Whales to trees and tattoos: the fun of researching a novel

It's a rolling ball - there you are at the top of the hill - and yeeha! you're off - hurtling down one path and then the other - and crossing back again - and along that one, geez it's bumpy -- no, this one is fantastic, feel that roll -- look!  - there! who would have thought? - and you grab at things and roll them one on the other - and

soon there are layers and the ball is bigger and fatter - and lumpy in parts and thin in others - smooth there, rough there - and stray bits come off - oh, see that go, no loss really ... and that too, bugger, all that work but...

got to keep rolling.... and then there are those dips where it stalls, the ball, kind of rocking back and forth uncertain about where to go next - and sometimes there are abysses where it's dark and frightening and no way out ...

no - no - there it is - out again and rolling - and the joy of it - the real joy

And why? For authenticity, first off - to give the details that make the novel feel true - and to gather the writer's most important tool: language, that is also about authenticity, but is more than that too. All those words and phrases a writer gathers in his/her research help shape characters and settings and plot. It can show where to go  - what is needed.

For example, when I was researching whaling and went up on a hill with former whalers and Department of Conservation people whale watching for a week, I was surprised to find how much the whalers (who'd stopped work over 40 years before in 1964) appreciated the beauty and wonder of the whales and the setting - and how succinctly and often poetically they could express it.

One day, when I asked what I was looking for out there on the mass of blue water that is Cook Strait, I was told that the spout of a whale was like 'your breath on a cold morning' - which actually took my breath away. I gave it to one of my whalers in The Blue, but more than that, it gave me a sudden understanding of what these men felt and saw and knew about their jobs.

There we were gathered so early on that cold slope under a tarpaulin - our breath white, stamping our feet to keep warm - and there were the whales, out there somewhere, so hard to spot, but ah! the breath - the breath... and once, those men would chase that breathing creature down in two-man fast boats and explosive harpoon guns - it was a fight, a battle - and like any good battle there was admiration for the creature - its size and strength and beauty - but the whalers needed the money for their families, their own white breaths -

but in time, now, they are conservationists these whalers - they've seen how the factory killing wrecks everything - no longer a battle - just carnage.... and there, those breaths again across the water, our breaths watching ... stamping our feet...

'Like your breath on a cold morning' was one of those phrases I pinned to my noticeboard for my eyes rest upon.

At the moment, I'm researching both trees - for my children's novel rewrite - and tattooing for my adult novel. Trees: I am reading The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge - fantastic book - and I am doing a lot of gardening - especially around trees and hedges. Tattooing - the Tattoo Museum in Abel Smith Street calls. You could say I'm on a roll....

Yearning and the epiphany in fiction: Robert Olen Butler

"James Joyce appropriated from the Catholic church the term epiphany. An epiphany literally means "a shining forth." He brought that concept to bear on the moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence. That, he said, is the epiphany in a story or novel.

What I would suggest is that there are two epiphanies in any good work of fiction. Joyce's is the second, the one often called the climax of crisis of a story. The first epiphany comes very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth. The reader responds in a deep visceral way to that first epiphany -- and that's the epiphany missing from virtually every student manuscript I've read.

It is an element also, of course, missing from much published fiction. Various stories you read may leave you a little cold, distanced -- you may admire, maybe you have a kind of "smart" reaction -- but nothing resonates in the marrow of your bones, and the reason is that the character's yearning is not manifest.

This lack is interesting, because writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction -- entertainment fiction, let's call it, genre fiction -- have never forgotten this necessity of the character's yearning ....  The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire's heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other. But that there must be yearning the genre writers never forget. We do.

Desire is the driving force behind plot. The character yearns, the character does something in pursuit of that yearning, and some force or other will block the attempt to fulfil that yearning. The character will respond to the force in some way, go round or through or over or under it, and continue the pursuit. The dynamic beneath the story is plot: the attempt to fulfil the yearning and the world's attempt to thwart that."

Extract from, 'From Where You Dream: the Process of Writing Fiction' by Robert Olen Butler.

I have been reading about fiction and how it works because I am marking Honours papers in creative writing and the end of year portfolio arrives soon, because I am working with first year students on fiction after weeks of poetry, because this year I have been forcing my first years to buy notebooks and to observe the world and write it down and share it and to use it every week, because a student turned an average story into something with real potential using an observation of dead flowers in a vase - the look of death, the smell, the way they turned a place loved into a place less welcoming; because a student said defiantly the other day that she 'likes cheesy', because we're doing PLOT this week and PLOT is tricky.

The two epiphanies. Thinking about them has taken me back to my novel The Blue. I know exactly where the epiphany comes near the end, and I am reminded again of the shock of that:  it came as much as a surprise to me as it did to Lilian. And I'd say there was an epiphany near the beginning - a meal of fish pie, the family eating together, the simple stuff of family, the thing she'd chosen -- but really it's a little way in, and is it really about what she yearns for? When I think about an epiphany right near the beginning, one based on yearning, I need to pause a moment, and I have a couple of false starts.

