Celebrated author Pauline Cartwright has returned to her North Otago roots for her retirement. She shares with Ashley Smyth some of the wisdom she has gleaned from a lifetime of teaching, learning, and as the author of too many titles to count. Pauline Cartwright has been and always will be a writer. For as long as she can remember, she would put pen to paper at any opportunity. “If there was an opportunity to have a go at something in the writing field, I did … I used to write poems for the children’s pages, and things like that.” As a pupil at Weston School, and then Waitaki Girls’ High School, a young Pauline Webster was close friends with Elizabeth Flett, the daughter of well-known Mills and Boon author Essie Summers.