I'd always known I was a writer, not as a hobby or something to squeeze into spare moments between what others called ‘real work’, but as the central, essential thing that made me who I was. The trouble was, I'd absorbed the message we're all given: get a stable job, write on the side if you must. So I did, and I was good at the work - I understood marketing, enjoyed the creative problem-solving it required. But I was marketing products I had no personal connection to, and while I was grateful for the work and the good people I worked alongside, I couldn't shake the feeling that I could be using these same skills - the communication, the storytelling, the community-building - in service of something that aligned more deeply with who I was and what I believed the world needed. I did manage to write during those years, stealing moments in lunch breaks, early mornings, and weekends, even finishing my first book, but it felt like writing squeezed into the margins rather than the writer's life I knew was possible. Each evening, I'd arrive home exhausted, wondering: what if I could build something where the work itself nourished rather than depleted me, where my skills could directly help people grow, discover themselves, and connect with each other?

I kept circling back to the same question: surely there must be a way to use my skills in service of something meaningful, to support myself financially, and still preserve enough energy and flexibility to write. Then I remembered how during university, I'd tutored primary school kids in English and discovered a deep satisfaction in that work, and I began to wonder: what if I could build something around that?

I started small, taking over a monthly creative writing club at our local library. The kids loved it. It grew organically from there - first into a weekly club at a primary school, then private groups gathering around my dining table at home, then another school wanting what we'd created. Before I quite understood what was happening, I found myself teaching ninety kids a week, carrying the whole thing on my own shoulders.

In 2014, I opened our first studio in Balwyn North and began inviting other writers to join the work. By 2016, we'd expanded to two studios, our community spreading across Melbourne's suburbs. By 2020, we'd weathered the heartbreak of releasing one studio and closing the original - simultaneously the most painful and the wisest business decision I'd ever made, because without shedding that weight, we never would have survived the two years of lockdowns that followed.

The name change gave voice to something I'd been feeling for a while: we'd grown beyond our original boundaries, become more than a place just for children. I still loved working with young writers, watching them discover what their voices could do, but some of those kids were growing up now, and a few had circled back to join our team as mentors themselves. I wanted to support them as they evolved into their next chapters, and I wanted to create space for myself too - programmes I'd actually want to attend, experiences that would inspire my team, opportunities to connect with other writers at all stages of their unfolding journeys.

I'd spent time in Paris, where literary groups and events bloomed every night of the week if you wanted them, a whole ecosystem of writers supporting writers, and I'd come home carrying that energy like seeds in my pockets, wanting to plant some of that abundance here. Somewhere along the way, I realised something fundamental: this work wasn't just about me anymore, if it ever had been. It's like writing a story, where you must write it for yourself first, must feel the truth of it resonating in your own bones, because only then will others feel that truth echo in theirs. The more specific you make something for yourself, the more universally it seems to speak - which appears contradictory but proves itself true again and again.

For years, I'd carried a quiet belief that I wasn't a ‘business person’, that I somehow lacked the right kind of brain for running an organisation. But I've come to understand that building Words of a Feather is actually just like writing a story - first written for my younger self and all she needed (which turned out to be what so many young writers needed too), and now written for all versions of myself across time, past and future (which is revealing itself to be what people of all ages are seeking). I'm writing into existence the spaces, the community, and the stories I want to inhabit and be part of, and the rest of the narrative fills itself in organically - one person at a time, one piece of writing at a time, one brave voice speaking itself out loud, one published book at a time.

Years ago in our first studio, a girl walked through the door with her father - I'll call her E for this story. While her dad and I talked about what he hoped she might find with us, she drifted towards the wall we'd painted with coloured chalkboard paint, selected a piece of chalk from the bucket, and began to draw. A bird, detailed and carefully rendered. Then she drew it again beside the first, this time simplified. Then again, more stylised. Then again and again, each iteration becoming more distilled until the final one was nothing but a round body with a triangle beak and two stick legs extending down.

She turned to me. "Amy, look. This is how I draw the bird now. This is how I drew it when I was five. This is how I drew it when I was four. This is how I drew it when I was three."

Her father smiled. "She loves to draw."

E joined one of our Storyteller's Club groups, settling in at the repurposed wooden dining table with a handful of other kids her age. Each week, as she listened to her Story Guide explaining the day's creative invitation and contributed her thoughts to the group's discussions, her eyes would remain fixed on her page, her pencil moving almost unconsciously across the margins, drawing that same bird over and over, an endless flock of them taking flight across her notebooks.

Finally, one of the other kids spoke what they'd all been wondering. "Why do you keep drawing that bird?"

She glanced up from her page for just a heartbeat. "Why do you breathe?" she said, and then returned to her drawing.

not just because it's about art or writing, but because it speaks to something deeper about voice - about doing what you need to do without feeling compelled to explain or justify it to anyone who asks. Throughout my life, people have asked me why I write, and I've never found an answer that felt adequate, probably because I've always felt the weight of needing to prove something, to convince them of its importance or legitimacy. But the truth is startlingly simple: for me, writing is like breathing. It's not a hobby, not something trivial I do for fun even though joy lives in it. It's as necessary as air.

And I believe it's necessary for all of us, as a collective moving through this world together. We are storytelling beings at our very core, and stories are the primary way we make sense of the world, ourselves, each other, and our place in the vast web of existence. They're how we forge connections across the distances between us, how we create meaning from the chaos of experience, how we express what matters most and can't be said any other way. I hold a deep conviction - something beyond belief, something closer to knowledge - that regardless of our vocations or how we spend the majority of our hours, we would all find ourselves healthier, happier, wiser, more connected to one another, and fundamentally kinder if we created genuine space in our lives for stories, for imagination and dreaming and deep listening and brave sharing. Not just for children, though certainly for them. For all of us, at every age and stage.

We offer workshops where young writers discover what their voices can do, mentorships for writers at any stage of their unfolding journey, Story Soirées where we can share our work out loud in a room full of people who understand why it matters, writing retreats tucked away in the mountains where we can step outside our daily lives and remember who we are, flash fiction competitions with themes that follow the turning seasons and give us permission to play, and annual anthologies where the stories we've nurtured together find their way into print and out into the world.

We're building this together - not just me, but all of us - a living community of writers who understand that creativity isn't a luxury we indulge in when everything else is done, but something as essential and life-sustaining as breathing itself.