I realise eventually that it is where Lilian emerges from feeding the chickens (a responsibility/crowded/demanding/society of sorts) and looks down from her home at the beauty of the place she loves (and fears) - the deep water Sounds - 'drowned valleys' where the land feels for a handhold - all that expanse of water is quite simply purity and beauty and freedom and escape from familial responsibilities and the demands of love.

This is evoked a little later on when she's out fishing with her son and looking back at the island where they live, and which holds their whole complicated history, and she says something about liking to go out on the boat and fish because things look different from out there. I knew all this instinctively when I was writing the novel, but hadn't thought of it the way Olen Butler puts it. I certainly hadn't focused on the need to have the epiphany based on yearning near the start to orient and engage the reader.

This is wonderful stuff. I realise my favourite readers like Alice Munro do the epiphanies (two of them) exquisitely. That is what I read them for.  All very useful for teaching plot. Clearly, my student with the dead flowers in a vase needs an earlier epiphany with strong sensual details, and she doesn't. And very useful for writing my own fiction too...

The next chapter of Olen Butler's book is called 'Cinema of the Mind', and I will discuss it here next week sometime.

The Blue is an E-Reader!

Go to Kobo and there it is. Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Yes, I'm chortling.

I talked to Penguin NZ's Commissioning Editor for fiction, Katie Haworth, today because I was interested in the CLL funding available to convert NZ books into e-readers for the GreatNZebooks site (in development). She explained that Penguin has already converted its stable of books using Kobo. She says it's the fourth biggest E-reader site in the world and they are happy with the results.

I checked it out, and found I could download The Blue to my desktop, smartphone, ipad or Kobo reader, which was created in Canada.

NBR has written about Kobo here when it was launched in NZ last May by Whitcoulls, and compares it to the other e-readers:

File formats are also a lot less locked down, with Kobo supporting the open ePUB standard, plus PDF and Adobe DRM.

In the same spirit of openness, you can also copy your own PDF content onto a Kobo.

There are two connectivity options - using Bluetooth to sync with a cellphone or laptop, or syncing with a PC or Mac via USB cable.

But what's the Kobo reader like? NBR again -

A Kobo reader looks very similar to an Amazon.com Kindle (check one out, plus tech specs, on Borders.com here), sharing the same style of black-and-white, anti-glare display.

But the Kobo economic model is very different with publishers - rather than Amazon or Apple - more in the driving seat, according to US reports.

Which is why Penguin has decided to go that way, I guess. The Whitcoulls connection doesn't seem to be a concern - Penguin is maintaining a watching brief. And meanwhile, for me it means The Blue gets another chance in the marketplace - this time an international one. Until today, it's only been sold in NZ, Australia and Israel, with the odd keen reader and bookshop in the UK and US flying the novel in. It has, for some reason,  had no Amazon presence. 

One thing, though. The E-reader cover's a little different from the printed version. This is an earlier version that was never used, but I quite like that. 

So woo-hoo for all that. Thank you Penguin! 

mesmerising

Excuse me if this looks a little cosy - but after writing a post about Kathleen Jones' bewitching biography of Katherine Mansfield, I remembered Kathleen had reviewed The Blue a couple of months back. It's so very lovely to get a review of my book this late on in its life (it is three years old) - and a review by a writer as talented as Kathleen Jones - and a review in the UK.

Kathleen says some interesting and insightful things - although the comment about the book being 'mesmerising' is still buzzing under my skin (as a word like 'mesmerising' does - independent of its meaning.) And I am doubly delighted that she read The Blue while staying in Kaikoura - just south of where The Blue is set and where whales roam the bays.

I went to Kaikoura with my family to research The Blue. It is one of my favourite places in the world and the trip with my family - my youngest only 8 years old at the time - travelling by train and boat with backpacks, is one of my favourite ever. After Kaikoura, we caught the train up to Picton and a boat to Arapawa Island where The Blue is set. There we stayed for a while exploring one of my other favourite places in the world. How lucky am I.

Here's the review.

Whaling

Oh I still notice whales, I can't help it. I thought when the final edits for the novel left my hands, my obsess... fascination with things whale would quietly decline. The Blue is set in Tory Channel (NZ)  in 1938 when whalers took to the water in small fast boats and explosive harpoons, and the novel required an enormous amount of research. The thing is, though, I was interested in whales before I began the book - having reported on them and the International Whaling Commission while I worked for radio and television in the 1980s - so perhaps it will never let me go.

Here I am - to paraphrase Bette Midler - still smelling a whale at 500 paces. Having coffee with a friend the other day, I noticed a T-shirt with a whale on it four shops down the road; and in a recent visit to Wanganui with my Bookclub, I was transfixed by a piece of whale bone for sale (stranded whale, minke possibly) and bought it. I wear it around my neck. It's so light. So porous.

And here's another fave whale thing of mine - the song Whaling by Dave Dobbyn of DD Smash. My son, Paul, and his mate, Eddie, played it at my book launch on their guitars. They didn't want to sing. Hey to sing this song, you really gotta have that 80s thing going on....

