I say to horror, 'What do you look like under your hockey mask, your bloodstained cocktail frock?' Elizabeth Knox

Elizabeth Knox writes movingly and insightfully on caring for a loved person through a long illness – and how caring for her mother has changed her world view and introduced her to the experience of despair. She talks too of how having a sister who was different from the norm made her write differently:  fantasy and horror instead of 'literature'. This from the inaugural Margaret Mahy lecture delivered this year and published by VUP: 

For instance, I say to horror, 'What do you look like under your hockey mask, your bloodstained cocktail frock? Show me your body. Your bones.' I walk into the house-of-horror-genre and melt away its grossly figured wallpaper, the shadow on the alcove of its stairs, its dirty glass, its shuttered windows. I melt away the walls themselves until what is left is the frame, a stark figure around an empty volume, and then I call into it my own storms; outer, other darknesses; the real things in life that aren't reconcilable with living rationally, happily and confidently. Such as what illness does to us – to our selves – before we die. And how, even with all the organisation and energy, and goodwill in the world, there is only so much effective help we can offer one another. And in the end how careless a world bursting with causes is with all those devoted to the long cause of care... 

.... So why do I write non-realist fiction now that I'm all grown up? Today's answer  has to be that I can best make sense of the sadness I feel by acknowledging what catches you when you're in despair – then laughs about it. 

Elizabeth Knox read at the wonderful Litcrawl in Wellington last night. People packed into venues around the a small area of the central city and heard poets and storytellers read their work, and then walked to the next event and the next. Yes, packed!

the angelic conversation

Thank you Rachael King for finding the trailer for The Vintner's Luck!

I can't wait. And I can't wait to read Knox's The Angel's Cut [ where Xas from VL hits Hollywood] but it's on hold while I finish Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal which is up for the Montanas in a week's time.

There's a fascinating interview with Catton in The Times Online. And really, this young woman - a mere 24 years old - is a stellar talent. With the Vintner's Luck movie in my head at the moment, I can't help but think that that Catton is a talent in the way of Elizabeth Knox: each of them ignores literary fashion and forges a singular, highly original voice.

Wellington's Writers on Monday series has Knox speaking on August 17 at Te Papa 12.15-1.15 pm. Meanwhile, this week's Writers on Monday event [July 20, Te Papa's Soundings Theatre, 12.15] is a curtain-raiser for Montana Poetry Day on Friday with some Best NZ Poems being read by the poets that penned them. And there are some more poets reading at Unity Books on Friday lunchtime [July 24] from 12.30 including the likes of Alison Wong and Airini Beautrais.

I'd highly recommend abandoning the usual lunchtime chit-chat for these snippets of the angelic conversation.

Persecuted by ideas - the inner life of Elizabeth Knox

I have skimmed and am now reading page by page Elizabeth Knox's wonderful collection of essays The Love School: Personal Essays. I am a terrible skimmer of non-fiction, especially exciting non-fiction. But I really must settle and read it properly because everything I've caught sight of so far has been the stuff that David Larsen describes as making 'the world tilt'. It is truly a fascinating insight into the mind of one of this country's most imaginative and successful writers and Larsen's review does it justice.

Rather than try and replicate that, here are some of the bits and pieces I've collected on Elizabeth Knox over the past few months, planning at some stage to post something on her on O Audacious Book. As happens, I still have the notes scrawled in red ink in one of my moleskine notebooks, and a tatty old review or two and nothing more substantial. So rather than dally any longer, here they are ...
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Most of the notes were scrawled down when I heard Elizabeth Knox speak at the NZ Post National Schools Writing Festival at Victoria University in August. She was her usual frank self - talking deeply and absorbingly about why she writes and what she writes. One student asked her where she got all her ideas from and she said: 'I'm persecuted by ideas, I know what I'm going to write for the next ten years.'
On what to write about: 'I wait for something that is so exciting it's driving me crazy. I have a lot of ideas but I don't always know which end to start it from.'
To other writers: 'Take what really blows up your skirt and take an angle on it - something you haven't thought about before.' And 'every idea is a whole lot of ideas bundled up together.'
On the physicality of finishing the Dreamhunter books: 'The matrix of the whole story was falling out of my head and my brain was unravelling. It was physical. A very strange feeling.'
On her new novel The Angel's Cut - the 'sequel to The Vintner's Luck' due out soon: 'Xas is so pleased with himself and so powerful and so ruined at the end (of TVL). And you start with the ruined Xas in The Angel's Cut.'
Knox says she was preoccupied with flight in The Angel's Cut. 'Xas lost his wings in Vintner's Luck. He's very small and thinks he's an insignificant (? or maybe she said 'significant'?) angel. He's been wandering the earth since he lost his love Sobran.... He's been back in the air including on a zeppelin in WWI in an airshow in France...'
On the the negative reaction to Black Oxen: 'I was walking down the street and I thought 'I don't want anyone to look at me.''
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I have kept a Listener review of The Vintner's Luck when it came out ten years ago (it has been stunningly re-issued to celebrate its tenth anniversary). The review is by writer Peter Wells and reminds me of the excitement so many people felt on reading Vintner's Luck all those years ago and continue to feel, and the excitement many of us have felt ever since when we see Knox's name on another new novel.

The truth is, you never know what to expect when you open that fresh shiny cover, but you do know it'll be a ride to remember. Appositely, at the school writing festival this year, Knox read a scene from The Angel's Cut which described Xas on a rollercoaster in the US. It was sensational. Literally. I barely wrote a word I was so taken up with experiencing the physical sensation of that ride. I did record a single quote that has no context but clearly stunned me at the time: 'left that person's hungry skin.'

Here's Peter Wells (The Listener 1998):

Reading The Vintner's Luck, I was reminded of why we read. We read to evade the weight of time ('Despair is gravity' - Elizabeth Knox.) We read also to experience the pleasure, almost unseen, of a beautiful construction, an airy theorem that exists only in words on the page and inside our heads. We read also to forget who or where we are. As Elizabeth Knox says, 'Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or neighbours.'