Meet David Riley

We recently connected with David Riley and have shared our conversation below.

Hi David, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

I was teaching English and Drama at Tangaroa College, a high school in Ōtara, South Auckland. The majority of the young people I worked with were Māori and Pasifika. I couldn’t find books about people and topics that my students wanted to read about, especially books that celebrated their backgrounds. It’s a great need because we want our Pacific young people to read more so their literacy levels are as good as anyone else’s. So we need to have literature they want to read and can connect with. Stories of inspirational role models also help them visualise what can be, the potential that exists for them to do the same things everyone else can do, to dream widely because they see people from the same backgrounds as them doing amazing things in lots of fields and at world class level. The literature is also important to counter stereotypes and narratives so often used by others to portray our Pacific young people and label them in negative ways.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I was lucky to grow up around books – my parents both read, and my mum bought us lots of books. One series I remember was called New Zealand’s Heritage, a series of 21 books about New Zealand history. The books lay around home and every now and then when I was bored I would read a bit of one. I’d read about Sir Edmund Hilary, then Kate Sheppard, then Dr Maui Pomare.
Over time, reading these books developed in me a feeling of pride in being a Kiwi. These New Zealanders did amazing things, sometimes world-first things. Maybe I could do good things too, even though I came from an ordinary family in Mangere, South Auckland.
When I became a teacher, I was inspired by Alan Duff’s Maori Heroes book and I gave my students a project to research a hero from their own culture. One of the sources of info they had to use was a book. After class, two Niuean students said, “Sir, we don’t know any books that have Niuean heroes, can we just choose someone from the Maori Heroes book?”
They had no problems finding stories in other forms. Pacific stories are commonly shared verbally by grandparents and parents, in music and dance, and in visual art forms like tatau and carving. But they needed a book as well for this project.
I knew there was a lot of academic material drawing on Pacific stories, culture and history from my time studying Social Anthropology at university. But we couldn’t find written material that was targeted towards young people, especially teenagers.
So that’s where I started – I began my research so I could help my students. The goal was to collect stories of achievement and inspiration featuring people with Niuean ancestry. That’s how my first book, We Are the Rock, came about. I remember a Niuean student from Mangere College telling me that she got a Merit for an assignment after using my book for her research. I was so happy about that because now there is a written resource young people can access.
Since then I’ve written Samoan Heroes, Tongan Heroes, Cook Islands Heroes and I’m about to publish Tokelau Heroes.
These books reinforce to our young people the same messages that their families and teachers are giving them – great people come from where we come from. Maybe I can do great things too. Sometimes the media will present images of who we are that are negative. Here in these books are who we really are!
A year 10 Tongan boy wrote to me: “Dear David, thank you for giving us your inspirational book to read and have. You have made my life change. You have made me a better person than I was before.”

Being a Drama teacher, one of the things I love to do is take my daughters to children’s’ theatre shows. We’ve seen all the usual classic European stories like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Jack and the Beanstalk.
But I think it’s important for Pacific children to see stories from their cultures, their heroes, on stage as well. So I got my classes to begin making children’s theatre shows based on Pacific heroes like Laufoli, a mighty Niuean superhero! We worked with a professional director and we performed it at the Vodafone Events Centre in Manukau, for primary children.
When Pacific children see their own stories on stage, it fills them with pride, to know their stories and heroes have just as much worth as the stories from other cultures.
And what is so exciting is when young people use books, plays and stories like these as a spring board to do their own storytelling about the heroes in their lives. In 2018 the Cook Islands Ministry of Education ran a writing competition based on my book, Cook Islands Heroes.
Year 7-13 young people from throughout the Cooks wrote their own hero stories and the winners were presented with awards and had their work published in a little book they also called Cook Islands Heroes.
One of the winning entries is called “My Heroine” and reading it had my wife and I in tears – the writer’s hero is her mum who gave birth to her at a young age despite pressure to have an abortion. “My home has a shine to it because of her positive mind,” she wrote of her mum.
I wonder how many times this girl’s mum will have her own feelings of self-doubt but find immense encouragement from these words written by her daughter. Words are powerful. Stories are powerful. They help us visualize a life we might never have known we could live.
Joy Cowley wrote about this power in her memoir, Navigation. When Joy and her siblings read and told stories to each other as children, she says, “we became brave, adventurous characters who could overcome all evil. When a witch locked us in a castle, we unpicked the lock with a safety pin. When she raced after us, hurling thunderbolts, we jumped on the back of a dragon and flew away. There was nothing we couldn’t do … In these stories three powerless children found a way to remake their lives.”
This is the power of reading, writing and storytelling. Now I work with a lot of children and community groups helping them to write and independently publish their own stories so they own the content and everything around it. This is to help grow young Pasifika writers.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

1. Humility
Often I’m working with stories and people from cultures different to my own and it’s important that I have a humble attitude and be willing to listen and learn. In Māori culture there’s a concept called Tuakana-Teina (older sibling-younger sibling) and is about showing deference to the older sibling. I’m the teina (younger sibling) whenever I’m working with people from different cultures on material about and from their cultures and I must listen, and defer to them.

2. Curiosity
Be interested in people and excited to learn, to research and find out new things and be willing to explore new pathways that might open up as you find out things. This includes exploring new technologies.

3. Love
I believe the most important quality needed to be a writer is to love writing, storytelling, and sharing stories in this form. I’ve met people who asked me for advice on how to be a writer but often I felt they were in love with the idea of being a writer, or with the thought of making what they think will be easy money making children’s books and putting them on Amazon for example. I haven’t seen any of them follow through with it. I think that’s because they soon find out this is hard work and not rewarding financially! There are many times when I’ve needed to have perseverance and resilience, to continue “showing up”, day after day, when no one sees, and there’s not much reward coming back and if I didn’t love this then what would keep me going?

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

The biggest area of growth for me recently has been understanding how to use digital technologies with the children I work with. I’ve been learning how we can use AI to create art and music to enhance story writing, as well as some of the things we need to watch out for when using AI.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://readingwarrior.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidrileynz/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DavidRileyNZ/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidRileyNZ