Well known children’s writer, Janet Lunn of Hillier, has taken on a new role as chairman of the Writer’s Union of Canada.

It will be the first time that a children’s writer is chairman, and will mean Mrs. Lunn’s current book and another she has already started (in her mind at least), will be on the back burner for the next year.

Dividing her time between her 130-year-old farmhouse at Hillier and an apartment in Toronto where she works, keeps the world of writing at her fingertips.

First and foremost on Mrs. Lunn’s list of priorities with the writer’s union is her driving ambition to make the public aware of the fact that writers are important for what she calls “our sense of ourselves as Canadians.”

The campaign to help writers financially is being called the battle for payment for public use. Writers subsidize places like libraries, the government doesn’t, she explained.

Once a book is sold to a library, the writer receives no more compensation. It can be read and reread by anyone making use of the facility.

The average salary of a writer in Canada is $5,000 annually, she points out. “We get 10 cents on every $10 when we sell a book,” she explained.

Writers today can’t live on what they earn, she said. Their alternatives are to either work at two jobs, one with a guaranteed regular income, or to gain support from a spouse who is earning a salary.

“People seem to think writers are glamorous and rich,” said Mrs. Lunn with a smile.

In the short term the people who are revered are the rich, but in the long term “the people we remember are the great artists,” said Mrs. Lunn.

For Mrs. Lunn, writing is work, not a hobby. She has written four books. In addition to The Twelve Dancing Princesses and The Root Cellar, she has written Double Spell (a mystery) and Larger Than Life (a history).