond the tangible benefits, engaging with the magazine – whether as a contributor or a reader – means entering a space where children and teenagers are actively finding their voices, supported and nurtured as they develop the confidence to share their inner worlds. As you read this issue, you might notice the way that process plays out in movement between experimentation and imagination, playfulness and seriousness, and the need to share impassioned viewpoints. Each piece of writing contributes to a larger conversation about the rich creative potential that publication both captures and nurtures. What emerges is not a single style or school of writing, but a sense of the young authors’ freedom to express and share ideas, questions, experiments, values and interests, and the wild soul of their imagination.
Creativity, of course, is not just about imagination, or telling stories. In fact, Word Oysters magazine is built on a very specific understanding of creativity and the processes of creativity as it applies to language and writing. While this isn’t the place to fully explore the Word Oysters approach to creativity, it is worth giving a brief overview to help you understand better the core values underpinning the magazine and why and how it exists to support young writers and their educators. If you’re interested in finding out more about creativity and the Word Oysters approach, see here for details of my forthcoming book, The Creativity Handbook.
In essence, Word Oysters approaches creativity and creative writing not only, or not primarily, as a way of thinking or an intellectual or academic endeavour (something to be measured, mastered, tested). Rather, our relationship to language and creative writing is understood as a way of being in the world and a means of experiencing words, most specifically through our senses – creativity is to do with our embodied experience of the world. When language is approached sensorially – through touch, tastes, sound, image, and feeling – writing becomes something we inhabit rather than master. Words are no longer obstacles or tests, but materials to play with, shape, and experience. In this way, writing opens itself to everyone, especially young people who may not yet trust that their voice is enough.
This philosophy underpins everything I do at Word Oysters to support and foster joyful discovery, creativity, and the development of a writer’s unique voice. The magazine is designed at its heart with a commitment to an “equity” of experience: I believe that everyone is a writer, and that every act of writing is a creative act. While I carefully and painstakingly edit every young writer’s work before it finds its way to publication, my editing style and intention is never to smooth away a young writer’s voice or to polish their work into something adult-shaped, but rather to listen closely to what the piece is already doing and help it arrive more fully as itself.
Alongside the practical work of editing, Issue 2 has also involved laying foundations and broadening the offerings and scope of the magazine: preparing supporting materials for future writers along with writing resources and guides. This work is still in progress and represents a huge time and resource commitment. I hope that you find the offerings helpful, and I invite you to explore the site as it evolves.
What follows is an introduction to the individual works published in this issue. The magazine is organised into three sections – poems, short stories, and nonfiction – each bringing a different mode of attention to language, experience, and meaning. In the notes that follow, I introduce each writer’s contribution and offer a brief sense of what each piece is doing, and why it matters.
Issue 2 begins with a selection of poetry. In the opening poem, ‘Moon Moth’, Rachael Lambert uses the image of a moth drawn to light to construct an extended metaphor for the empty seductions of wealth, power, and public adulation. Rachael’s writing moves fluidly between image and idea, and becomes a meditation on innocence lost, as a childhood “mother’s embrace” gives way to perilous decision-making. Rich, tactile imagery grounds the poem’s moral and emotional landscape which ultimately gestures towards an alternative vision of freedom – flight beyond the lure of brightness and towards belonging, peace, and a gentler kind of light.
Aurora Cridland’s sequence of haiku, ‘The Ocean: A Haiku Book’ shifts us from moral reflection to quiet observation. Working within the discipline of the haiku form, Aurora captures the ocean through small, luminous details (neon coral, patterned fish, shifting tides) Read together, Aurora’s haiku accumulate into a gentle meditation on the sea’s changing moods, from underwater dazzle to the rhythmic rise and fall of the tides.
Sophia Maxwell’s vibrant three-stanza poem, ‘Darwin’, brings us into the living pulse of the city she clearly loves. Her rhyming couples, repetition, and alliteration, (“heaps of cultures; heaps of faces”, and “bouncy, bright”) create buoyant lines that convey energy and movement, showing how sound and pattern can mirror lived experience. Like Aurora, Sophia invites readers to inhabit a vivid environment, this time bustling and human rather than natural.
Aiden May’s beautiful, meditative poem, ‘Blue’, continues the focus on movement, this time with birds in flight. I love the way Aiden uses repetition and rhyme, and especially open vowel sounds (fly, high, why, by, soar, more) to open us up to the rhythm and experience of birds’ flight conceived as an elemental, liberating movement.
