Image Credits:
Many thanks to Jenny Sanders for supplying author, book, and other pictures. Other images have been created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. Some images are directly from Pixabay. Photos from the ACW Golden Jubilee weekend were taken by me, Allison Symes.
One of the great joys of the writing life is meeting and befriending other writers. You learn from each other. You talk with others who understand the drive to write and who have their fair share of the ups and downs of trying to get work published. Often you’ll come across the same writer in different ways and this is true for me with regard to Jenny Sanders, my interviewee.
Jenny and I are both members of the Association of Christian Writers. She came to my flash fiction workshop at the ACW Golden Jubilee weekend earlier this year held at The Hayes, Swanwick. She has been part of the ACW Flash Fiction Group I run once a month on Zoom.
She also writes for Mom’s Favorite Reads, contributes flash fiction pieces in response to my articles and monthly challenges for that magazine. So you could say the writing paths for Jenny and I criss-cross a fair bit!
Recently I discovered Jenny has links with Chandler’s Ford as well, yet another crossing point. With all those crossings, I thought we should have a chat here at CFT so Jenny can share something of her writing journey and her connections to our part of the world.
Over to you, Jenny.

Jenny, tell us something about yourself and your writing.
I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pencil, mostly thanks to my Dad’s love of books and the groaning shelves of my childhood home in Surrey. I went to an infant school (as it was then) where reading and writing were given priority, and I flew. Junior school provided great opportunities for creative writing in the 1970s because grammar wasn’t taught particularly well, but there was space for stories and poems.
Allison: Same era as me here. What I loved in English were the composition lessons where we could write our own stories.
Jenny, would you like to name some of your favourite authors from childhood and from now?
I enjoyed a wide range of writers. My family were great fans of Beatrix Potter, AA Milne, and Kenneth Grahame. Ladybird books were one of my first forays into independent reading – all those fairy tales and coloured illustrations on every page, so very manageable. I borrowed Bobby Brewster books from the library (H E Todd) which involved wall paper coming to life, I think.
I read the Jennings and Derbyshire books by Anthony Buckeridge. Like many people, Enid Blyton’s much maligned Famous Five books were probably the first ‘proper’ story books (not full of pictures) books that I read. My birthday and Christmas money was often spent on purchasing any that were missing in the set. Goodness knows where they are now. I moved on to demolish CS Lewis’s Narnia series soon after that.
Jenny, school and its attitude to reading and writing makes a huge difference. How did you get on at school?
I had two extremely good teachers who encouraged me. I was frequently chosen to read in assembly and landed the narrator’s parts in plays, much to my disappointment – I fancied playing a good villain (oxymoron intended!). We read books like Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner and The Otterbury Incident by Cecil Day-Lewis. I thought they were wonderful stories.
Allison: I remember Emil and the Detectives too. Great story.
I once wrote a narrative poem as a piece of classwork, based on a cross between Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Windy Nights and The Listeners by Walter de la Mare which garnered quite a lot of kudos as it was handed around the staffroom. That was a nice feeling. We also had a summer holiday challenge to write a story in chapters. I think I must have been channelling Enid Blyton when I wrote, The Bloodthirsty Adventure, complete with dripping dagger on the cover. I won a poetry competition on schools radio, which meant mine was read out on the Friday morning broadcast in 1976. That was very exciting.
Jenny, could you tell us more about schools radio? Can you tell us what poem won you the competition?
Gosh, it’s a long time ago! Our Friday assemblies consisted of the whole school sitting on the hall floor, listening to the schools radio programme. I can’t remember what it was called but it was in a service format. I know this was the Christmas edition because I remember the story set in Wales that was told during the broadcast.
My poem began Christmas is a time for giving, Easter time and birthday too. Lots of presents, lots of joy, coloured cards for me and you. Something like that. It certainly wasn’t Keats or Shakespeare!
Allison: I don’t recall schools radio. Every so often my school caretaker would wheel in a HUGE TV set on wheels into the assembly hall to watch a schools programme. Nobody but the caretaker was allowed to touch the TV!
Jenny, can you tell us about your life after school?
I always expected to become an English teacher and wrote at every opportunity, especially if there was a prize on offer! English remained my favourite subject throughout my school life and meant I wasn’t intimidated by having to write essays at A level or at University. I studied for a BA (Hons) in Drama, Theatre and Television in Winchester and that’s where my link with Chandlers Ford comes from. Quite a few of my car-owning friends had their accommodation there. I only had a bike and lodged in Kingsgate Street, in the city centre, which I loved.
Naturally we’re biased here at Chandler’s Ford Today but we think it is a great place to live. Presumably you often visited here? Do you recall which parts of Chandler’s Ford you visited?
I do remember going to what I thought of as an extremely sophisticated dinner party thrown by one of the drama students in the year above me. I’m still not sure how I qualified for an invitation. I’m sure I wasn’t cool enough for that posse. It ran to three courses which was wonderfully decadent to me who was living on cabbage and tomato sauce at the time, boosted with those dreadful tins of pilchards you open with a key. I tried to save as much money as possible so I could travel. The grand finalé of the banquet was frozen homemade orange ice cream served inside a hollowed out orange. I was dazzled!
Allison: Ah those were the days. A posh meal for me back then would have been something like steak at a Beefeater restaurant or, at home, something like gammon with pineapple on it followed by a pudding with Dream Topping on it.

Jenny, can you tell us about your career?
By this time I hoped to become a TV presenter. I had aspirations and an appetite to work on Blue Peter which I felt would give me access to a fantastic range of adventures. It was a challenge since all my family are medical so couldn’t give me any great tips or advice. I spent some time at TVS in Southampton, tailing the news teams and Fern Britton.
Allison: Many of us here will recall TVS and, before them, Southern Television.
Jenny, can you explain a bit more about what tailing here means? Did that mean you were going on air or were you an assistant to them?
I was firmly in the back ground (Equity and the NUJ wouldn’t have appreciated any more profile, though I did pretend to be a customer in one news reel they were trying to film), but I travelled to various locations with them. Remember Chris Peacock and Fred Dinenage? It was great fun, though quite an intimidating environment for me, but also a wonderful opportunity.
Allison: Many of us will remember those two very well indeed.
I discovered that there is something very invigorating about ringing someone, announcing you’re from a television company and launching into a bunch of questions. People fell over themselves to oblige. I did a lot of watching and asked a billion questions. I loved seeing how the journalists and presenters came alongside their interviewees, gleaned their specific story, filtered it and put it together on camera and then re-crafted it in the editing room.
You’ll notice how on all the regional news programmes, the final story is usually one which leaves you with a warm, fuzzy feeling. It will be something like the story of a rescued cat; a prize-winning marrow; a fund-raising project. Deliberately done. I’d be up in the director’s gallery when the programme was broadcast, hearing the director decide which camera they would go to next; seeing the videos lined up by the tech guys for the next story and guessing which story would be dropped if they ran out of time. There’s always one in reserve.
Allison: Wow! There is still a lot to be learned here from how to put stories together for the programme as a whole (putting stories for a collection is similar in that you’re looking for the good of the book as a whole) and why stories are chosen at all.

Conclusion
Many thanks for the first part of a fascinating interview, Jenny. Next week Jenny and I will explore what happened after Jenny’s life in television, discover how she ended up writing regularly for many years for the Andover Advertiser, and what she feels some of the joys and challenges of writing devotionals are. Plus we chat about Jenny’s fiction work, including humorous short stories, and how she got into flash fiction writing.
Related Posts:-
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
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Very lovely post, Allison! Truly enjoyed reading your interview with Jenny Sanders.
Many thanks, Sophia.