For a Book Week morning in Maylands, the Swan River glinted nearby and gum trees swayed gently in the breeze. Inside the school library at Maylands Peninsula Primary, the usual quiet shelves had come alive. Thanks to support from the City of Bayswater, students gathered to meet a special visitor, author and screenwriter Kathryn Lefroy.
Kathryn’s stories roam far and wide. She has written the fantasy adventures The Secret of the Stone and Alex and the Alpacas, as well as screenplays for family films, heartwarming dramas, and spirited comedies. Her words have shaped tales of time-travelling elves, daring rollerbladers, pole-dancing robotics students, and a young girl’s quest to save her whale shark friend. Yet, behind these big, bold adventures is a truth she shared with the children: “Every story starts small. It starts with a spark.”
She began the session by asking the students what they were reading. The answers came like popcorn , Dragon Keeper, Lord of the Rings, Wings of Fire, Warrior Cats. Some loved mysteries, others action and adventure. A few admitted they liked movies better (The Hunger Games! one shouted), while others spoke up for video games like Minecraft, Pokémon, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Kathryn leaned in: “Even games start with a story. A writer is always there at the beginning.”
Her own beginning, she explained, was shaped by many sources, a dream in Year 4 that became a prize-winning poem, a moment watching Spider-Man: Homecoming when she wondered, What if a kid like this had powers in my own story? Ideas came from real-life encounters, like an alpaca in Tasmania that wandered right up to her and ended up in a book, and from the movies, books, and places she loved. “The trick,” she told them, “is to catch ideas when they float past. Write them down. They disappear if you don’t.”
The children were wide-eyed when she described how long a book can take: sometimes seven years to write, then another whole year before it appears in a bookstore. She admitted she’s not a millionaire yet (“but I keep trying!”) and that her favourite book is always her newest — right now, The Secret of the Stone.
When she read aloud from her work — a passage about a dead frog and a glimmer of wishing power — the library was quiet. Then it was the students’ turn. Kathryn handed out picture prompts and challenged them to respond with the craziest, most imaginative ideas they could think of, as long as no characters died. The results were a whirl of energy: creepy creatures, hilarious mishaps, and unexpected plot twists.
Some students drew pictures, others wrote in dot points, some sketched out blurbs for stories that could have been the next bestselling novel. Kathryn listened, laughed, and nodded. “That’s how it starts,” she encouraged them. “A moment like this — and suddenly, you have a world.”
After the workshop, a small queue formed for autographs. In the chatter and shuffling, you could hear something quieter too — the sound of young minds turning over their own story seeds, wondering what might grow.
For Kathryn Lefroy, the visit was another chance to pass on what she has always known: stories can come from anywhere — a dream, a walk in the country, a picture, a question, a single “what if?” For the students of Maylands Peninsula Primary, it was a reminder that their own voices can build bridges between the worlds they know and the worlds they can imagine.
And so, on that bright Book Week afternoon, the air in the library seemed filled with invisible threads — each one a story, waiting to be caught.
(courtesy pictures of the books from author’s website)
