michael petherick

Author of 'Rhyme Ninja'

Hello!  I am the pencil drawing right next to these words.  The hands are Rātā’s.  She is my daughter.  Eleven year old girls can do anything.

I do all kinds of things – sing, write books, take photographs.  I really like rearranging pictures that other people have made.  I do it all at once, regardless of where I am.  The Rhyme Ninja poems were originally text messages that I sent to Susan (one of the editors of the Annual) to make her laugh.

She didn’t ask for them.  She actually asked for something else.  But I sent them to her anyway.

That’s the best way to create.  Do it wherever you are.  Write stuff on your phone while you are walking down the street.  Collaborate with your friends.  Mash it up, like the pencil drawing that Rātā did of a photo that I took of myself.

When I was eleven, we didn’t have many books.  So I read the same ones over and over again.  I must have read The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis fifty times.

I read comic books.  English ones like Whizzer and Chips, over and over.  And ones about war.  We loved reading about the war when I was a kid.

 And I wrote poems on anything I could find.  I would send them around the classroom, just like I did to Susan.  The teachers didn’t like that much, secret notes and kids giggling behind their desks.  If you do the same thing, make sure you don’t get caught.

If you like my poems, you can find me at mstuartpetherick.com