Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

Margaret Mahy links her years as a librarian to the core of her creative practice. Librarianship did not simply surround her with books; it compelled a wider, more active kind of reading. A librarian reads across ages and genres, tracks patterns of taste, hears what delights or deters, and watches stories land in real time during read-alouds. For someone who was already an enthusiastic reader, that immersion becomes a laboratory. Intimacy with many voices, structures, and cadences strengthens the instincts that guide a writer’s choices about pacing, clarity, and surprise. Working with children especially sharpens a sense of rhythm and immediacy, because young listeners quickly reveal where a tale lags or sings.

Her claim that writing and reading are aspects of a single imaginative act highlights the reciprocity at the heart of storytelling. A writer imagines a world and sets down a path through it; a reader brings it to life again, completing the circuit with their own sensibility, memories, and attention. The page is a score, but the music happens in the mind. Reading trains the imagination to hold characters and places in view, to anticipate, to feel patterns; writing draws on the same faculties, only outward-facing, shaping those patterns for someone else to inhabit. In this sense author and reader collaborate across time, and a librarian stands at the hinge, curating the exchange and witnessing how imagination passes from shelf to mind and back again.

Mahy’s career — years in libraries before becoming a celebrated New Zealand author of children’s and young adult fiction — bears out this unity. Her stories often invite readers to co-create meaning, blending the everyday with the uncanny in ways that depend on an agile, playful imagination. The line is both craft advice and credo: read greedily, write generously, and treat both acts as one continuous exercise in making worlds shareable.