Gondal-Girl reviews The Blue

One of my favourite bloggers, Australian writer Gondal-Girl, has posted a brief review of The Blue. When the book was a year old, she thrilled me to bits when she sent a cellphone pic of it on the shelves in Gleebooks, Glebe, Sydney. Very cool indeed - especially to find myself next to Canadian author Alistair MacLeod. I've never met Gondal-Girl, but we've been talking through our blogs for nearly two years now. In that time she's produced a baby she refers to as the pixie ... and I haven't produced anything nearly as, well, solid. I've already got three 'Pixies', although two of them have grown to giants. Hopefully this year will yield up a children's book with my name on it - now that's pretty solid - and see an adult novel completed if not actually on the shelves. Thanks for the review G-G, I like that you found the book dreamy.

Just slippery or down-right nasty? The unreliable narrator.

A fantastic article in The Guardian listing fiction's top ten most unreliable. This is something I explored in The Blue leading to a 'twist' when the 'truth' is revealed - I found laying and re-laying the threads through the loom of the novel and then weaving them together until they became a single, hard carpet of story, hugely satisfying. And when I say 'carpet' I mean one of those enormous, richly-coloured Turkish rugs that are rolled out for you beside a dusty roadside in Capadoccia. I especially liked writing from the point of view of someone who appears to be one thing but is in fact another, and I'm exploring this further in my second novel which is still in the works. I like the slipperiness and how language creates that slipperiness - offering up partial truths and lies as a certain type of reality. I like the way this makes readers trust nothing about what is in front of them, and work to get underneath the carpet pile, to find the warp and the weft. None of my characters are as nasty as the slipperiest of characters in Guardian writer and novelist Henry Sutton's Top Ten Most Unreliable, but who knows, maybe one day.... Thanks again to the indefatigable Bookman Beattie for his link to Henry Sutton. 

lilian

Lilian is the protagonist in my novel, The Blue, and here is a painting of Lilian done by a young friend of mine, Ariana Ponder. Ari - aged 17 - read The Blue for a Year 12 school assignment last year, and had to create a visual response to the book. She is quick to say she's not an artist [she's doing clothing design at Massey University this year], but I am impressed, and touched, by the result.

I like the strength in Lilian's face, and the stoic, slightly shy way she faces you.  There is also a prettiness about her and a sense of Lilian coming from another time. I love the rich blue of the dress and the way the red scarf suggests the more sensuous side of her nature. In my mind, Lilian's hair is darker and messier than this, and Lilian herself is stronger-boned and more weathered by life on isolated Arapawa Island in 1938 - which is not to say my Lilian is the Lilian. The joy of fiction is that it is a private experience and every reader reads a different story.

I also see Lilian's mouth as less sad - but this reading of her relies on an older reader, I think, someone who can see and understand where Lilian's happiness lies within the pact she's made with herself. [I certainly wouldn't have got it when I was 17 - I know that - I'd have read it as a story of loss and grief....] Or am I kidding myself? I'd be interested to know other readers' responses.

The lower section of the painting shows Lilian's youngest child Billy - 'the one she did her best by'. This speaks volumes about her: one hand is closed almost in a fist, and the other rests only lightly on his shoulder. She is both protective of him and not fully engaged. In the same way, Lilian gazes out and gazes inward at the same time. Can you feel the secrets withheld? 
 
Finally, it strikes me that the whole painting has the formality of a photograph, except that Billy is looking away. This is Lilian. This is the stuff of The Blue.
 
Brilliant.Thanks Ari.

Postscript: Thanks to artist/writer Fifi Colston for photoshopping the portrait so it's a single picture rather than two scanned parts...

Jawing with a blue whale - The Blue in Stanley

Nothing can adequately describe the feeling of vertigo I get when fiction and fact collide - the giddiness that is part thrill, part disbelief, part anxiety, part a weird kind of omniscience. It's like standing in a mirror room and seeing reflections of yourself receding to infinity. What comes first? What is true? How can all those words add up to a representation of reality that concerns and interests and moves people? How can it have a life outside of itself? And how does this thing I have made fit with all the wonders of the real world?                                
Above, you have a whalebone arch in the Falklands' capital of Stanley made from the jawbones of blue whales caught in the South Shetland Islands; and here, a photograph of The Blue next to one of these remarkable bones.

Is it nestling in delightedly, do you think, working up the courage to have a jaw about the largest creature the world has ever seen? Or is it leaning nervously, a little non-plussed, perhaps, by its close proximity to the 'real thing'?

A bit of both I think. O little audacious book.

The photographs were taken yesterday by Robert Paterson who works for the British Antarctic Survey on board the RSS James Clark. A Scot from the Isle of Bute, he travels thousands of miles to places like the Falklands and South Georgia where whaling is knitted into local history, much as it is in Arapawa Island, New Zealand.

Robert was in NZ a little while back and while here he stumbled upon my blog. Being a seafaring man who connects with old whaling towns on his voyages, he thought he'd like to read The Blue, so back home in Scotland, he emailed to ask me where he could order a copy. I put him onto Louise at NZ Books Abroad and she got to work. Unfortunately, the book didn't arrive before he left the country for his latest expedition, so he contacted Louise again and asked her to send another copy to Stanley in the Falklands, which is one of his ports of call.

