Iso Yawi
By ISO YAWI - PNG Attitude
God, My Country and Me by Iso Yawi, paperback, JDT Publications, May 2019. ISBN-10: 1071009486. Amazon Books, US$6.50 plus postage
LAE - I started penning short stories in small notebooks with no audience at all. It was my secret.
I was too shy to put my writing on platforms to be viewed by people, even fellow students and friends. My grammar was too bad.
My English language and literature exercise book was filled with red marks correcting my grammatical errors.
Yes, grammar was too complex for me to understand back in those high school days. However those red marks of correction motivated me.
I would say to myself, “I will write a book one day and turn things the other way around!”
After leaving school, I still wrote and also developed a reading habit. I realised that, to overcome my problem with grammar, I had to read a lot of books.
When I completed high school I had not received any offer to attend a tertiary institution. It was a good time to read. I went to the secondhand shop at ‘Value City’ in Eriku, Lae, and bought more than 30 books to read.
They included Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, Think Big and Gifted Hands by Ben Carson, The Talisman by Lynda La Plante, To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, The Firm, The Client, The Partner and The Innocent Man by John Grisham, Line of Vision by David B Ellis and a lot more.
This covered the two years, 2011 and 2012. In 2013 I got an offer to attend college so put my reading and writing largely to rest. With the higher volumes of lesson notes to read and digest at college, I still read but only one book a month.
In 2014, I left college and was unemployed again, so I started downloading PDFs of grammar lessons and some YouTube videos to help myself cure my grammar mistakes.
Then in September 2014 I read about the Crocodile Prize Anthology in The National newspaper. And by 2015 I was ready to submit my first entry - a poem – and it was published on PNG Attitude.
The poem was Tears for the Fly River.
It was my first poem written in black and white on a platform for public consumption. I was super excited.
I then submitted more entries for the Crocodile Prize. I was still unemployed so my time was uncommitted. Then, by the time the Crocodile Prize deadline came round in 2015, I had a job.
Reading PNG Attitude at her home in Sydney, Australia, Barbara Short saw sparks of talent in Tears for the Fly River and decided to help me with my raw literature work. She mentored me, helping polish my grammar and teaching me to consider the interests of readers as my prime objective.
When the 2015 Crocodile Prize Anthology came out, I was super excited to see most of my literary work published along with works of other Papua New Guinean writers.
I continued reading books, hard copy and PDFs, and Barbara continued to polish my writing. I also submitted entries to the Crocodile Prize literary competition in 2016 and 2017.
One evening in 2018 I was hanging off a B-mobile telecommunications tower at Watarais in the Markham Valley near the Highlands Highway, troubleshooting a faulty telecommunications link between Watarais and the Kassam Pass.
When I had restored the link, I had a call from writer Emmanuel Peni, who asked if it was safe to speak to me. With me firmly caged in my harness clinging to a 60-meter high tower, I replied “Yeah, sure! It’s safe.”
He then announced I was the winner of the 2017 national short story contest for The Fears and Foes of an Impoverished Primary School Student.
I was shocked. I was 60 meters high and over-excited. I ended the call before Emmanuel said anything more, climbed down and returned his call.
Later I then went to Port Moresby to collected the winner’s certificate, trophy and prize. This lifted my spirit and motivated me to compile 20 of my short stories into a book and so publish my first collection of short stories, God My Country and Me.
The settings are Papua New Guinean - schools, the jungle, small towns, tiny villages.
Many of the stories have been previously published in PNG Attitude and in the Crocodile Prize Anthology.
In my quest to publish my first book, two special people helped me: editor Barbara Short and publisher Jordan Dean of JDT Publications.
I also thank Keith Jackson and Phil Fitzgerald, who published most of my works on PNG Attitudewhich gave me courage and motivated me to share my literary works.
I have been able to order only 15 printed copies of God, My Country and Me. But you can also order it from Amazon Books.
Go to this link for more: https://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/2019/07/quite-a-journey-from-secret-diaries-to-first-published-book.html
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