Upbeat magazine marks coming of age

POSITIVE Words magazine has been giving creative writers across the country a platform for their work every month since 2002.

Heathcote-based founder and editor Sandra James said she was leading several writing groups when she established the magazine.

“Everyone was saying it’s so hard to get published,” she said. “Back then you couldn’t just post what you had written on the internet easily.

“I’d read about a couple who had started a literary magazine years before that, and I thought why don’t I?”

After several of her friends had encouraged her to give it a go, James set about setting up Positive Words.

“I thought it would be great to give everyone the opportunity to be published because everyone deserves a voice and not everyone’s going to write the next Stephen King novel.

“I think I would have backed out except that everyone was so enthusiastic and told to me go for it.

“One friend said you’re turning a negative into a positive, so it became Positive Words.

“It would be 21 years since I started preparing everything for the first issue which came out in November 2002.

“It’s never made any money, but everyone enjoys it.”

James is also helping budding local writers via the Heathcote Writers Playgroup that meets Tuesday afternoons at the community house.

She said the group started in late 2018 and was still going strong despite being slowed down by COVID restrictions.

“It’s $5 a week, I wanted to keep it as low as possible because that means everybody’s got access,” she said. “I was a single mum with four kids, so I know what it’s like.”

James said she had wanted to be a writer since she was a child.

“I was reading Enid Blyton and all the usual children’s things,” she said. “I wanted to be Jo March in Little Women and Anne in Anne of Green Gables.

“When I left school, a cadetship came up at our local newspaper in Gippsland and I started there, and I’ve been writing ever since.”

With a journalism career was curtailed by her first pregnancy, James needed to refocus her creative output.

“City journalists had maternity leave, but we didn’t,” she said. “Times have changed.

“I never stopped writing, mostly scribbling, doing bits and pieces in the early days.

“I used to love writing to New Idea, but I was shy then and I didn’t use my real name.

“Over the years I’ve had several things published, Woman’s Day used to do fiction and I kept submitting short stories until finally I got one accepted which was just magic.

“I did a few that way and they paid quite handsomely.”

Along with Positive Words James has recently published My Muse Wears a Purple Collar, a collection of flash fiction. She is also a poet despite an early setback.

“My grade six teacher told me my poetry wasn’t very good, and I didn’t write poems again until nearly 30 years ago when I joined my first writing group,” she said.

“But I have won lots of prizes since.”