Zombies and Mansfield and me

Zombies - nothing to do with KM - it's a short film my daughter
(centre, white jacket)  is in called A PARTY FOR ME (dir. Amy Brosnahan) 

Oh the bliss of language. Just now, this morning, sitting with coffee in dressing gown (yes, a bad habit, but if I get dressed there will be things to do), I am filled with it, like Bertha in Katherine Mansfield's Bliss is filled with the glowing pear tree against the jade sky.

I have been reading Mansfield you see - but not via the usual route. The book I am close to finishing is Mansfield with Monsters (Steam Press) to review on Wednesday on Nine to Noon (Radio NZ). These are Katherine Mansfield's classic stories but with the gothic/troubled element developed by authors Matt and Debbie Cowens via zombies and vampires and other beings of the horror genre. I know, weird. But I'm enjoying it! The version of The Doll's House in here will not allow me to read 'I seen the little lamp' the same way again.

It's been bliss reading KM's marvellous language again, fun to try out this zombie stuff (not my usual milieu), and then there's the added pleasure of digging out my copies of her original stories and enjoying those too - the ones I know and the ones I don't.

More language tumbling about me this week ...in the form of tantalising extracts of Kirsty Gunn's new novel The Big Music out there on the internet (see previous blogpost) and I see there was a rave review in The Independent this weekend calling The Big Music a masterpiece! Fantastic.

And there's more. I have finished my children's book. I thought I had finished it a couple of month's back, I told a few close friends and my children so, but I couldn't quite let it go (another bad habit). I let it sit on the computer here. Popped in and out. Fiddled. Yesterday. Done. I can't quite believe it (which is probably why I've buried the announcement in the middle of a post).

I have also finished a short story to share with my lovely local writing group tonight. It's been sitting on file for 25 years  - weirder and weirder - and troubling me for some time. I loved it as it was but no-one else did that I showed it to. I started revamping it for the Grimm fairy tale competition (rewrite one of the classic fairy tales as a modern tale) but failed to get it done in time (fancy that).

I believe the new version is better, although the old story is ghostlike behind it... and having read KM's Bliss this weekend, I realise that what I had before was something that had that sort of rush of unmanageable feeling about it - I hadn't thought that until now - while the new story doesn't, is more prosaic somehow, but despite that, is more engaging emotionally? Anyway, I'll be interested to see what the group thinks. 


It just shows what a writing group can do. Deadlines and expectations are good for me. Trust, too - we trust each other with our work: drafts, meanderings, rewrites .... There are seven of us - men and women - ranging in age from 40s to 80+ and writing a range of genres including spy thriller, horror, children's fiction, creative non-fiction, literary fiction, poetry, memoir... with half of us shifting around between those genres from week to week and the other half sticking to ongoing projects. We meet monthly and we have a meeting tonight. I am so looking forward to it. 


Meanwhile, I guess I should get dressed and walk the dog. In its own way, bliss. 

More than a book, it's a feeling - Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music launched

"The hills only come back the same: I don’t mind, and all the flat moorland and the sky. I don’t mind they say, and the water says it too, those black falls that are rimmed with peat, and the mountains in the distance to the west say it, and to the north . . . As though the whole empty wasted lovely space is calling back at him in the silence that is around him, to this man out here in the midst of it, in the midst of all these hills and all the air. That his presence means nothing, that he could walk for miles into these same hills, in bad weather or in fine, could fall down and not get up again, could go crying into the peat with music for his thoughts maybe, and ideas for a tune, but none of it according him a place here, amongst the grasses and the water and the sky . . . Still it would come back to him the same in the silence, in the fineness of the air . . . I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind. 

"Is what there is to begin with, a few words and the scrap of a tune put down for the back of the book in some attempt to catch the opening of the thing, how it might start. With this image of a man, born 83 years ago down out of these same hills, and how he might think now how the land doesn’t mind him, never has. Here he is walking in up the strath towards that far bend in the river and the loudest note could sound in his head and him follow it with a sequence and still this country, his country, would keep its own stillness and only give back to him the louder quiet, like the name of the tune itself could be I don’t mind, is what he’ll call it, ‘Lament for Himself’.[1]"

Extract from The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn, launched this month. 

