By Kayt Duncan
I have spent most of my career working with stories without actually writing, or for that matter, editing them.
My professional life started in film and television post-production at Channel 7 in the bowels of their Brisbane building known as Tapes. It was here junior linear tape operators cut their teeth on broadcast editing machines and made a name for themselves in the floors above, where producers sat around boardroom tables picking staff for the next big prime time television venture. Opportunities were vastly fewer than the eager young guns desperate to prove they had what it took to claim the prized role of “Editor” in a world where the label represented instinct for pacing, technical prowess and a head for storytelling. It was a launchpad into endless roles on countless productions worldwide. Fame, glory, wealth … OK, well, maybe that’s too dramatic.
Let’s say instead the difference between spelling and grammar checks on high school essays and structural editing for an international publisher. Career contentment. Ambition achieved.
Well, my name didn’t make it into the boardroom meeting I dreamed of. After upskilling at the turn of the century to move from broadcast television into online and digital videography, I moved through small business video production, live comedy and children’s entertainment, all while writing, performing and producing for live performance and video. I understood narrative. I understood audiences. What I had never really confronted was story in print.
During a career break raising children, I volunteered at Braille House in their Twin Vision children’s library. Something about making books accessible to children who could not see the story within the pictures of a picture book lit a fire I did not expect. Children with low or no vision face a profound imbalance of access to books in exactly the years when a love of reading takes root. The only way I knew how to respond was with story.
I began researching manuscript writing, illustration, typesetting and the accessibility challenges specific to braille and twin vision books. In 2019 I published my own twin vision picture book, Spotty Dotty, with Braille House’s support for their Braille Awareness program that I had helped produce. A path opened from there through the Children’s Book Council of Australia, the Queensland Writers Centre, and into my current role managing digital communications and content for Family Day Care Queensland. You can probably see the trend here – children!
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, an acquaintance connected with IPEd invited me to present to the Editors Queensland (EdsQ) branch on braille, Moon and twin vision books. I walked into that room as a nervous guest speaker. Not long after, I had joined as a member and accepted a vacancy on their Events team.
That decision got my name into a “boardroom meeting”.
I had learned through years of polishing my public speaking skills in Toastmasters, that the best growth does not happen in the audience; it happens when you put your hand up for the committee. What I had not yet learned was that the people handing out opportunities were not always walking the upstairs corridors. They were in the rooms I had just stepped into, and potentially the rooms I didn’t. Rooms in buildings everywhere. IPEd taught me this. The EdsQ Events team became, without any formal arrangement, one of the most effective mentor circles I have ever been part of.
Through organising speakers and programs, I met editors across every field and absorbed knowledge I would never have found in a course. I discovered I was genuinely accepted, not despite the gaps in my editorial background, but because of what my other experience could offer.
My involvement deepened from there. I joined the Accessibility Initiative Working Party, chaired by 2025 Janet Mackenzie Medal recipient Julie Ganner AE. Yeah, I felt like a fraud for most of it. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I stayed the course, contributed what I could and came out the other side with an entirely new level of respect for what editors do. What I can do.
Then came a moment that quietly shifted something in me. A mentor I hold in enormous regard, years deep in the industry, asked me for help with a client’s technical Word document issue. Not out of kindness. Because he knew I could solve it. That is not a small thing when you have spent years assuming your skills aren’t good enough to be considered, let alone noticed. Around the same time, I was selected for IPEd’s new Emerging Leaders Program. Someone in the organisation had noticed what I had always thought of as background contributions, research legwork, committee support – all the stuff junior tape editors do at the bottom of the building – and decided that had value worth developing. Gasp! My name got mentioned upstairs.
Professional fame, glory and wealth look completely different to me now than they did to the early-20s, fresh-out-of-uni dreamer. Still on the elusive side, because I still hesitate to call myself an editor as I sit safely in the stalls marked “Associate member”. It’s more recognition for what you can bring, passion included, and the respect granted to those who bring their A-game for the story, regardless of where they trained and in what medium.
Here is what I would say to anyone standing at the door of IPEd wondering whether they belong. Pay your membership, yes. Attend the presentations, absolutely. But if you really want to know what this organisation is made of and what it can do for you, answer a call for a committee role or volunteer for a working party and give something back.
The mentorship that follows is not incidental. It is the whole point. And it does not just get your name into the boardroom meeting. It gets you physically at the opportunity table, sooner than you think.