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Former Dunedin poet Cilla McQueen shared thoughts on her life as a poet and teacher with about 300 English teachers yesterday.
She was one of four keynote speakers at the New Zealand Association for the Teaching of English conference, held at St Hilda's Collegiate over the past three days.
Her talk included readings from Axis and Soundings and tales of how her passion for writing developed.
There was little focus on creative writing when she was at school, but she would fill exercise books, cut in half, with stories, mostly about "horses and skiing".
"In secondary school, it was mainly essay writing I enjoyed," she said.
Her work was first published in the 1970s, the same decade she started a journal which "intensified this self-propelled writing".
McQueen followed her parents into the teaching profession and, as a language teacher, enjoyed "getting through to students".
Teachers engaged with their pupils, enabling them to understand increasingly difficult concepts, she said.
Language was "everywhere in the world", helped us make sense of it, and was, therefore, an "integral part of our existence".
The better grasp a writer had on language, the better they were able to convey and interpret creative thought.
She also believed it was important for pupils to read aloud, especially in this technology-driven age, to gain a greater understanding of the speech patterns of a language, and comprehension of writers such as Shakespeare.