In his reflective poem, ‘Anxiety: At Its Finest’, Alan Clavell turns inwards, confronting the weight of anxiety and depression with candour and expressive language. Through stark contrasts of light and dark, pitch and glare, his poem conveys the instability and unpredictability of emotional experience, completing the shift from external observation to internal landscape.
With its rhythmic staccato and controlled use of assonance, Isvara Larwood’s poem, ‘WW1’ offers a stark, sensory insight into the experience (the sound and feel) of battle. The lines are sparse, and yet this is juxtaposed with an opening into longer, rounded sounds with the repetition of the long ‘oh’ (flow, woe, blow, echo). Isvara manipulates the contrast deftly, producing a poem that sounds like war, and in this way draws readers into an empathetic understanding of human cost.
Benji Strafford’s ‘Life Cycle’ offers a quieter reflection on growth, vulnerability, and the passage of life. Using the metaphor of a tree, Benji traces human experience from the carefree innocence of childhood to the complexity and eventual solitude of adulthood. The poem moves between external imagery and internal reflection, inviting readers to consider how life’s challenges may shape experience and bring us to an eventual peace.
The final poem in this selection, Gauravani Larwood’s ‘The Forest’, lifts the senses once more, presenting a vibrant, sensory celebration of the natural world. With playful onomatopoeia, energetic rhythm, and vivid colour, Gauravani evokes both minute and spectacular aspects of woodland life, ending the section with an immersive, joyful experience of being fully present in nature.
Short story-writing is a form notoriously difficult to master. It never fails to surprise me that the school system insists on story-writing as a dominant mode while rarely teaching the complex dynamics of the craft itself. At heart, of course, we are all storytellers (we narrate our lives, retell moments, shape experience into meaning), but translating subjective experience into a coherent, controlled and properly structured short story capable of deeply engaging readers is something else entirely.
Against this backdrop, the stories gathered here show young writers rising to the challenge in different ways. Some stories act like brief excursions into story-worlds that build dramatic tension. Some delve deeply into fictional worlds that are filled with a whole casts of characters, their dialogue motivating a story world that is immediate and compelling. But one thing connects them all – the wild imagination of the young writer capable of opening to their creative instinct with the courage to take the reader into their imagination with them.
This is immediately evident in the first story in the selection here, William Warner’s ‘How Maui Caught the Moon’ which re-tells Polynesian mythology. William’s short piece captures the humour and mischief of the Maui character, and is written with balance and a lovely, storybook cadence.
Quiet intensity takes over in Rachael Lambert’s ‘Letters to the Lost’, a tender meditation on grief and memory. Through intimate, carefully chosen details, and a complex story structure that navigates different time frames and narrative voices with flair, Rachael captures the experience of a child, then young man, navigating the loss of his father.
Aurora Cridland offers an excerpt from her longer investigative narrative, in ‘Skylar Banks (Book 1)‘ in which the twelve-year-old eponymous heroine sets out on the journey to find her missing parents. With a strong, quirky narrative voice, Aurora gives us a dynamic, character-driven story that uses lively dialogue and action to bring her heroine to life.
While Aurora tells one character’s story, Freya Hart navigates the challenge of telling a story with a cast of four key characters. ‘Ember Sisters’ is a layered narrative about power, responsibility, and the sibling bonds among three sisters with superpowers (or ‘abilities’). Freya uses dialogue adeptly to drive character development and action, conjuring a vivid narrative brimming with danger and energy.
Shifting into a lighter, more playful register, ‘In the Woods’, tells the story of two brothers – wizards – who put their talking chickens to the test in a magical spelling bee. Author Eliza Brenan works hard to structure a complex plot, relationships, and large cast of characters, and she does so with vibrant, comedic, dialogue that is full of charm, wit, and moments of truly elegant writing.
Back in the recognisable world of childhood risk-taking, Marcus Patch’s ‘Crocodile Encounter’ plunges us straight into a world of exploration and questionable decision-making. Marcus layers his short, punchy sentences to create an exhilarating pace so that the danger is acutely felt. In this way, Marcus’s lively story shows a sharp instinct for structuring suspense narratives.
The final stories in this section mark a tonal and thematic shift, with contributions by teen writers Gabrielle Brenan and Stephen Patch taking on darker, more confounding elements of human experience, each showing a mature grasp of storytelling techniques and an increasing confidence in writing about psychological depth and moral complexity.
