Writers on the Quake

Some wonderful writing is starting to come through about the Quake, the 'recollected in tranquillity' sort of writing that evokes so well the lack of tranquillity, takes you inside the place that is Christchurch but that doesn't feel like Christchurch now.

One of the best for me is Christchurch poet Joanna Preston's post, which includes these words:

People who are in shock, in pain, in distress that I can only vaguely imagine. It’s real: this disaster-movie setting is the place I chose to live in. Where I got married, where I’ve lived longer than anywhere else. Where I became a real poet. Where I made a garden, and painted walls, and had a life. My city. Beautiful, placid, gentle Christchurch. Frustrating, passionate, one-eyed Christchurch. Staunch, sod-this-we’ll-get-through-because-we’re-Cantabrians Christchurch. How could this be happening? 

Terribly moving is a poem about a young poet who lost his life in the Earthquake, posted on Bookman Beattie's blog.

And other Christchurch poets - all part of the Tuesday Poem - have drawn me in for different reasons: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman's poem approaches the aftermath of the Quake via the eyes of a fly, and actually made me laugh.  Catherine Fitchett's daily trials - the difficulties of simply registering the car, for example - are strongly drawn and make one wonder which country she's describing.  Surely not Christchurch, our Christchurch. Roll down, too, to her previous post to find a poem that expresses so well what she and Christchurch are going through.

Author and Poet Helen Lowe talks about the drudge of digging liquefaction for six days and the pain of sorting out a devastated study - the place she writes her books.

There are those who remain silent because they can't get online or can't find the words or can't find the words, and those who find other words, and those outside of the Earthquake who find the reluctant words and corral them and question them and then put them up still uncertain - Renee Liang, Jen Compton, Alicia Ponder, myself.

Careful or you'll end up in my next novel

Oh, yes, the perfect T-shirt for a writer. If you can't read the writing - it's in the title of the post. 


Not at all what I do of course - I prefer to invent rather than steal people for my novel(s), so much more fun. So much more Godlike. So much safer. Of course I still nick bits and pieces of people - a gesture of joy, a way of acting under stress, a mannerism of age, a nose ... and it's surprising how many people spot a mate or someone they think they know in a novel, even when the author's never met them. 


Anyway, you can buy this T-shirt HERE at the Literary Gift Company. There's a fab little Virginia Woolf pin, too, in the shape of a red typewriter and a perfume that smells like a paperback and a cup that says 'Go Away I'm Writing.' 


Thanks to Christchurch poet Joanna Preston for this link. And do check out her blog - she's just won the prestigious Mary Gilmore Prize for a first book of poetry in Australia, and her blog is insightful and inspiring. It's called the Dark Feathered Art, adapting a line from one of her poems: