Food by Fiona Kidman (and other treats)

My friend and writer Fiona Kidman has a new website up and running. It's not your common and garden writer website, this one has all sorts of interesting stuff in there e.g. the places she writes - like the gorgeous desk pictured.

On the home page, you'll find the cover of an upcoming short story collection, and details about a fiction/memoir writing course, then how can you resist the 'Food File' with recipes Fiona's written about in her books or simply likes to make. She says,

'I am sometimes asked for the recipes my characters make and whether I have prepared them too. Yes, if my characters have made a dish I will have made it.'

I am tempted by the tomato soup, the zucchini slice and the oriental chew because the ingredients for those recipes are hanging about the kitchen at the moment (the zucchini is verging on a marrow in fact).

After relishing the food, I advise a sortie into the News file for Fiona's views on a cell phone tower in her backyard (a sobering story for us all), a photo of the street named after her, a photo of her grandson's wedding, the launch speech she gave for Sue Orr's (fab) book... and there's more...

Then there's the publications page, the 'About Fiona' page etc etc. Well worth a visit.

The webmaster is Jane Harris of Three Hats who also does the website for Randell Cottage which Fiona and I are both trustees for.

Coming up: Bougainville Book Fair Weekend & Randell Writers Residency Deadline

Ten thousand books on offer at the amazing Bougainville Book Fair this weekend in Wellington - many of them new donated by publishers, booksellers and authors - and for a great cause. 

And - authors, authors, authors gives us your projects! Randell Cottage, Thorndon, needs a NZ writer in there for six months from next April - lovely house, great stipend ($20k) and a terrific team to support you (I am a trustee).  

Tuesday Poem: Where the Night is Long

Where night is long

by Pat White

just at the point of darkness, but

upon which day you are no longer

certain, you will learn that making

poems is only one of the many things

just as each dog runs its own gait

- tail held for balance – so

and the trout faces upstream

gills opening, closing, opening; it is

the job of the current to supply food

just as it is the hawk’s task to soar and the mouse

to enter the house because the hawk’s shadow

has hovered over the path, a momentary dark

or the coming winter to test strength, try the will

of the aged to breathe another, another –

just as the stars are out there

giving their show for free, maybe

after the equinox and you can’t sleep

because of the wind’s tantrum performance

for the third day, when the dead are willing

to lie undisturbed leaving scattered leaves to rise

just for a moment you may even be

happy enough to be no more than you are

to let other creatures function as they might

your poem can let go, just one more firefly firelit story

up in smoke, another breath to breathe in sleep

against the odds, an offer arrives

Pat White is the new NZ writer at the Randell Cottage in Thorndon which is home to a NZ writer for six months of the year and a French writer for the remaining six months. This poem is in an unpublished collection of 100 poems that Pat has been working on, and is posted here with his permission. I like the way it sets off the vigorousness and 'thisness' of nature versus the stillness and 'otherness' of the poet. And I very much like the way a poem is 'one more firefly firelit story/up in smoke'


I am involved with Randell Cottage as a Trustee and Chair of the Friends committee, and so have been helping Pat settle in over the past few weeks. This has included helping him dig over a rather neglected flower bed, so he can plant some vegetables!

Pat, you see, is as much a man of the land as he is a man of the written word. Here's what we've put up on the Randell Cottage website about him:

Pat is a poet, essayist and artist whose work reflects his passion for the natural environment and an exploration of the way individuals relate to the land. His poetry collections are: Signposts (1977), Bushfall (1978),Cut Across the Grain (1980), Acts of Resistance(1985), Dark Backward (1994), Drought and Other Intimacies (1999), and Planting the Olives(2004). He has also published In Gallipoli: In search of a family story (Red Roofs, 2005). Pat lives in the rural Wairarapa near Wellington. In 2009, he completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters with a folio of essays entitled How the Land Lies. He was writer in residence at the Robert Lord Cottage in Dunedin 2009/10.  Pat will use the Randell Cottage residency to research and write a biography of West Coast writer, teacher and fellow environmentalist Peter Hooper (1919 – 1991). He says living in Thorndon will facilitate his research at the Turnbull Library and allow him easy access to papers in private hands.

Beads on a String - Kirsty Gunn's art of writing

I've read Rain again. Author Kirsty Gunn is in Wellington as writer-in-residence at the Randell Cottage - a NZer, she's returned home from the UK and Scotland to pursue a project centred on Katherine Mansfield - and it's been a pleasure to catch up with her and hear her speak about and read from her work, and talk about other writers and their work.

