Hannah’s Story
Hannah hated high school in small, quiet ways that really added up. The long walk up the school driveway created a sinking feeling in her stomach and a rising tightness in her chest. The dread really was not worth it. The constricting in her chest when she saw groups huddled at lockers made her feel like she couldn’t breathe. The ways conversations dipped when she walked past: the new girl. The flicker of another student’s eyes that seemed to say, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ She never knew how to explain what was wrong, because everything was falling apart. You can’t put that in words.
At home, Hannah moved through the mornings with dread. The kettle whistling. The smell of toast that was just beginning to burn because she was helping Dad button his shirt. His fingers didn’t listen to him anymore. ‘Leave it’, he’d mutter, embarrassed. ‘It’s fine’, she’d say, doing up each button. One. Two. Three. She knew the schedule of his carer’s visits better than she knew her school timetable. She knew which days were bad, and more and more he couldn’t get out of bed. The house always felt thick with something unspoken. The rising panic of his illness silently creeping through their life. By the time she reached school, Hannah felt like she had already lived a full day. And still, she was expected to sit still. To listen. To care about quizzes and lunchtime gossip. Every molecule of her being wanted to run away. She felt like a ghost moving through fluorescent corridors. The teachers thought she was distant. Moody. Anti-social. They didn’t see the exhaustion tucked beneath her ribs. The constant low hum of worry. Most days, as the bell rang for third period, something inside her would snap. A quiet, decisive no. Instead of turning towards the school block, she’d slip down through the dry creek running out the back of the school, heart racing, not with rebellion, but relief. The bus, the traffic, city air felt wider. Kinder. She was anonymous and free with no responsibility for a few hours.
There was an abandoned building near the edge of town, cracked brick and shattered windows. The roof sagged like it was tired. Weeds clawed their way through the pavement. No one went there. Which meant it belonged to Hannah on her afternoons in town.
Hannah would drag her paint-splattered backpack inside, dust swirling in beams of light that fell through broken panes. The air smelled of rust and damp concrete. At first, her hands would tremble, from fear of being caught, from the leftover tension of school, but the moment the colour touched the wall, something in her chest loosened. She painted girls with ribcages being turned into violins, becoming swans, riding away dressed as men: stories from her father’s songs. She made murals of doors swinging open. She painted fathers made of glass, light shining through their many cracks. She painted enormous skies breaking through ceilings. The brush against the brick was steady. Certain. She didn’t feel judged. Her feelings had somewhere to go. Anger became thick, red strokes. Fear became thin blue lines threading through everything. When she painted, she wasn’t the strange girl. She wasn’t the carer. She wasn’t the one who left early. She was just … Alive.
The day she was discovered, Hannah’s stomach dropped so hard she thought she might faint.
She had been halfway up a shaky ladder, adding delicate white cracks to the wings of a painted figure, when she heard heels clicking against concrete. Sharp. Measured. Unmistakable. She turned. Standing in the doorway was Ms Devereaux. Her drama teacher. She looked wildly out of place among the rubble. Ms Devereaux always appeared like a cartoon character: sharp lines, leather skirt, crisp blouse, pencil-thin eyebrows arched like careful brushstrokes, red lipstick so precise it seemed drawn on with a ruler. Not a hair out of place. Her eyes moved slowly over the mural. Up. Across. Taking in every detail. Hannah’s mouth went dry.
She imagined the phone call home. The disappointment. The word truancy stamped across her record like a bruise. Again. Another school that was going to ask her to leave. Instead, Ms Devereaux tilted her head. ‘Well’, she said coolly, folding her arms. ‘That explains a great deal.’ Hannah climbed down, pulse roaring in her ears. Ms Devereaux stepped closer to the wall. Her red lips curved not into a smile exactly, but something softer. ‘You have great potential, Hannah’, she said quietly. ‘And you’ve had nowhere to put it.’ Hannah stared at the cracked floor. Ms Devereaux glanced around the ruined building. ‘This’, she said, gesturing at the mural, ‘is not vandalism. It’s vision. Though I would strongly prefer it not involve skipping my classes.’ Despite herself, Hannah let out a shaky breath of something almost like a laugh.
‘We’re staging “The Importance of Being Earnest” for the Year 12 major production’, Ms Devereaux continued. ‘I need a stage designer. Someone who understands what sits beneath polite surfaces.’ Her pencil-thin eyebrows lifted. ‘You, Hannah, understand that very well.’
