The Lost Parcel by Annie Try

It was the first present I bought, the first to be wrapped and popped into a Jiffy bag ready to put on the address and take it to the Post Office. The first because the gift was for an ex-colleague who lives in Perth, not our nearby one in Scotland, but Perth in Western Australia.

The parcel sat on the end of my very long kitchen table for a few days, still with no address. Then I located the address book and went to pick up the present. But it wasn’t there.  This was several weeks ago and it has still not turned up, despite several huge hunts among Christmas wrapping paper, cards, ribbons and other wrapped presents. And more widely throughout the whole house. I’m hoping that writing this now will trigger something to help me find a new place to look in my hunt.

I was on the rota for Sunday school today. We usually have a clutch of pre-schoolers who attend. The first item on our timetable was to find sheep, so I hid them around the room at a suitable level to be discovered within the short timeframe of the game. No pre-schoolers turned up, but a visiting 9 year old wanted to come out of the service so she and the other teacher gamefully hunted for the balls of cotton wool with faces, remembering not to look too high. It was ironic to be part of a hunting game when I had been ungainfully hunting for a Jiffy bag for weeks.

But there’s a plus. In the same way that our visitor focussed completely on trying to hunt down faux sheep, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my friend and how she would have smiled at the little bit of English Arts and Crafts she would have had for Christmas in the guise of a William Morris tea towel and a similarly decorated cardholder. This led me on to memories of when we submitted our first book together, being incredibly sure that it was just exactly what every child psychologist needed. And we were right, receiving not one, but two offers of publication. We wrote three more books together, they were published in other languages and we still receive a trickle of royalties 27 years later. 

I wonder what would happen if we had the same confidence in something we wrote today, without having been previously published? Our first publisher was The British Psychological Society - they no longer publish books. Our books - full of resources for working therapeutically with children -  were training others from our combined experience of encountering children too traumatised, anxious or obstinate to benefit from traditional talking therapy. Or who simply thought differently, perhaps due to a condition such as attention deficit disorder or autism. There is still a need for different approaches to therapy - or to anything - but will publishers still be able to take the risk with relatively unknown writers? 

It is very difficult to become a mainstream author of fiction these days, unless one is a celebrity. Is this happening with innovative texts in the non-fiction world, too?  If so, we are in danger of losing something much, much more important than a Jiffy bag of little Christmas presents.  

‘Annie Try’ is the name used by Angela Hobday for fiction writing. With an MA in creative writing, she loves to speak to small groups and large. She has recently set up a new monthly local writing group, Wereham Writers, which includes absolute beginners and more experienced writers. The response to this has been overwhelming.