Jayne Case
Moltema author Jayne Case has turned one of the most difficult chapters of her family’s life into a picture book for kids, that is helping other families make sense of their own challenging circumstances.
Case wrote Counting On You: A NICU Story, after her youngest son was born needing time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). NICU is the specialist ward for newborns who require extra medical support or are born premature. Case’s family spent time in Hobart, home to the only high risk NICU in the state, after doctors identified a kidney issue about a week before his birth.
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She says she searched for a book to help her two older children understand what was happening to their brother, surrounded by tubes and monitors, but could not find one suited to the experience. So she wrote it herself, drafting the entire story on her phone in the middle of the night while breastfeeding.
Case had no publishing background and taught herself the industry from scratch, learning self publishing through an online course and working with an illustrator, Tika, based in Indonesia at the time. Print on demand technology lets her produce copies as needed and sell them through her own website (threeharveys.com) and Amazon.
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A significant part of her mission has been getting the book directly to families who need it most. Through her website, people can donate a copy of the book to one of dozens of NICU units or Ronald McDonald Houses across Australia rather than buying and posting a copy themselves.
Case has already drafted a second book, this time self illustrated as well and hopes to finish it soon.
Heather Ewings
Deloraine’s Heather Ewings has been telling stories for as long as she can remember. Her grandmother recently unearthed a handwritten “book” from when Ewings was about five, titled “The Crashed Bus,” complete with illustrations and a cliffhanger ending involving faulty “brackes”.
That early instinct never really left her, even when life got in the way. Writing took a back seat during her time at university, and although she picked up the pen again after her second child was born, it took another four years before her first short stories found a home, published in the UK magazine Five Stop Stories. Since then, Ewings has had more than 40 short stories published around the world, along with four books, with several more in various stages on her desk.
Her debut novel, What the Tide Brings, tells the story of Myna, a woman who discovers she is a selkie and must choose between reclaiming her true home in the sea or staying on land with the husband and daughter who can never join her there. The idea arrived almost fully formed, appearing one night as Ewings worked through a difficult draft of an unrelated historical novel, now under consideration with several publishers. A scene poured out late one evening, and she woke the next morning eager to read on and discover how it ended. Since Ewings had written it herself, there was only one way to find out, she had to finish it.
It remains Ewings’ only book written entirely by hand, a process she says she hopes to return to. You can find all of her work at heatherewings.com.au.
