Sarah Laing's Let Me Be Frank

Sarah Laing is one of those super-talented people who writes short stories and designs the book cover to go with them

writes a novel (not sure if she designed this book - my guess is she did)

designs other people's book covers and wins awards for them


illustrates other people's books

writes a blog and illustrates it. 

Sarah's blog is a delight. Called Let Me Be Frank it is about being a writer in residence as Frank Sargeson fellow in Auckland, which sounds very grand when it's not. The blog is also about being a mum and doing all that other stuff one has to do while being a writer in residence. It is wry, funny, bang on. 

One of the recent posts is about going to Wellington with co-Sargeson fellow Sonja Yelich to be feted by the sponsor, Buddle Findlay (solicitors). I was supposed to be there but my husband, a consultant at BF, forgot to remind me about it. No that's not true, he tried to text me but my phone was dead because I couldn't find the charger. (Just like last night when I couldn't remember where we kept the wok to put it away - one of those increasingly common 'slip-of-the-memory' moments). 

Anyway, now I've read Sarah's blog I feel like I was at the BF do (although I have never thought of the BF building in the way Sarah has ever). Now I've read Sarah's blog, I feel like not knowing where the wok goes is reason for celebration of - oh, I don't know, the slippage in life between what we hope for, what we imagine, what we get ... between now and then .... 

If I were her I'd give the wok sturdy legs so it could run off to its own little shelf, and maybe it could gather up the phone charger on the way. The charger of course would have a sleek white horse to ride ...  Ah, I wish I could draw like that.... 

More on Sarah Laing here and at her website (where she does heaps more stuff) here.

Why blog

Innovative Canadian Poet Sina Queyras waxes expansively about the business of blogging on the Poetry Foundation blog known as Harriet. Queyras' take on why she blogs - and why she experiments with her poetry so openly there - is interesting  for the Tuesday Poets amongst us as well as those who simply like (are driven to?) blog.  She begins like this....

It begins like this. Where do you find the time? That’s the question most often asked of me when the subject of blogging comes up. Particularly over the past three months of posting on Harriet, keeping up my own blog, Twittering, teaching, and so on.  There are several strands of thinking that emerge from this question for me, once one gets past the idea that of course it isn’t enough, one hasn’t done enough, or done it well enough, and there are always a barge of ideas waiting to be done…and done better. Aside from that, the idea of service arises, that to some degree it’s our responsibility to discuss the work we care about, and so there’s little choice. The idea of practice arises too, a kind of daily writerliness that helps build community as much as one’s muscle, a dailiness that has been, in a sense, transferred to the public realm. Finally my belief that no writing is wasted. 

More here . Then look at some of the other Harriet posts. Astonishing stuff. 

A Year of Blogging

I realised when I did a video-conference on 'authors who blog' with Rachael King that I'd been blogging for a year! It seems longer - but no, I started in April 2008. So in honour of that I've inserted a section into the right-hand panel with all the subjects I've blogged on. It's a bit long to have it there all the time, but it's kind of wonderful to have it up for a day or two. Like a flag declaring my interests, passions, obsessions around The Blue and books and writing, and then there are those loose threads, stray thoughts, glimpses of other things flapping around too ...

I'm off to the bookshop now to sell a few books, and to - frankly - be a bit overwhelmed by the number of books out there, new ones every week. Sometimes, one more book from me seems like a stray snowball in an avalanche.

Swing

This is my daughter Issy. Isabel. It was taken five years ago when I took the family to Arapawa Island for research for The Blue. That's the mouth of Tory Channel behind her. She and her brothers loved the rope swing, the way it flung them out towards the steep drop to the water and brought them safely back.

Issy's been very unwell lately - stopped unexpectedly over the steep drop and struggling to get back - so I haven't thought of blogging this past week. There was nothing in me to write about. I needed energy and optimism. And then my computer started doing strange things and I couldn't use the internet, so there was no blog-watching either.

Nothing for it but to spend the spare moments, when Issy didn't need me, on marking the last of those creative writing papers, polishing up that manuscript assessment and sorting out the boxes of writing notebooks I've collected. I forgot I had so many (all those fragments of thoughts and observations - what to do with them?)

I also started reading to Issy again: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book which I blogged on here. It's terrific so far. The sort of thrill I got from the beginning of Great Expectations, and the Leon Garfield books I read as a teenager.

The Blue has provided some entertainment on National Radio every morning. An odd experience, but I'm warming to it. I found the way the finished, crafted work (the novel) had been cut to create a new work difficult at first. Things are juxtaposed differently, events left out, the fine balance I tried to achieve between action and thought in a character, changed. But of course it had to be done, and some of the changes are felicitous.

The actors' voices take the text away now, and it's as if I'm looking at the story from the outside and can appreciate it anew. I even cried at one point! It's actually a fine adaptation by Frances Edmond, directed by Jane Waddell, and it moves me to think of people sitting at home and in their cars, and listening to it.

And Issy's getting better, although she is a little fragile.

I wish we had a swing in our garden like we used to - it was nothing like the Arapawa Island rope swing - but it did the job.

