Listen this Monday 10.45

The Blue is on radio starting this Monday. Go here to hear it as it goes to air and you can download it for your ipod, too, I'm sure. Just press the little headphones on the left of the Radio NZ web page.

It's on Radio NZ's National Programme every morning at 10.45 am from Monday 17 November until Friday 5 December which sounds epic to me. And one of those days I'm doing a book review in the usual 10.30 slot, so I can sit in the studio afterwards and hear it in glorious surround sound. How cool is that?

The Blue runs for 15 episodes and has been adapted by Frances Edmond into a play for three voices with Jane Waddell producing, and featuring Judith Gibson, Tim Gordon and Denise O'Connell. Which is terribly exciting and nerve-wracking all at once.

Here's the write-up:

Book Readings for week commencing Monday 17 November 2008
The Blue by Mary McCallum
The Blue is the wild windswept story of a small community of whaling families. It’s set on a remote Island in Tory Channel in 1938. It’s a tale of family disharmony, infidelity, teenage rage, death - loss – all blowing through the cracks of domesticity, the sewing, the chooks, the home schooling – like a bitter but barely mentioned southerly.
Published by Penguin
ISBN: 978 1 877361 99 9
Episode 1 of 15

The photo on this post is off the Radio NZ website showing a keen listener out in his kayak. It could be in Tory Channel even. It could even be The Friar madly updated, complete with his dog Smiler. Anything is possible.

And I read a short story today at the Massey Writers Read series mentioned in my last post. This is astonishing to me because I have never read a short story to an audience before, and because this particular story is, for me, an extravagant experiment with voice.

The main character is an older sexually-repressed male university lecturer and he's stuck in a stairwell with a female student.... I was very worried about how it would come across with a female reading but actor Michele Amas, who was also reading today, told me it was fine. She says a couple of sentences in - if you tell it right - people go with you. That's the confidence of an actor, I reckon. Some nice comments from a chap in the audience who believed in my male narrator, and from playwright Ken Duncum.

I did have Novel no. 2 with me to read from if I chickened out, but I told myself I was being ridiculous. The Stairwell (as it's called) was absolutely right for today as I wrote it between the two tutorials I taught at, it was triggered by an event at the university, fed by class discussions on 'voice', and is set at Massey!

It was a treat to be there, too, because I got to hear work in progress from Michele Amas, Ingrid Horrocks, Thom Conroy and Angie Farrow. The latter presented as a short play. All of it, terrific.

The Blue on air

I was called by Jane Waddell tonight. She is directing The Blue for Radio NZ National and wanted to check out the pronunciation of some of the words for the first recording on Tuesday. She told me the adaptation is for three voices - a narrator, Lilian and The Friar. She also told me the names of the actors but I didn't write them down.

Someone is going to be Lilian, someone else will be The Friar.

For a moment this is exciting, terrifying, inexplicably moving.

Two characters I know better than many people will be given a human voice. How will that be? What if the voices are not what I imagined them to be? Will Lilian and the Friar develop unexpected characteristics? Will they act differently without my hands on the reins?

This must be how authors feel when their books are made into movies. Then again, I tell myself, surely every time someone opens a book and reads, another version of it is created in the reader's head that the author can't control anyway. No two readers will 'hear' Lilian's voice the same way. So a radio version of The Blue is simply another - more public - version which listeners will 'adapt' to suit themselves. (Or that's what I keep telling myself. The thing is I don't often see the other Lilians people have imagined, although sometimes they tell me about them: there is much that is familiar, but there are some surprises too.)

A new audience for the book is marvellous, of course, and should lead to more sales, but hearing Lilian speak outside of the voice in my head is something else altogether. It will be close to miraculous - terribly moving - an ultimate act of the imagination.

To finish, the very funny Anne Enright (a hero of mine whom incidentally I had a chat with outside our hotel at the Auckland Writers' Festival) has been talking about the vulnerability of the writer in the face of the reader. Not someone reading at home in bed, or listening at the kitchen table, but the live reader. The sort who goes to festivals like Going West in Auckland this weekend.

Any of the writers performing up there could usefully read Enright's article for some terrific tips on what to do in this sort of situation ....

Performance is always a gift from the weak to the strong, and it is a transformative gift. Everyone feels better, you think, as the last lift and drop of your voice ekes out a final trembling trochee, as your head drops that humble half inch, as you pause and step back from the clatter of applause, surprised, overwhelmed, murmuring "Thank you. Thank you so much."

And then they turn up the house lights.

"Why are you so bitter?" says the woman in the front row, before they can fumble a mike across to her. She is sitting very straight. She seems to be wearing a hat with flowers and a pheasant in it, but of course she is not - that is just your imagination.