Hot news! Yes! Possum Magic has returned to the best seller lists in its 21st year. I am beside myself. I feel exactly as I did 21 years ago when it hit the best seller lists for the first time and stayed there for months on end.

I would have been dismayed if it hadn’t sold well after all the publicity that Julie Vivas and I did on radio, TV and for the newspapers. On one day alone we were interviewed eight times. We felt really tired and old that night Ð ancient enough to have created a book that was twenty one years old.

Scholastic, the publishers, who put their hearts, souls and money into the 21st birthday celebrations, (thank you, Scholastic!) estimate from the activity on their website that one in three schools in Australia had a Possum Magic party on March 31st. Certainly I never want to eat a Vegemite sandwich, a lamington or a piece of pavlova again in my entire life!

In Adelaide in late March, on a perfect blue-sky, no-wind day we had a Possum Magic picnic with 5,000 children in a park, preceded by an Adelaide Symphony concert in which Possum Magic featured. Julie and I were given a huge key by Mike Rann, the Premier of South Australia, and he and Julie and I cut a mountain-of-lamingtons-cake. It was huge: the cake, the day, the excitement, the drama, the celebration. I’ll never forget the sight of hundreds of hot little kids with Vegemite all over their faces, interspersed with chocolate and coconut bits from the lamingtons, and possum masks dropping over their eyes as their balloons popped. And bands played on, heroically. Totally fabulous.

To add to all that I have been in the news several times due to my connection with Mark Latham, leader of the Labor Party. I am his Read Aloud Ambassador. Being in the news isn’t all good, all of the time. It can be nasty and brutal as well as fascinating and pleasing. But I’m not my parents’ daughter for nothing. I am old enough and tough enough to handle whatever comes my way. Humour is a great way of dealing with vile people, I have found.

The sad thing for me is that reading aloud to children is being politicised in this country. Good grief. It’s good for all of us, and for all our children! Who cares how parents vote? I don’t! I just want them to read aloud to their children from 0-5, for ten minutes a day, every day, to experience the complete delight of being their darlings and laughing with them and hugging them and getting to know them as they read together.

I am off to the USA again this weekend for the International Reading Conference (18,000 delegates!) in Reno, Nevada. Then to the Children’s Literature Matters conference at Penn State University which sounds wonderful. I’ll have the chance for once to hear other authors speak, as well as speaking myself.

When I come home on May 11th Where Is The Green Sheep? will have been in the shops in Australia for a whole day. I have been dying for this moment to come. I haven’t had a new book out for two years. The Green Sheep has been out in North America for a couple of weeks and I’ve already had ecstatic e-mails about it from the US and Canada. (Thanks, Pat and Franki!)

I won’t mention world events. I wouldn’t want to depress or enrage anyone!

I hope that whoever you are, wherever you are, you are safe and happy, and you are treating everyone in your world as you would have them treat you.

Much love again
Mem Fox xxx