Ian Trafford
Writer , Photographer
Biography
Writing and photographing for Learning Media took a long time coming. When I was a kid, my mum awoke at 5.00am to start the washing. I was one of five boys and into everything. My dirty clothes revealed a life of mud, dirt, eels, paossums, dam building, and a boys-own farm life of mischief and mayhem.
Just as soon as the New Zealand Government allowed, I had my cyanide poison license, my drivers license, and my gun license. (Around 15 or 16 years old in those days.) I sold lemons to soft drink companies, pigs' ear fungus to Chinese dairy owners, live eels to an eel exporter. Then there were the possum skins, the scrap metal, and the recycled bottles spied from the school bus window and collected on my one-speed bike after school. Oh man – the washing pile!
It was smack-bang in the middle of the long-hair era, and my Dad loved his barber. His barber loved me and my brothers, too. Every month we somehow earned a short back and sides haircut thank-you-very-much-sir.
When I was 18, my good parents deposited me from the farm station wagon onto the forecourt of Palmerston North Teachers College. “Trafford” and “traffic light” sound different to my ear, but obviously not to the classes of guinea pig children I was sent to practice my teaching technique upon.
In my 20s, I grew my hair long. In my 30s, I grew dreadlocks. Despite the effort of hair growing, I managed two years of teaching impulsive and inspiring primary school children (really! – the inspiring bit, I mean). I loved the characters. Then I left to start a whitewater rafting and a sea kayaking company. After selling the companies, I went on to design and tutor the Adventure Tourism programme at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. Thankfully, adult students were just bigger versions of kids.
I love words – but I am the world's worst at paper work.
Words always tumbled around me and within me, but they rarely touched paper. I read and dreamed. My fifth form English teacher granted good marks for my creative writing, but I figured she was being nice, and it was just a country school after all.
I have two grown children. My son reads and dreams. His writing is much better than mine. He is now qualified to be a scientist. I hope he discovers a cure for the genetic paperwork phobia so that others get to read his writing.
I have to wash my own clothes now. My love for adventures and words never wane.
Learning Media have published my true stories about real people's journeys and adventures. My stories for the School Journal Story Library are about whales and whalers, waka, stockcars, truck driving, Outward Bound, Sailing on the Spirit of New Zealand, pig hunting, and taiaha training on a sacred island. I am often a participant on someone else's journey now. I owe a lot to the generous spirits of these people.
I have photographed for lots of other Learning Media stories. Big-hearted people I know also employ me to photograph kitesurfers, endurance adventure racers, outdoor activities, and remote scenery in all sorts of places on the planet. Sometimes with world champions, sometimes not.
I still clearly remember the two creative essays I wrote for my first national school exams at fifteen.
I still don't know my prepositions from my antipasto. (And I need more jobs, or a manager. Must get onto my paperwork and my advertising.)
If you want to be a writer, keep dreaming and keep writing. Do lots. Think lots. Read lots. Observe lots. Don't worry about your neighbour with the flash car and house. Be rich with experience. You are a writer, whether you get published or not. Just be brave enough to write to 100 publishers in your spare time.