The theatre was not that different from the warehouse. It was dusty, and dark, and quiet, but intentional. The stage was empty and expectant, not abandoned. The curtains were deep burgundy velvet, heavy, dusty and dramatic. Lights hung overhead like watchful stars. At first, Hannah hovered at the edges. The cast were loud, confident, attractive, brimming with insider jokes. Of course they were. She felt the old tightness return, that familiar sense of being slightly out of focus in everyone else’s world. But then she stood alone on the stage one afternoon, script in hand, and read the play properly.
“The Importance of Being Earnest” was a comedy, but beneath the wit was something sharp. Everyone is pretending. Everyone is performing versions of themselves. Double names. Double lives. Hannah understood that intimately.
She designed tall, elegant Victorian panels, cream and gold with peacocks, and she made them slightly distorted. The doorframes leaned just a fraction. The painted wallpaper patterns didn’t quite align. Perfection unsettled. Behind each pristine wall, she painted hidden layers: wild gardens clawing upward, cracks splitting porcelain surfaces, constellations bleeding through polite drawing rooms. During rehearsals, while actors delivered clever lines, Hannah painted in silence under warm stage lights. Her fingers were smudged with colour. Her cheeks streaked with accidental gold. People came to her with questions. ‘Does this look right?’ ‘Where should I stand?’ ‘Can we move this piece?’ The tightness in her chest began to ease. Her creativity, once squeezed into stolen afternoons, was expanding. It stretched across flats and backdrops, climbed ladders, spilled into lighting discussions. It had space. In the years that followed, Hannah would always remember that creativity saved her not by changing her life, but by giving her a space big enough for her heart to breathe.
Vital Arts
Hannah’ Story comes from the Preface of our new book – “Youth Arts: Creative Production and Skills for Work” – co-authored by/with Anna Hickey Moody, Sophie Hartley, Tammy Wong Hulbert, Scott Brook, Rimi Khan and Christen Cornell. Hannah is a character based on a real person and real life experiences, and her fictionalised story, like the others throughout the book, was written by my colleague Anna Hickey-Moody.
The book – which is freely available via Open Access – emerges from the work we have been doing over the last four years on an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Linkage project the official title of which is, “Creative industries pathways to youth employment in the COVID-19 recession”, but which elsewhere we call the “Vital Arts” project.
The “Vital Arts” project has been concerned with identifying, and finding innovative ways to credential, a number of what we have called 21st century skills that young people develop, not necessarily explicitly, through their various forms of participation in the creative practices of youth-based arts organisations and their programs.
The project was framed by the argument that youth arts programs don’t just build artistic talent, they grow the skills young people need to thrive in a fast-changing and AI-driven world.
These skills are transferable, preparing young people not only for creative industries, but also for education, employment and civic life. Vital Arts has developed a model to formally recognise these skills through micro-credentials, giving participants real, portable evidence of their achievements (see here for more detail about the project, its partners, and the micro-credential we have developed through the work of the project – https://vital-arts.org)
In the book we write for youth workers, educators, creative industries professionals: for people who work with young people who can’t stop moving, who like making things, who answer back and question. This book is for the rare adults who care about the kids that spend afternoons sketching in the margins of exercise books, rearranging sounds into songs or moving their bodies into rhythms that don’t fit the school bell. We see you.
Growing up as a creative child often means learning that your ways of knowing and doing are not recognised. The school classroom rewards rote learning, neat handwriting and ‘the right answers’ more than the ability to imagine otherwise, to do and to question. The school yard can feel like a place where creativity is eccentric at best, suspect at worst. The world of exams, test scores and classroom noise rarely makes space for the quiet determination of kids who need to tinker, shape, perform and invent.
The work of the project, and of the book, is underpinned by the strong sense that creativity is a form of intelligence that can shape resilience, problem solving and generates joy. It is the way that communities survive, how stories endure and how cultures grow. Creativity is also a way of making sense of who we are, especially when the world around us is often confusing, heavy or unjust.
This book is written in recognition of the young people whose gifts were overlooked, dismissed or undervalued at school, not because they lacked talent or persistence but because the systems around them didn’t yet know how to measure what they had to offer. It is also a celebration: of imagination, of doing things differently, making it against the odds and of the value that comes from following the impulse to create, even when nobody is watching.
Our hope is that the book, and the project that it emerges from, help to remind us all that being creative is not a side-note to life but one of its most profound expressions.
Hickey-Moody, A., Hartley, S., Kelly, P., Wong Hulbert, T., Brook, S., Khan, R. and Cornell, C. (2026) “Youth Arts: Creative Production and Skills for Work”, Policy Press, Bristol. https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/youth-arts