Late News: I have just realised this is my 101st post on O Audacious Book. Goodness, so many. Thank you to all my regular visitors and those who just fall here out of the sky - the man from Portugal who commented on this post for one.

Blogging, a beacon

Dove grey reader is a book blogger worth reading for her thoughtful reviews, and insights into life in Devon. One recent review was of Susan Hill's new book The Beacon which she recommends highly:

What plays out before your eyes is a very very clever economical sleight of pen, no over-egging of this pudding, good solid story-telling, beautifully written and yet what lies beneath is left to the reader to fathom so I wonder what conclusions others will reach when they turn that final page?

Interestingly, a comment on this post notes the sudden disappearance of Susan Hill's blog which included a creative writing forum (she continues to have a website.) This is followed immediately by another comment, from a Janis Goodman:

I had also been missing her [Susan Hill's] blog and emailed her today - she replied saying that she has given up blogging entirely. It made me think about the strange relationship the reader (and occasional contributor) has with the blogger. I felt a bit as if door had been unexpectedly slammed in my face. Perhaps it would have felt better if she had felt able to blog her decision and leave the blog up in cyberspace as an archive, for a while. I suspect that a lot of us have been revisiting her blog, wondering if all was well and if there was a technical problem with the blog - as seemed at first. Obviously she has every right to give it up - it's simply that her readership has been instantly disenfranchised.
Posted by: Janis Goodman Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 01:02 PM

Other comments follow expressing the same feeling of regret and loss.

Writers blog for all sorts of reasons, but most of us who do it seem to agree blogging is a stimulating and useful precursor to writing fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Rachael King and Vanda Symon are two NZ writers who have declared this to be so. In some cases, it becomes an end in itself as another form of essay or creative non-fiction or book review. Ex-pat kiwi essayist Martin Edmond apparently talked of the benefits of blogging at his recent Writers Read presentation at Massey University, and he mentions in one post how he feels when he doesn't blog:

It is perhaps not useful to think of a weblog as a site of publication but that's how it always seems to me. Not a notebook or a diary because those forms do not assume an immediate readership of more than one. On the other hand, I also feel a kind of pressure to post regularly here even when there is nothing urgent to say. When a week goes by, as it has, and I post nothing, I start to feel as if some essential activity has lapsed even though that's probably not so.

It's salutary what he manages to pack in when he doesn't blog! Dovegrey reader seems to have started her blog as an ordinary common-and-garden reader and is now on UK publishers' lists as someone to send a book for review. Bookman Beattie seems to have carved a similar space for himself in the NZ review lists.

It is also increasingly recognised that blogging gives a writer a much-needed web presence in this day and age. I began O Audacious Book to put The Blue out into cyberspace when the bookshop sales started to falter a little (pre the Montana Awards) and it's certainly been useful for that, the highlight being when an Israeli publisher wanted to buy the rights for translation and asked me to email him via the blog. But however it started, my blog immediately became more than a publicity tool.

Like the reading journal I wrote while working on The Blue as part of my MA, I find blogging helps my free-floating ideas to settle and my thoughts cohere so I can apply them to my fiction. And like Edmond, I also enjoy this new non-fiction writing form - the journalist in me still looking for a place to settle, I suppose - especially the chance to rant about my passions and pet hates. A writer like Denis Welch enjoys this freedom to the full.

Finally, the blog actively introduces me to interesting writing about writing and books, through visitors to my blog commenting or linking or just visiting. In fact it opens up all sorts of interesting blogs.

I am kept company, entertained and encouraged by my regular blog-visits. I am constantly reminded, for example, that all writers go through moments of exhilaration and serious self-doubt, and that almost all of us work from home alone and need - and don't need - distracting company. As someone said, once, it is like the all-important 'water cooler' chat other people get at work.

So, another reason to write a blog: a sense that I am adding to this cyber-conversation, especially for my 'regulars' (I say that with as much hope as confidence). On the other hand, I know I can spend too much time on it when I should be writing a novel, and sometimes I do wonder if my peregrinations are merely a chat with a water cooler, no human ears in sight.

I mull over what keeps me visiting particular blogs and try and convince myself O Audacious Book might fulfil some of those criteria for some blog readers. Here they are: the quality of the thoughts and the writing I find there, the information offered and the character of the blog itself. The best writer blogs for me have a wide-ranging intelligence, passion, quirkiness, commitment, a sense of fun and aren't afraid of controversy.

Like a good novel, in the end it all comes down to 'voice', surely. Regular posting is important too. The conversation has to be alive. And like any friend, there has to be a similar world view, things in common, and even - if you're lucky - a willingness to step out and be counted as a friend (See the comments on Shroedinger's Tabby's post on the anniversary of her father's death, or comments on Gondal-girl's blog when she threatened to stop blogging - couldn't find the latter but they're in there somewhere).

Which makes me feel for the followers of Susan Hill's blog. To go looking and find an unexplained absence would be very upsetting. Like losing a - well - a friend. This surprises me a little to say it as I wouldn't have thought it was so before I started this lark.

So shame on Susan Hill for deleting her blog without so much as a warning. And a plea to all the bloggers I visit - see the blog roll on the right - not to do the same. If you're even so much as thinking about it, let me know, I can counsel you.