ABOUT  VAL  CLARK

Hello and welcome! My name is Val Clark. I am an author and creative writing teacher based in the Central West of NSW. I have always loved storytelling, and I believe that the power of words can change lives.
They changed my life.
There were no books in our home, apart from a few Disney pop-up books. Confession: I am still a sucker for pop-up books! There may not have been books in the home, but my head was crammed with stories. They spilled out of me as I invented the storylines of our games — Pirates, Cowboys and Indian and Mothers and Fathers. When the drama in my home exploded, I found safety and security in my stories.
I was not particularly clever or bright in school. In fact, in year 10, I was in 3C4, which was the bottom class of the lowest stream. Year 10 was the first year I had to sit public examinations to be allowed to continue to year 11. That’s where my pride kicked in. Too young to leave school, I didn’t want to repeat a year, but I had no idea how to prepare for exams and nobody was sharing. I muddled through, passed the exams, progressed to year 11 and started to pay attention.
Fast forward to teachers’ college, university, marriage, family, loving life as — would you believe it — a teacher? A particular story crashed around in my head until it just had to be written. Written and — shame on me — shown as a first draft to the school’s English teacher. Her feedback was brutally honest. I needed to learn the craft of creative writing. Consequently, I earned a Master’s degree from Adelaide University and, after moving to Darwin, became a workshop junkie, attending everything the Northern Territory Writers’ Centre offered, because there was always something to learn.
There I experimented with genres and voice and finally began to write the young adult novel, Lost, the first book in the Chronicles of N’arth. There I had a number of small articles, short stories, poems published and performed and a radio play produced. I was on my way to developing a CV.
Teaching was, and is, an integral part of my personality. I learn something and immediately ponder the best way to teach it. It’s no surprise then that, on moving from Darwin to Dubbo, where there was a small, but ageing, writing community, I was keen to pass on my knowledge. I became an active member, and eventually president, of the Outback Writers’ Centre, presented creative writing courses and workshops and inaugurated the Dubbo Writers’ Festival.
I’ve had a lot of fun creating and presenting these 3 hour workshops to adults and high school students: Creating Compelling Characters, Heroes Journey, Show Don’t Tell, Uncovering Creative and Credible Stories, Fantasy World Building and Save The Cat Writes a Novel. The 10 week courses Writing the Stories of Your Life 1 and 2 and Writing the 10 Minute Play, have also been a delight.
In between preparing longer works like Found, the sequel to Lost, for publication, I have also published the short stories: After Plenty, enCounter with a Tyre Roller and The Demise of Unity and the following pieces of memoir. Montage and Epiphany Highly commended Boldrewood Literary Awards and Dread, short listed for the Cowley Awards. From 2011 to 13 I wrote The Write Stuff, a Dubbo Weekender weekly column for emerging writers, as well as travel articles in the Dubbo Photo News