Kirsty Gunn's fifth novel The Big Music (Faber) was launched in London last night after an earlier Dundee launch. A kiwi by birth and upbringing, and a fellowVictoria University student/debater/Bill Manhire Original Composition classmate, Kirsty lives in both those places now - England and Scotland, and the book is set in its own landscape of music and rhythm and language and the Scottish Highlands.

It is more than a book, too, this book -- it is the inspiration for the film made by Gary M Gowers, for the 'Pebroch' bagpipe music written by her father (heard on the film), for an art installation created by her sister Merran. Hear Kirsty and Merran and Gary talking about the project below. For more on Kirsty, her book events, a longer extract from her book go here. If you're pondering whether or not to investigate this book further. Read the reviews below. I am in no doubt that as with her other novels, The Big Music is more than a book, it is a feeling, a thing, an experience.

“More than a dappled tale, an allegory, or history, The Big Music is a landscape; a work of longing fragments that collect on a journey and grow to light lands before, around, and after them. It’s a hike that makes us feel not so much Scotland as Scottish, and whose flavours, like the title’s theme, cannot be made small. Haunting and spacious.”dbc Pierre, author of  the Man Booker prize winning Vernon God Little

“I emerged from The Big Music blown away by the pulse and force of such fearless writing. It is beautiful, powerful work. Gunn has written to a rhythm and not to a plot – as Virginia Woolf urges – and she has written a landscape I didn’t want to leave. Gunn terrain! How deeply I love this book, a magnificent tour de force.” Jane Goldman, General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. 

UPDATE 9/7/12: NEW REVIEW FROM THE INDEPENDENT CALLING 'THE BIG MUSIC' A MASTERPIECE

"Kirsty Gunn has set herself a fearsome task. Writing about music, which lies at the heart of this "novel" (the quote marks are hers), is so difficult that almost everyone who tries, fails. And hers is a music which many find inaccessible, and some have never even heard of: the piobaireachd, the formal music of the Highland bagpipes. To take that, and to show us at its heart a love-song and a lullaby: she is a brave woman even to try.

The result isn't what you'd call a success; not even a qualified success. The result is a masterpiece. Gunn solves the problem she has set herself, not by writing about the music but, by some strange meticulous magic, writing within it." Michael Bywater, The Independent 7/7/12

Tuesday Poem: Four Poets to a Cottage

Walk in on them, four poets eating scones, plates

on their laps, caught like teapots in a cupboard. That

room, once the music room, once a bedroom

for spinster sisters, built in a time of family bibles,

angular blue glass bottles, brick chimneys. 

The room now: bar heater, laptop, plate

of softening butter, poets of some standing,

sitting at odd angles, collar bone, ankle bone, 

swallowing cooling tea in gulps, eyes shifting

to the blocked fireplace, the unprepossessing ceiling,

not letting on a feeling that the air is constricted, that

they are the wrong size doll for this doll’s house,

that the chimney creaks, could well be falling, that

in a cavity in the ceiling, a child’s clothes were found.

                                                                        Mary McCallum

It's the AGM of the Randell Cottage Friends Committee tonight at 7 pm at the cottage: 14 St Mary Street Thorndon, all welcome. After a brief meeting, we'll have drinks to celebrate the first 10 years of the writer residency. All welcome. 

I am the Chair of the Friends Committee as well as being a Trustee, so I will be there with bells on. The Randell Cottage Writers Trust is a writers residency in the 1867 Randell Cottage in Thorndon, and I wrote this poem when Kirsty Gunn was living there - an expat NZer who'd come home. She invited some fellow poets to tea and scones and they came. 

Btw, Kirsty has just published a new novel Big Music with Faber. Thrilling. If you're in London, the launch is at James Daunt's on Holland Park Avenue from 6 pm, Wednesday July 4. Here's a video about the book. 