It made me want to read something of Kirsty's again. So I opened up Rain. The lyricism and tautness in this short novel makes re-reading - not something I usually do - a wonderful pleasure. It's like reading poetry: the skilled and lovely language transports you.

When I first knew Kirsty, she was a poet like me. We were the two youngest members of one of Bill Manhire's early Original Composition workshops. There seemed to be a bunch of older, more experienced writers there including Jean Watson who published Flowers from Happyever at the end of the course. Kirsty remembers us explaining away the 'things' we brought along with the phrase 'this is just an experiment.'

Kirsty's poetic sensibility informs all of her fiction - in the way her language is exact, concise, freighted, original; and the way that language circles and pounces and uses repetition to create something incantatory, mesmeric. Rain, for example, brims with water in all its expressions. The breadth of Kirsty's vision in this concentrated drop of a novel is astonishing, almost shocking at times. Water is threatening, embracing, implacable, beautiful. The way people interact with it is an expression of them - the father with his fly fishing, the girl with her institute-learned swimming, the boy playing on the edges of the lake.

Speaking recently at a NZ Society of Authors meeting at the Thistle Inn in Wellington, Kirsty said that when she writes she gets the first line and 'a clear sense of place' and then she lets the story unfold piece by piece. By that, she means she writes a section over and over [sometimes seven or eight drafts] until it's done and then she moves on to the next section, and so on.

Kirsty Gunn:

It's like beads on a string [the way she writes a novel self-contained piece by piece ].

The story tells me what it's going to be.

She says an intense sense of place is pivotal in her work as it was in Katherine Mansfield's: the light, the colour, the setting. And she doesn't name the places but they are particular places nonetheless. Kirsty says by not naming the places she writes about she protects the privacy of the individual's sense of place. New Zealanders knew Rain was set in Taupo [there's the lake, the desert road....] but Scots imagined a lake in Scotland, Americans in America...

Then there's the tone or key of the story. Kirsty calls that her 'grounding place'. She likens this to painting and how artists build up colour layers in a painting - her novels [or 'things' as she prefers to call them] have an underlay of tone which cannot be argued with. It is, she says, like a kind of synethesia - she 'sees' the tone in the work.

Kirsty also talks about how the short story, being of limited space, sets 'an emotional temperature.' She suggests that to find this same thing in her longer work, she has been steadily shortening the time period covered - Rain is set over a summer, Keepsake at a time in a girl's life, Featherstone in a weekend, The Boy and the Sea over a summer's day.

While she's in Wellington [leaving September], Kirsty Gunn is working on a collection of short stories and a 'thing' called Thorndon which leaps genres and has Katherine Mansfield at its core. This is rather nice because the historic Randell Cottage is in Thorndon just up the road from KM's birthplace.

Kirsty will be talking more about her work at:

the IIML's Writers on Monday series: 12.15-1.15 pm, August 3 at Te Papa

the Massey University Writers Read series : 6 -7 pm, August 6 at the Wellington Campus 5D16 [Block 5] - drinks to finish, and 6 pm, August 7 at Palmerston North City Library.

These events are free. I'll be chairing the Massey events, so I'll continue to dip into Kirsty's books over the coming month or so. It's not all re-reading. Next up is 44 Things [Atlantic] which I haven't opened before - except to peek in the bookshop.

To find out more about Kirsty go here, and the Randell Cottage website will be updated with Kirsty's events over the coming weeks.

Writers' cottage open to visit

The Randell Cottage Writers Trust is having an Open Day this Sunday 12 October from 11-4pm.
I am on the Friends Committee and will be on deck from 2-4pm to welcome visitors to this historic Wellington cottage which is home for two writers every year for six months each: one from New Zealand and one from France.



Come to: 14 St Mary’s Street, Thorndon.

Randell Cottage is one of Wellington’s oldest restored cottages. Take the opportunity to explore this corner of our city’s history, and if you're a writer you might like to come along and imagine yourself working there... We're calling for NZ writers to apply now.

Here's what you get: a cottage rent free with free electricity and broadband etc, plus a stipend of $2,500 a month funded by Creative NZ. We are currently trying to value the whole package but it must surely be worth around $30,000 for the six months (given the central location of the cottage.) It is just a walk away from the National Library and the central city.

