The first life on earth. A book by Me

The desire to curate content and share stories is strong

My first book was an adventurous tome, not a story about goblins or spiders, no Teletubbies or Tank Engines, no, my first book was no less than the story of how Life came about on Earth. Don’t let my crayon skills fool you: this was a comprehensive study of dinosaurs, volcanos and erratic grammar.

The desire to tell stories is embedded in us young: from bedtime stories if we are good through to the stories we make up when we are late. Storytelling sits at the heart of our oral and visual culture.

Storytelling is about finding coherence, about curating content from it’s natural habitat of disorder into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

It’s a skill that we start off with young, but refine through our lives.

Today, technology has moved on, indeed, the whole publishing industry has morphed beyond all recognition. Funnily enough, when i made this book as a young child, i was emulating the structure and shape of books that i found on the shelves of my bedroom, but i had no real prospect of ever getting it published. Today though, the devices of consumption are devices of publication, and i could easily write a book from my bedroom and publish it myself. Ironic, i suppose, that my childhood book becomes part of my ongoing story of publication and writing.

‘The First Life On Earth‘, by Julian, was an act of curiosity: this being a key driver for learning. The materials i had at hand were paper and crayons, pencil and staples. Today, it’s more likely to be the iPad and keyboard, but the underlying curiosity remains unchanged. We are provoked into action, into learning, by our desire to uncover the hidden, to push back our knowledge, to enquire as to the meaning or history of something in our world.