So here it is, The Blue. Rather surprised to be so far from home and snuggled up to the jawbone of a blue whale. And it's all thanks to a Scot of the Antarctic! No, really, what a thoroughly lovely thing to do. I still can't quite believe The Blue is doing things in this world over two years after publication, let alone making expeditions south. There's that vertigo again...

Robert tells me that these whalebone arches are common sights in places where whalers once lived and worked. He says, 'I remember one in Edinburgh, by the Meadows, and I'm told there is one in Whitby too.' [Here's a Stanley local, Chelsea Middleton, holding The Blue beside the whale arch. It looks more confident like that I think.]

And to finish, Robert included a photograph of an old whale station in South Georgia. He says in his email:

I wonder what Johnny Norton and the other whalers would make of South Georgia? Here's a photo of the old station at Leith. There aren't many places in the world where you can see reindeer grazing alongside elephant seals and penguins - but this is one of them.

Johnny is one of the former whalers of Arapawa Island that helped me with my research for The Blue. I reckon he'd be fascinated by the old whale station at Leith. As I am.

All photo credits: Robert Paterson

For more photographs of the travels of The Blue see the links in the right hand column of the blog - and I'd love more. Send them to marymac21ATgmail.com.

The whaler, the book and me

It was one of those nights you dream about as an author. Seventy-five people turned out to the Marlborough District Library to hear me talk about The Blue and one of them was Johnny Norton, a former whaler, who  helped me with my research five years ago, and I hadn't seen since. Johnny (above right) was one of the whalers who sat up at the Lookout on Arapawa Island in 2004 as part of the first DOC whale survey team. And I was there too, all those years ago, watching the whalers watching the whales, and taking notes for my novel. Johnny and the other whalers with their binoculars, and the groovy young DOC scientists with their laptops and theodolite, were wonderfully welcoming to a wet-behind-the-ears novelist. Another whaler - Ron Perano - came along last night, but he headed off before the photo opportunity. He joined the DOC survey the year after I was there.

There were other whaling families at the event, too, and people who live on or nearby Arapawa Island. I found myself rolling out all my stories about my research on and about Arapawa Island and the whaling : the marvellous and funny things I discovered, and the wonderful people like Johnny Norton I met on the way. And - feeling a little nervous with real whalers in the front row and not able to put it off any longer - I read a whaling scene.

As I read it I felt glad to be reading it and glad I'd written it. It felt like the words gave life to what these men and their families knew and loved and endured in their lives - elevated it all somehow, put it up there with the epic and elemental stuff of the myths and legends that informed my choice of whaling as a setting for the novel in the first place. It sounds a bit grandiose I suppose - but language is what I know and whaling is what they know and it's as if, without realising it, we'd given each other a gift. As I said to the crowd, I do believe fact is stranger than fiction, and often more compelling and more wonderful, but I believe it's fiction's job to take us there, and allow us to properly hear and see those people and places and events, and to feel empathy, but not in the way you always expect. As artist Francis Bacon said about art, ultimately fiction is about deepening the mystery.

Here's the beginning of the extract I read:

The sky was the colour of barely beaten egg, and the sun newly emerged from behind Arapawa Island streamed clear yellow on Lookout Hill and the men who waited there. Little else was lit at that early hour. A hundred yards below the Lookout the sea was still dark, and the hills behind were in shadow and crisp with frost. Each man on that hilltop felt privileged to be there on the edge of, the very edge of, the waking world.

It wasn't all that serious! I picked this extract because it is the best translation of what I saw and heard up the Lookout when I was there myself - the things the whalers knew, the way they talked and joked with each other, the way they did their job.

By the end of my talk, Johnny and Ron were up the front with me talking about whaling then and now, and the reason for whale conservation - it was rivetting stuff. One man came up at the end and said he'd been dragged along to hear me speak but he had to tell me he'd had a fantastic time. Well, I have to tell you, so did I.

Huge thanks to the Marlborough District Library - to Glenn Webster and the Friends of the Library especially - for looking after me so well and putting on such a fantastic event as part of their 150th celebrations, to NZ Book Month for supporting it, to Blenheim Bookworld [Peter and Charmaine] for selling my books, and to Blenheim for turning on an exquisite 22 degree-day yesterday and giving me such a supportive crowd.

Photo of me and Johnny Norton by Glenn Webster.

The Blue in Marlborough and Fiona Kidman a double knight?

Two exciting pieces of news:

The Blue is having its own NZ Book Month event at the Marlborough District Library, 33 Arthur Street, Blenheim tomorrow night - Wednesday October 28 @ 7.30 pm [do ignore the websites that declare the event is on Thursday, it absolutely isn't]. Exciting because Marlborough is at the heart of my novel set on Arapawa Island in Tory Channel and I love taking it back to that part of the world. So far, my South Island events have been in Christchurch and Nelson, but this is my first sortie to Marlborough. I will talk about the research and writing of The Blue, and why I think the story of these 1930s whalers and their families lay in wait for me to write it. Then I read for a bit.

I have my notes ready and in big letters on the first square of card are the words Epic and Elemental. Every talk is different because I work from two note cards scrawled with notes and key words, but I nearly always start with Epic and Elemental. The epic stuff of the life of the whaler in Cook Strait on fast, two-man boats with explosive harpoons, and the elemental world they and their families inhabited. Their families. Well that sends me off in a whole other direction. For this was a time when men were men and women waited... well, they didn't just wait did they? There was washing and sewing and minding the children and feeding the chooks - and sometimes there were secrets too deep to remember and losses too deep to repair. Do come and hear more in Blenheim. It's so much more fun speaking to a crowd.