NZ writer Jennifer Compton has just left the cottage after a successful six months writing a novel and finishing off a book of poems and another of essays (this is not a photo of Jen! it must be of one of the Price family who so kindly donated the cottage.)

French author Olivier Beys arrives in October for the summer. For more on Jennifer's visit go to the Friends' newsletters here and here.

Reading at Work

It doesn't always go down well when you're working in an office to be seen reading something by Mark Twain or Charlotte Grimshaw. So the NZ Book Council has, rather sneakily, come up with a concept that allows keen readers to escape the workaday world while staying in full view of nosy workmates.

Go here to readatwork.com for the weirdest thing I've seen in a long time: short stories, poems and parts of novels made into power point presentations complete with bullet points, flow charts, graphs, and other graphic displays. In other words, it would take a very nosy workmate to work out you're hunched over Oscar Wilde's Happy Prince or Tim Jones' Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev or a poem by Brian Turner or Emily Dickinson.

For some of the work, the literary language suffers in the new construction, but for some of it the bar graphs and bullet points isolate words and phrases rather felicitously.

I'm still reeling. [Warning when you go to readat work.com you appear to be in Windows but it reads 'Widows' instead. This is intentional. Click on the word BOOK and go from there.]

Another way to connect with literature while you're at work is to go to the Writers on Monday series at the National Library Auditorium in Wellington from 1-2 pm. This week Jennifer Compton is the writer on the spot.

New Zealand-born Compton has lived in Australia for most of the past 30 years so she finds herself in the odd position of being called an Australian across the ditch and a Kiwi writer here. Jennifer has been living in NZ this year as writer-in-residence at the Randell Cottage in Thorndon, writing her first novel All the Time in the World set in the Wairarapa and finishing a book of essays, but she is more widely known as a poet and playwright.

She has published two collections of poetry and a chapbook, written half a dozen stage plays and a number of radio plays, been poet-in-residence at the Whiting Library Studio in Rome, seen her poetry collection Blue shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2001, and in 1995 was awarded the NSW Ministry of Arts Fellowship (poetry).

Jennifer will discuss this and other aspects of her trans-Tasman writing career in conversation with the chair of the Randell Cottage Friends - which would be me. Actor Michele Amas will also add a touch of the dramatic with a reading from Jennifer Compton's play The Big Picture (which Michele starred in at Circa nine years ago.) Go here for more about the series.

The Aviatrix

The Aviatrix was painted by Rita Angus in 1933. It is in the breathtaking book Rita Angus An Artist's Life by Jill Trevelyan (Te Papa Press) which I got for my birthday today from my parents'-in-law.


The plates of Angus' work reveal her considerable talent for portraiture. I picked this one because an earlier post here about Jean Batten attracted some interest from Australian writer Gondal-Girl who likes aviatrices so I hope she sees this.


The painting is of Angus' sister Edna who was one of the first women in NZ to own a pilot's licence.


And serendipitously, I was invited to visit Angus' former home in Thorndon Wellington this evening. I am involved with the Randell Cottage in Thorndon which is a residency for NZ and French writers, and we are in the early stages of building a relationship with the other artists' residencies in the area: the Rita Angus and Douglas Lilburn, as well as the Katherine Mansfield birthplace.


So in the still of the evening, a small group of writers (including the current Randell Cottage writer-in-residence Jen Compton) and other devoted Friends of the Randell Cottage walked around the small but perfectly formed Rita Angus cottage with its pocket-handkerchief balcony and huge magnolia tree.

We stood in the art room with its paint-spattered floor boards, admired the duck-egg blue kitchen cupboards and looked down from the lush garden bank at the way the magnolia tree grew like the thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle.

Rita Angus lived here from 1955 and loved its tranquillity and closeness to the city. Her painting above is called Garden with Magnolia Tree.




And here's the book with one of Rita's stunning self-portraits on the cover. I love the way her people take full possession of the canvas and resolutely hold the eye. Even the Aviatrix is bolder and more audacious than Angus' sister in her aviatrix garb.

The paintings can be seen in their full glory in an exhibition at Te Papa now, and if you can't get there the book is the next best thing.

The text is fascinating too. I've learnt, for example, that Angus was a minimalist who kept her cottage very tidy, and always had a self-portrait above the fireplace in the living room. The room she painted in was also the room in which she ironed.

Which links to a previous post here about writing in the midst of things.