Unsettling and visceral, Gabrielle Brenan’s story, ‘The Railway’, builds psychological suspense line by line, placing the reader inside her protagonist’s experience of fear and wonder. ‘The Railway’ is a confident piece of writing that moves between place and interiority with a poetic grasp of their interconnectedness in which the imagery of height, shadow, and isolation mirrors the protagonist’s inner collapse.
While Gabrielle’s story draws the reader inward, Stephen Patch’s ‘To Tell You the Truth’ ends the section with a high-octane chase that fuses action with moral reflection. Stephen’s dialogue crackles, the stakes feel immediate, and the spiritual undertones add unexpected emotional depth.
Taken together, these stories offer a glimpse of the imaginative and technical approaches young writers bring to fiction. The next section of the magazine, on nonfiction, extends this exploration, giving us a real sense of the different modes of creative work that writing can involve, and the many ways that a young writer’s play with words and meaning may be harnessed across genres.
This section is divided into two subsections: biography and persuasive essays/opinion pieces. In the section on biography, young writers explore the lives of public figures who have inspired their interest. Some are inspirational figures, selected for study because their words, actions, or work in general offer us something to emulate or revere. Some have lived lives that expose problematic social issues or inequities, or give insight into values such as compassion, self-sacrifice, resilience or determination. Others pose conundrums to our young investigators, or contradictions that need exploring or further understanding.
Importantly, the majority of biographical writings in this section are short speeches, shaped by the need to communicate the writer’s interest and enthusiasm clearly and persuasively to an audience. A few longer pieces represent more involved research projects that are fascinated by the combination of selection, narration, and story-telling involved in biographical writing.
What links them is an emerging discovery that biography is not just about collecting facts, but about telling a story. Read as a whole, I see in this array of biographical pieces young writers developing strong views about the people they are researching, and discovering how writing can be used to explore values, passions, and questions that matter to them. Biography, here, becomes a creative and thoughtful act, a way of asking questions, and a way of making sense of both other people’s lives and our own ways of thinking.
For instance, Mathew Brenan’s biography of Lloyd Alexander is written with genuine affection and curiosity, tracing the experiences that shaped a much-loved fantasy writer. Moving from wartime Europe to the imaginative landscapes of The Chronicles of Prydain, Matthew shows how Alexander’s life, travels, and encounters with language fed his storytelling.
Similarly, Aliza K tells the story of Amy Carmichael with warmth, clarity, and deep respect. Focusing on Amy’s faith, courage, and tireless compassion, Aliza shows how one woman’s convictions led to the rescue of countless children. Aliza’s talk is both informative and heartfelt, revealing why Amy’s life continues to inspire hope, generosity, and moral courage.
Meanwhile, in her longer study of Anh Do, Eliza Brenan immerses readers in the many details of a life that moves between public and private worlds. Her careful attention to small moments and narrative voice shows how biography is shaped as much by a writer’s curiosity as by the facts themselves.
Equally compelling is Fynn K’s speech exploring the extraordinary courage of Desmond Doss, a World War 2 medic who refused to carry a weapon on grounds of conscience. Fynn clearly shows us how and why he is fascinated with Doss, with his faith, endurance, and determination to save others’ lives, by telling the story of the brutal events at Hacksaw Ridge, using vivid detail, and Doss’s own words.
Isvara Larwood’s biography of Albert Einstein is a confidently crafted story, tracing formative moments of Einstein’s life and balancing factual narrative with reflective insight, showing not just what Einstein achieved but why his thinking and values matter. Isvara has paired carefully selected anecdotes with his own reflective voice, making this a presentation that can profoundly engage an audience.
Gabrielle Brenan’s much longer biography of Bill Gates begins with a preface that feels personal, reflective, and slightly mischievous, inviting the reader into her curiosity and scepticism. While Gabrielle promises “the bare facts,” she never simply lists dates and events. Instead, she humanises Gates through his personality, habits, relationships, and contradictions, using sly commentary, small jokes, and selective detail (especially about friendships, schooling, early coding, and family life). In doing so, Gabrielle shows how biography blends storytelling with historical investigation, demonstrating that it is always a matter of choice: what to emphasise, how to interpret, and how to invite readers to challenge assumptions and think for themselves.
