Moomintrolls and the art of keeping and discovering secrets

Two gorgeous secrets discovered today.

First up, this quote by Moomintroll author Tove Jansson - much needed as my children's novel nears completion. I have been reading other children's books (9-11 age group) to brush up on what makes a children's book really tick, and then I discovered this:

"Every children's book should have a path in it where the writer stops and the child goes on. A threat or a delight that can never be explained. A face never completely revealed." (Tove Jansson)

Yes, of course. Of course.  Oh I love those Moomins.


And the other secret is an artistic version of Jansson's statement - an artist who uses lines that hide as much as they reveal. I've known Helen Reynolds for a while (she and her husband bought our last house and we nod in the street), although I haven't properly engaged with her work until now.

I met Helen outside the dairy today and instead of nodding, we talked about how to be a creative person one needs to be a selfish person - something we (with five children between us) find hard to do.

I left vowing to check out her blog. And I did and well, wow. Helen Reynold's art uses topography and landscape to create works that are sensual and muscular and bounding with energy. That are as interior as they are exterior. One made me think immediately of my poem Notorious Veins with its knotted interior landscape, and this - the latest image up - seems to evoke the sensuous landscape in my Tuesday Poem this week: After Reading Auden.

I have put a link to Helen's blog in the sidebar to be alert to her daily images. It reminds me of the excitement I felt when I used to have a link to Nasa images.

Hue & Cry

Love this cover. Love the editorial by Chloe Lane which starts 'Monet flung himself into the Seine...', love the crazy piece What Depressions Look Like by Amy Howden-Chapman which ends '... We may have to build ourselves back up and out with green jobs, toothpicks and gum. I can see a new skyline of saliva bubbles, ladders, and clean smiles.' Love that Amy - one of the most creative thinkers but worst spellers and grammarians I know - has an Oxford comma inserted between 'ladders' and 'and'.

Love that Anna Taylor with her fresh first collection of stories out has The Beekeeper in here which starts 'When she was seventeen, my mother saved her own life just by walking across the lawn to the washing line...'

Love that there's a lot of 'Adams' in there [got a son with that name so it jumps out at me] - Pip Adam [the writer] with a piece called Pushing, Pulling and a series of Charlotte Simmonds' poems one of which begins: 'Before 6.30, Adam eats a pie, cracks a bourbon, smokes pot and a couple of cigarettes and/listens to punk rock...' Love that when I read it aloud to my boy, he nods 'yeah, that sounds about right...except for the punk rock...' Love that there's a poem by funky Johanna Aitchison called what seagull wants and a series of poems by my Montana-winning friend Airini Beautrais all about tricks of various sorts with her lovely off-centred view of the world: ' While you are stopped on a street corner/your future lover cycles past you/and does not notice you there...'

Love that Lawrence Patchett talks about 'Hawera and the Morrieson question' - which includes how Ronald Hugh's cousins Shirley and Heather threw away his papers without thinking 'because he wasn't as famous then' and how his writing attic is now stored in a paddock. Love that Hue and Cry calls itself a 'literary slash art journal'.

Love that it has cheered me up.

Because my friend Kirsty Gunn, who has cut a swathe through literary Wellington with her cry of 'death to the narrative arc' and 'I am not a writer, I am an artist' , and who has been so wonderfully stimulating and opinionated and generous as Randell Cottage fellow, and made life such fun for the winter she's lived here, is soon to head home to the UK and Scotland.

I just want to hue and cry.