Speaking of Arapawa Island, one of my favourite NZ authors, Fiona Kidman [author of The Captive Wife also set on Arapawa and one of the reasons we are friends] was tonight presented with the gong for the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres which makes her officially a knight. The French Ambassador announced she'd received the honour at a function earlier this year to launch her memoir Beside the Dark Pool. Well, tonight, after pinning Fiona's honour onto her appropriately red jacket, the deliciously mischievous ambassador Michel Legras opened another slim box and pinned on a second medal - this time the highest order in France: the Legion of Honour. Which from my reading of wikipedia makes Fiona Kidman a double Knight as well as a Dame.

Sounds like a fancy chess move... ! But this time, Fiona wasn't going to be outsmarted. She was reduced to silence by the first knighthood surprise but tonight she had a speech prepared - albeit for one knighthood not two. It ended with some rather lovely poems, especially one about her husband Ian and a perfect time they had at a village in France. You get the feeling that Fiona Kidman, like Katherine Mansfield, might have a bit of poker work on her heart ....

Needless to say Fiona, and her assembled family and friends [some of them going back to her childhood] and colleagues were delighted by the Legion of Honour, and we all took turns to admire the enameled brilliance of both medals and tried to read the tiny French words. I recommended to Fiona that she wears them on a daily basis, and overlapping so they clank gently together as she walks, and she said she would definitely think about it, and as a start she would wear them to breakfast the next day. She agreed it was so much better to enjoy the honours than hide them away in a dark drawer. As fellow blogger Denis Welch said, over the divine fingernail-sized canapes and bottomless breasts of champagne, the French do the best medals.

I have in my arms the scarecrow and the bells of saint babel's etc.

Books for Africa, as my friend Maggie would say! The Giant Book Fair at TSB arena [on again today] yielded up for me: The Scarecrow - r.h.morrieson, The Bells of Saint Babel's - allen curnow, Blindsight - maurice gee, Mary Shelley - muriel spark, Not her real name - emily perkins [signed], In search of a character - graham greene, I have in my arms both ways - adrienne jansen, Big Wellington - o'brien/white, some travel books for my husband [a pico iyer, a theroux and dessaix's book on turgenev which I also intend to read], and an alastair cooke book of essays plus the Henry Root Letters for my dad [for father's day].

My children got a restrained bag-full each, and Penny and Elsie and Quentin between them lugged out enough books to fill a couple of suitcases. I saw Maggie there, and her own magnificent haul is detailed in a comment on the previous post. I envy her the Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Jan Morris - a hard-back, no less.

She mentions how I'd spotted both our novels on the NZ Fiction table. It was an odd moment seeing The Blue there - I checked and it was a first edition with a Montana award sticker on the front, in good condition, too. Read? Who knows. I put it back with its spine out and mentioned it to Elsie who was piling up short story collections elegantly on her forearm, and she smiled something reassuring back, and then the woman next to her said, does she want that book? - nodding at me and The Blue. And Elsie said, no, she wrote it. Oh! said the woman, I loved that book! Oh! I said. Really? That's wonderful! And it really really was.

Later, after a rummage through Travel and Essays and General Fiction, after seeing a man yelp as he leapt on Ed Hillary's book about Everest, after a chat about whaling with Ken from the Maritime Museum over old copies of Landfall, after admiring Quentin's copy of some fabulous biography that slips my mind and Issy's book about the Titanic and Paul's book of Cheever stories, I came back to NZ Fiction. And The Blue was gone.

How to get a Gatsby

The editing process of a novel is a shady area not usually opened up to the gaze of the publishing unwashed: the reader or aspiring writer. As a first-timer, I stumbled into it with hope, excitement and anxiety.

Luckily, I had Jane Parkin as my editor for The Blue. Highly respected in NZ publishing circles, editor of a range of marvellous award-winning fiction writers, her style can be characterised as insightful, inclusive, gentle and persistent. She also never made me feel she'd edited enough first novels to know without looking what to do with mine. In other words, Jane approached The Blue with respect, excitement and curiosity. Or that's how it felt to me. And when I received the marked-up drafts -all red dashes and post-it notes - it was like seeing finger marks in a clay sculpture, as if she'd gently pressed the novel's skin to find the pulse.

All the changes Jane suggested were good ones that I applied forthwith; many were essential to the flow of the story. Often, she would present me with a problem in the book - we would discuss it - then I would go away and think what to do. I liked that she didn't always know the answer and trusted me to find it. One structural problem we tossed around for a bit, tried one thing and then another, and then at the last minute I flicked the difficult chapter into a slightly different position and suddenly the novel relaxed into place. Jane agreed. It was the many hours of dicussion that got us there. Frankly, it was exciting to have one other person in the world as fascinated by my novel as Jane Parkin was, and as willing to obsess about its every detail.