In another beautifully well-structured speech, Jemima K introduces her listeners to the remarkable story of Bethany Hamilton, whose determination and courage turned a life-changing injury into a testament to resilience. Through clear, engaging narrative and Bethany’s own words, Jemima highlights how persistence, faith, and a love for surfing propelled Bethany back into competition and inspired countless others.
Oliver Hoath’s biography introduces the life of William Kamkwamba, the boy from Malawi whose persistence, curiosity and ingenuity transformed his community. Oliver brings Kamkwamba’s story to life with the clarity, rhythm, and pacing of a very well-designed speech. His use of short, direct sentences and careful emphasis on key events guides the listener through William’s challenges and triumphs, turning a real-life tale into an inspiring spoken narrative.
Cooper Hoath’s biography of Joseph Merrick is compassionate and deeply human, telling the story of a man too often reduced to his appearance. Cooper carefully traces Merrick’s life from hardship and exploitation to moments of dignity, creativity, and kindness. Cooper invites his audience to look beyond the surface and recognise the inherent worth of every human being.
Iver K’s speech about footballer Bukayo Saka is written with admiration and joy, capturing both sporting talent and personal character. Rather than focusing only on achievements, Iver highlights family, faith, humility, and hard work as central to Saka’s success. Iver reminds us that heroes are shaped not just by skill, but by the values they live by.
Ultimately, biography can never be just a list of “bare facts” because a life isn’t simply a set of dates, places, and events. A biographer has to make choices about what to include, what to emphasise, and how to interpret a person’s actions, thoughts, and feelings. These decisions shape the story, giving it meaning and showing the connections, conflicts, and patterns that make someone’s life distinctive. In other words, biography is always part history, part interpretation, and part storytelling, bringing a real person vividly into the reader’s mind, as a character, not a list of facts.
Building on these explorations of real lives, the final three pieces of nonfiction in the magazine shift slightly in focus. Rather than telling the story of an individual, they take up broader questions, arguments, and opinions. Here, writers engage with ethical, social, or philosophical issues, applying research, reasoning, and persuasive language to explore ideas that matter to them. In doing so, these pieces demonstrate how nonfiction can move fluidly between storytelling, argument, and reflection.
Gauravani Larwood’s passionate discussion piece challenges readers to rethink everyday assumptions about food, ethics, and responsibility. Combining scientific evidence, moral reasoning, and spiritual reflection, Gauravani builds a sustained and persuasive argument against meat consumption. The essay speaks with urgency and conviction, inviting readers to question what is considered “normal” and to consider the wider consequences of their choices.
Building on this question of ethics, in his opinion piece, ‘Is it Important to be Earnest?, Stephen Patch examines the enduring ethics of honesty with examples from Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest. Stephen discusses the ways that deception damages relationships, causes suffering, and ultimately fails, showing how literature and scripture together can illuminate the value of truth.
In his second piece of nonfiction and the magazine’s final piece, Stephen offers a thoughtful analysis of David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, exploring how war strips individuals of freedom, hope, and agency. Through attention to symbolism, imagery, and contrast (particularly Malouf’s use of birds), Stephen brings to light the belief that freedom persists despite human cruelty.
Taken together, these three opinion pieces show how the writer’s voice shapes not only what is argued, but how it is experienced, demonstrating that nonfiction, like fiction, is an act of creativity, storytelling, and voice.
Closing Thoughts
Writing, above all, involves our experiences of the world from the inside: through the senses, emotions, and our attentive presence. Writing is never just an intellectual pursuit, and our relationship with words, language, speech and writing connects us to others and the world at large in profound, ongoing ways that map our subjectivity, our reality, our relationships.
Word Oysters exists to allow home educated young writers to explore this connection in whatever ways they feel driven, in a welcoming, supporting environment that aims to build confidence and craft. We welcome all writing submissions from all home-educated students in Australia. We want to encourage everyone to share their work.
Whether you’re writing your first novel, have a whole collection of poems in your notebook, or you’re struggling to put pen to paper, or even doubting your abilities, we encourage you to share your work. You might be writing poems, stories, journals, report, essays or screenplays, or something else entirely. Whichever it is, we want to hear from you. At Word Oysters, we believe that every act of writing is a creative act, and every voice is valued.
Issue 2 is a celebration of this spirit of creative inclusion and experimentation, of the many possibilities for writing and the many writers and their voices. I hope it inspires both contributors and readers to continue exploring, imagining, and feeling their way in and with words.
Word Oysters 