Gail Pittaway

• MA (Hons)
• DipTchng(Dist)
• TTC 

• Research archive, Gail Pittaway

Sadly, I am now semi-retired and only part-time, but I still get the joy of working with creative people as I now supervise Masters projects with a creative writing or communication focus for our school. As with my previous role of mostly teaching undergraduates, it's great to support students developing their voice and style in writing and generating original and arresting texts.

I love how versatile communication studies can be and the reach that takes in community, creative and transactional writing. It's been very exciting to assist students to create portfolios which include journalism, personal storytelling and industry focused work. My colleagues are inspiring, hardworking and committed people who make coming to the office a pleasure.

My ‘industry’ is education. I was a born teacher, and my academic strengths have been in studying and developing storytelling and generating storytelling techniques, especially through written and the spoken word.  I am most proud of the course I created called “Storytelling, Myth and Ritual’ which still runs as part of the degree offerings.

My media work is mostly based on reviews of books and theatre, occasionally opera productions. I review books regularly on Radio NZ’s Nine to Noon Programme and my theatre reviews mostly appear on Theatreview, New Zealand’s dedicated theatre website.

I write short stories, poetry and recently completed a creative writing doctoral thesis which involved an 80,000-word food memoir.

As an editor I am one of a team which takes turns to edit Meniscus, an open access, free online creative writing journal which is hosted by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs of which I have been a member since 2003. Meniscus

Some examples of my writing are in the research links above.