ONE July evening this summer, I was on a Croatian island with my partner, peering at the ferry timetable and trying to work out if we would manage to get back to Dubrovnik and our hotel that night. My attempts to make sense of the timetable were interrupted by an unexpected phone call from England, from Katie Waldegrave, at First Story.

"Are you still interested in the job in Nottingham?" she asked. Right then I was thinking of anything but England and jobs, but of course I was still interested.

First Story is a charity that arranges and pays for acclaimed authors to be writers in residence in challenging state schools across the country and they were planning to start up in Nottingham.

If only First Story had existed when I was growing up in Mansfield in the 1970s and 80s. Back then, my sole ambition was to be a novelist and I was always trying to write – from fairy stories, adventures where the glamorous girls caught the baddies, to tales of teenage angst and first love. The only trouble was, I never managed to finish any of them.

So I decided that the best thing to do was study the finished article, and I went to Hull University to study English literature and language.

Despite having a great time there, I didn't really become a part of the literary world – the poet Philip Larkin was a librarian at the university but I never once spotted him in my three years. I still had some literary ambitions though and was set on becoming an editor at a publishing company.

The university careers advice service had very different ideas, telling me that was far too competitive and that I should become a civil servant, exactly the job I didn't want!

Luckily I ignored their advice and got a job as assistant editor at Clio Press, a small publishing company in Oxford.

I felt that my life was all mapped out then. But Oxford had a sting in its tail: everyone else had learned Latin and was fluent in a few foreign languages and arcane facts, such as the difference between baroque and rococo. My boyfriend was married to his work and I discovered that publishing was a great job but it didn't pay.

I needed a change of scenery and so went to Spain to teach English. Living abroad was a fantastic experience that I'd love to repeat, but I could see the advantages of home.

When I left Mansfield, I never imagined I'd live in Notts again but travelling made me realise how well Nottingham compares with other cities, and I moved here in the early nineties.

I spent a very enjoyable and productive seven years at Nottingham Trent University as publications editor in the marketing team. We were based in a beautiful listed building in Clarendon Street where, situated at the top of a four-storey house, I had lots of exercise running up and down stairs to talk to the designers or the schools liaison team. I had the perfect excuse not to join a gym.

I would have stayed at NTU but I'd always had a nagging feeling that I should do more studying, so I did a PhD on cinema-going in 1930s Nottingham at the University of Nottingham.

There were 50-plus cinemas in the city then, and cinema etiquette was very different – it wasn't unusual to eat a full fish supper while watching the film. As a mature student, I also worked in widening participation, encouraging under-represented groups to go to university. After my doctorate, I did that full time, working with school students in the Nottingham area who wanted to study medicine or health science.

Working for First Story is a natural progression from that role and it fits well with my other post as web and communications manager at the National College; in fact, education, communication and books are the threads running through my career.

First Story gives groups of secondary school students the opportunity to develop their creativity and literary skills by working with respected writers in weekly writing workshops.

The first workshops have just started at Ellis Guilford School, Nottingham Academy and Nottingham University Samworth Academy.

Running the First Story East Midlands programme is incredibly rewarding and enjoyable; I'm so glad I took that call whilst stranded on the Croatian island. Oh, and thanks to a stroke of good fortune, we did get back to mainland Croatia before nightfall, but that's another story.