About the book Catch 32 tells the tale of Zach’s class of thirty-two 7-9 year-old children, with each chapter based on the story of a single child from the class. Woven into Zach’s memoirs are wider themes: about moving into a remote rural area; about managing relationships at home and about living a new life.
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About the author Zachary Green is the pseudonym of a local freelance author who has written over 20 published titles in a variety of genres. He has lived and worked in North Yorkshire for over 25 years, and taught in the Yorkshire Dales during the 1980s. The creative process Catch 32 was a joy to create because it involved writing about real experiences: true stories of humour, pathos and angst set against the backdrop of that magnificent landscape of wild hills and soft valleys. I found that once I started writing about an event from my past, even one over 20 years old, details soon came flooding back: writing concentrates the mind and helps to crystallise memories incredibly well – the process is almost therapeutic, in fact. The difficulty comes in knowing how much detail to include, what to leave out and who to focus on in terms of characters. The author’s personal connection with the subject matter adds a great richness but it can also blind a writer to important matters of form and style: you can become so wrapped up in the story that you lose the wider picture. I enjoyed writing this book because it’s light and entertaining, almost escapist in nature: it’s full of disasters and funny episodes, all true, and populated by outrageous characters who came into my life for a brief time as a teacher in a time before the computers and National Curriculum. For anyone planning to write a similar set of memoirs I would give the following tips: - Make notes of events as they happen – it is amazing what you’ll forget otherwise
- Knit your episodes together with a central theme so that it doesn’t just become a collection of short stories
- Don’t expect to get it right first time
- Try to get some unbiased feedback from someone you can trust
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