The elegant writing partnership between The Great Gatsby's F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins is explored in a new book on writing The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. Uber UK blogger Mark Sarvas has serialised the essay and it makes fascinating reading. Here's Part 1 - scroll up through his blog for the other three parts.

Here's the link to The Writer's Notebook on the Tin House website.

My words echo thus, in your mind. But to what purpose

I discovered T.S. Eliot in the sixth form. I remember opening a book of his poems while I was babysitting for the neighbours, and feeling the immediate painful thrill of words like small darts hitting home here and here and here.


I fell in love with Eliot, dear reader, and bought his Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 the following year. Sometime after that - I don't know when - I lost it. Last week, my friend Whena Owen gave it back to me [picture above] wrapped up in an old dress pattern. Apparently her brother, Dylan, was cleaning out his bookshelves when he found it and found my name in the front, and underneath excerpts from Eliot's poems written in fountain pen with curling daisies instead of full-stops (eek). Whena and I were at school together and flatted together once, too, so somehow the Collected Poems of T.S. had migrated into her shelves and then into Dylan's.


My excitement at getting the book back was partly about the book itself and partly about what it had gone on to become for me in the intervening years. You see, when I wrote The Blue I deliberately wrote several passages which reflected the key literary influences of my life - in style, ideas and/or content. One of them is Eliot. Others are Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera. The connections aren't at all obvious and I don't expect people to make them - and oh, when I read this I think how pretentious it all sounds - my motivation was primarily to slip in a small tribute to each of those authors and poets and partly to satisfy myself. I hoped that some readers might make the links sub-consciously or consciously and that would give them a deeper understanding of the text itself, and some insight into the shady places from which my writing springs.

Okay - if you're still reading - where is Eliot in The Blue? First of all, you need to read the extract at the start of this post which comes from Burnt Norton in The Four Quartets by Eliot, and the one below from the same poem. Then read the extract from The Blue at the end of this post about the wedding of Lilian to Ed. It occurs straight after WWI and 20 years before the story opens, but comes near the end of the novel as a memory. The Blue extract is enhanced by knowing the Eliot link, I believe. The theme of all time being 'eternally present' and therefore there being no point in 'disturbing dust on the bowl of rose leaves' is critical to what unfolds in The Blue. Readers of the Four Quartets will also know the bird is likely to be a deceptive thrush, and will know lines like these: 'Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/cannot stand too much reality', and all the rest....

How marvellous it was to open my old creaking copy of Eliot's Collected Poems and find them there: the garden, the gate, the excitement of the children, the bird calling - all as I remembered them, and as I had written them into The Blue in one way or another [rose bushes become pine trees, the children become silly, trilling Jeannie etc.] There's also a complete change of rhythm in The Blue at this point, and the point of view switches from limited third person to second person, with two possibilities: either Lilian is talking to herself and/or the author is talking to Lilian, or both.

THE BLUE [2007] Extract from Chapter 25

Back a step. Back a step up the path. Back up to the small gate of the small churchyard and make a decision there not to enter. To turn at the sound of the small birds, to turn at the smell of the pine trees, to turn at the first crunch of the gravel, and leave quietly, without fuss or hurt. If you had to go in, you fool, you, Lilian, you should have turned back at the first small gravestone, and if you didn’t turn then, there was a point on that path where you could see him and he couldn’t see you, and you knew with sudden clarity that there was nothing there that was familiar. If it hadn’t been for Jeannie, giggling behind you and running into your back like that, you might have turned at last and, seeing the gate there and the small gravel path, you’d have known what to do. As it was, he’d heard that silly trilling friend of yours, and looked for her and saw you, Lilian, in your borrowed silk georgette and red fox, and come forward, trussed in his uniform, his head dipping bashfully and his large hand out. He’d waited outside to introduce you to his Best Man, the cousin you’d heard so much about, who had even written you a letter or two. And there he was stepping out from behind him, a shorter, stockier man in uniform, too, but filling it differently, with thick black hair and ruddy cheeks, older than Ed by a few years, his eyes an astounding blue. Ed clasped his hands together, and waited to see that you liked him.

You remember how slowly it unfolded, the cousin stepping forward and removing his soldier’s hat and taking your hand in greeting and saying your name in a way you’d have usually thought of as familiar but in fact was less insolent than that. And then he said nothing more, although he looked as if he wanted to. Jeannie came forward, wishing he would smile at her like that, but he didn’t. He took her hand instead and kissed it, and Jeannie chortled, silly girl, and showed her crooked teeth.

‘Come on, Owen,’ said Ed, looking pleased at the way it had gone. And they went inside the church, the two of them, to wait for you.

©Mary McCallum

On the library shelves

I'm at the Barn - our place in the Wairarapa - and out of internet contact. But sometimes I creep to the small library with painted brick walls and a small, dynamic Scottish librarian and use the free WiFi. At the moment, the small dynamic Scottish librarian is selling Girl Guide biscuits to two German back-packers, so I'm guessing she's also involved with Girl Guides.

After coming here on and off since Xmas to use the WiFi [I'd deliberately not activated the wireless connection on this laptop until then], I finally introduced myself today. She knew the name and The Blue and explained it wasn't the sort of novel people took to easily at first, something to do with the whale on the cover and people not being sure about the whaling ... but once persuaded, the locals have been enjoying The Blue and told their friends etc and now, apparently, it rarely makes it back to the NZ Fiction shelves. Once it's returned, and is waiting to be shelved, it goes straight out again. Yippee.

My library readers have been wonderfully supportive of The Blue. It is still requested around the country and people tell me of waiting lists. Shortly after The Blue was published, and when I was worried about sales, I'd go to library websites and get such a buzz to see the books were out, and even more of a buzz later to see it was requested by people.

I think my excitement is added to by being the daughter of a librarian. One who could never believe the problems I had getting books back to libraries on time - the fines - the lost books - the way I nearly didn't get my undergraduate degree conferred because I had logged up such a huge fine at the university library.

The Blue seems like a way of redeeming myself. Instead of shaking their heads and giving me chilly smiles, librarians welcome me with open arms now. I've spoken at a number of library events, and one wonderful library at Palmerston North bought something like 28 copies of The Blue and encouraged all its readers to read it.

My Mum seems very happy about that.

Worth twittering about

I am enjoying this book so much that when I got up for my morning coffee, instead of checking my emails I read MISCONDUCT. Bridget van der Zijpp is a kiwi and this novel - her first , out last year - was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. The NZ Listener picked it as one its Books of the Year and made a fairly strong case for considering it thinking woman's chick lit.

If Bridget J has an older wild-child Aotearoa cousin, Simone is it. Saying this in no way disparages van der Zijpp. Her eye is sharper than Fielding’s, her writing edgier, her sensibility welcomingly wry rather than witty.. [The NZ Listener review]

Yes - sharper, edgier, wittier - constantly surprising, a terrific sense of the seaside town it inhabits, and a wonderful cast of characters drawn with sympathy and insight.

The publisher's blurb and more reviews here - good on Victoria University Press for taking the time to put reviews up on its website - and some interesting-looking bookclub notes here.

I am also still excited about The Blue being published in Israel. It should be in the shops there now - my translation editor, Hadas, told me Passover was the time and it was still Passover when I last checked. Two copies of the wonderful book plopped into my letterbox a couple of weeks back wrapped in brown paper. I forgot to mention it here but I don't know how I could. Holding them was a transcendent moment.

One more thing: oh yes - oh no - oh dear - I am a twitterer. Don't know how it happened - I think I wanted to read someone's twitters and ended up... well, joining... the same way I joined Facebook, really. I feel a bit ambivalent about it because I can see it's another time-consumer masquerading as a time-saver, and it is - as the pic below shows - very 'pick me, pick me'. So who knows if this is a long term thing for me. Meanwhile, down underneath my blog roll on the right somewhere are my twitters for time-being. If you have nothing else to do ...

The Ninja in Nazareth

With my novel freshly translated into Hebrew and about to hit the bookshops in Israel, here are some photos of the original NZ-published version of The Blue taken in Israel by my Hebrew editor Hadas. Those who've been following this blog, will know The Blue has travelled far afield in the hands of friends and other readers and been photographed in Greece, England, India, Antarctica and other exotic locales. If you look down the side column of the blog you'll see the links.

Here is Hadas' email explaining to me where her photographs were taken. Note, Yahli is her five-year-old son.

Saturday we went on a trip to the Galilee (my parents live there) ... On our way we went to Nazareth. There is a Jewish holiday now, called Purim – a lot of candies and customs. Yahli was a Ninja fighter. We walked in Nazareth with our small Ninja and looked quite weird. I don't know how religious you are, but we thought you might like a photo of THE BLUE there – outside and inside the Basilica of the Annunciation – you can chose.

Thanks to Hadas and the small and patient Ninja.

The Blue in Hebrew

The Blue is a Hebrew book from yesterday!

Here's what my lovely Hebrew editor Hadas Matas told me by email: 'I'm proud to tell you the book is ready. It is planned to be in the shops in two weeks – before Passover.'

Hadas and I have been emailing each other for two-and-a-half months now discussing phrases like 'touch of the tar brush' and exploring the words for whales in a culture which isn't familiar with whales. Her emails dropped in on me in the hot Wairarapa in January, in the middle of a Canadian winter, in the streets of NYC and Washington, and back again in Wellington. In the process we've become friends.

For those who can read Hebrew, here's the Aggas Press website. I can only look at it and marvel. The translator was Vered Tochterman. The publisher is Sharon Greenberg.

Thanks to everyone at Aggas for the way they've embraced The Blue. Especially Vered for her skills, Hadas for her keen eye and her personal warmth and encouragement, and Sharon for wanting the book and finding me (roll down the post on the student writers and read the comment underneath.).

I am thrilled.

Naming Ned

One Sunday in February I went for a walk with my lovely friend, Alexandra, and her son Ned aged five (pictured). It was a sunny day and we walked down from their house into a small and leafy valley. Every now and then, Sandra would pause and point out something she wanted to show me: a kowhai seedling beside a painted stake; a hillside dense with native shrubs; a young rimu with its narrow sloping branches.

From looking at the path, listening to Ned's chatter, talking about something or other, I had to pause. What Sandra was pointing at came into focus and was framed. I saw it when before I hadn't, and what's more I saw it with her eyes. It grew as I watched it. An ordinary section of bush or a shrub or a seedling took shape, beckoned, became meaningful. Was named.

It struck me all of a sudden that this is what a writer does when she writes a story.

Another revelation came when Ned said, 'I'm going the quickest way' and rushed off to take a short-cut just like the six-year-old Billy in The Blue. I stole the phrase from a six-year-old boy who walked with me on Arapawa Island when I was researching the novel five years ago, but haven't heard it since. Ned's spitting out the exact same words in the same circumstances as a child of my invention was one of those meta-fictional moments which disoriented me briefly.

Of course, the truth is small boys the world over (and whatever era) are black and white, and absolute. So macho and yet so deliciously children. It has to be the quickest way and not merely the quicker way. And I am thrilled to think that Billy - after 18 months or so inside the pages of my book - is still acting the way a real boy should.

The Blue in Washington

Here's The Blue by the Washington Memorial, held in position by my friend Laura who lives in Washington DC, and who is connected to the writing of the novel because she was my Italian expert. My lovely character Gunner is of Italian descent and utters the odd phrase learnt from his father - alla fine del mondo being one - and Laura was happy to check them for me.

She, her husband Leo and family left Italy thirteen years ago to live in NZ before shooting through to jobs in DC. In the four years they were here, our two families became great friends. Our children were similar ages, Laura and I had our third babies close together, we all loved good espresso coffee and Laura's pasta. And while we finished off bottles of red wine, the children played dress-ups, ran wild in the garden and cooked pancakes wearing roller blades (the children not the pancakes!)

We had Christmasses and birthdays together, my family learnt some Italian, the Italians learnt Kiwi, I learnt to cook a risotto - Laura an apple crumble, the men tramped the Tararuas (sounds all very 1950s really...maybe it was), we buried two placentas and planted a pohutukawa together (nope, that's definitely 1990s, given our whakapapa.)

Salad days.

It was hard when the Italians left NZ. Although they have visited us, we haven't - until now - managed to get over there to visit them. It was so good to see their home in Georgetown and get a feel for life beside the Potomac.

Every now and then people send me a photograph of The Blue in some exotic spot around the world and I put it up here. It started with a friend visiting Greece and blossomed to include Antarctica, India, and Qatar. The links to these photos and their accompanying stories are down the right hand side of my blog.

Anyway, there I was visiting exotic spots in Canada and the US last month with not one but three copies of The Blue in my suitcase (for gifts, random publishers I might meet on the train, exotic photos), and somehow I managed to forget to take any one of them plus camera to all of the key landmarks on route - the frozen St Lawrence, the world's biggest skating rink in Ottawa, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the White House ...

Finally, in DC on our way to the airport I grabbed a minute in front of the Washington Monument. I wanted the White House but there was a road block and lots of traffic, so I had to plump for the Monument instead. Only a day before, the grass around this giant needle had been covered with ice and the hill had looked like something on another planet, in fact it was icy all the way down the Mall to the Capitol; but on the day of the photo the weather was milder, the grass bare and brown.

My daughter and I had walked the Mall two days before when it was crisp and icy, Issy crunching in her chucks while I strode beside her on the asphalt and tried to imagine the two million people who'd stood on its 1.8 kilometre length that month to watch Obama's inauguration.

As we approached the Capitol, bells at a church somewhere started to ring out America the Beautiful and behind us the sunset glowed rosy pink and that pure stretch of ice shone pink too. A few people walked by on their way home from jobs as government officials or staff at museums but mostly there was no-one - just us - the bells tolling, the ice shining, famous monuments standing at ease as if they were any old monuments in any old town. It was surreal.

Speaking of monuments, I was not as taken with the triumphal Neo-Roman monuments as I thought I'd be, and even the Greek-style doric columns of the Lincoln Memorial seemed too much to my eye - too huge for a start, and housing a massive 19-foot figure of Lincoln who is rendered godlike by his size and weight. See the man, it says, triumphant Man.

I prefered the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial nearby. A wedge of polished black granite below the level of the earth, it struck me as eloquent and authentic, and a living monument where people still go to trace their relatives' names, where names are added and changed, where history is still working its way out, and more than anything where Man is not triumphant nor is he the centre of things.

Rather, he is one of many thousands of names, the depth of half a thumb, one beside the other. Small, easily lost, forgotten, found again if lucky. A cross (missing in action) to a diamond (dead). Ordered to march the march by the same country that adores the giant marble statue and the doric column, the super-sized burger, the multi-millionaire child celebrity, the President as super-star.

But perhaps there's a new order now.

Scott from Long Island was watching Issy and me take photos of each other in front of the White House on our first day in DC. Scott is a black man with a gentle, considered way of talking, and he was there to pay tribute to the newest President of the United States. 'For the first time there is someone in the White House who thinks like I do and acts like I do,' he said. 'He looks at home on the basketball court and in the Supreme Court.'

Scott seemed very happy about having an ordinary-sized man in that big white house. We looked through that fence together hoping to catch sight of him jogging or something, but all we saw were squirrels. When Issy and I left, Scott was still standing there looking thoughtful.