It's Tuesday - so check out a fabulous CHEESE poem on the Tuesday Poem hub (click the Tuesday Poem quill in my sidebar) or go HERE, and then check out the cheesy and non-cheesy poems in the sidebar there. Definitely worth a look.

Wanderings

Here it is, JAAM 27, Wanderings, edited by Ingrid Horrocks. And in it, you can find me wandering around with the likes of Martin Edmond, Kirsty Gunn, Tina Makareti, Helen Lehndorf, Vana Manasiadis, Vivienne Plumb, Johanna Aitchison.... and thirty or so magnificent others.

My piece is called More Things on Heaven and Earth, Margaret. It is creative non-fiction this time, a genre that I've worked at as a journalist and a blogger, but not much outside of those spheres, and not daring to give it a fancy title like that. It pleases me enormously to see it here - one of only seven non-fiction pieces. The rest of JAAM 27 is short stories [11], a healthy stack of poems, and some colour images from Mike Ting.

The brief from Ingrid said she was interested in work about wanderers and travellers as well as works 'that digress in creative ways from narrative, argument or genre.' So my non-fiction effort is about fiction and real life and how they collide sometimes in unexpected ways. I still like it on re-reading, although I can't help but feel how meagre it is up against all the other stuff, not least the moody Kirsty Gunn story it nudges in

the line-up.

I'm still reading JAAM 27, but already it strikes me that there is a certain mood to it that reflects its editor - a writer of travel memoir, a poet and academic: Quiet. Calm. Reflective. Cerebral. Compassionate. In tune with the physical world.

The pieces I've read so far throw up a world where nothing is known for sure, but where the questions asked are not angry or bitter or tired, but rather simple questions posed in whole sentences on a wind-blown hill where 'macrocarpas/ kneel down and pray' [The Sinews of Ohau Bay by Keith Westwater] or beside a secret lake in the warmth of the sun [Memorial by Kirsty Gunn].

Water certainly features in this journal - water to lie beside and cross and walk through as rain. There are a lot of trees, too, and a reassuring amount of earth to anchor things. 'Worm leavings' even [in the end by Tina Makereti]. The physicality of the world we know triggers thought or holds it. Like it did for the Romantics, I suppose, except that there is less certainty here, more flux, boundaries that blur. And there are babies at the breast, wedding dresses with stories to tell, characters in novels that turn up elsewhere, and text messages that 'don't always arrive intact' [from The Thousand Ruby Galaxy by Martin Edmond]

That feeling, she knows now, looking back on all this, of getting 'lost' on that holiday as Karl had said they were when he'd woken up to find himself somewhere unexpected, was not being lost at all. It was the feeling, at the minute of letting it fall over her and claim her as she lay on the grass, of herself, who she was, what she wanted, what she didn't want. [Memorial by Kirsty Gunn]

Welcome to the shifting world of JAAM 27. More details here.

Note - The art work on the cover is by Rachel Walker and called Falling Through Time.

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.

Always smelling of blood

The McKays came in most weekends, or that's how it seemed anyhow, and always smelling of blood. Everyone knew they killed their animals. Uncle Neil, but the
boys too, he taught them how to do it, then they'd all walk in through Gran's kitchen door Saturday morning, smiling the big white smiles like they had knives in them and carrying in their arms their parcels of meat.


"A beast...." That's what Uncle Neil called it, the thing that they were bringing in. Not cow, or sheep, or deer, only, "I've got a beast for you here..." like it had never been alive on the farm, a creature with eyelashes and breath, but was altogether different and now it was dead.

"Hey."

That was Davey. He was the eldest, and kind of like a man. He never used to say "Hello". just "Hey" like that, while he chewed gum. "Pull in, will you, so I can get past..."

Extract from 44 THINGS by Kirsty Gunn [Atlantic] 25. Now I can see how it was, I think.

Come and hear Kirsty Gunn read from this astonishing story and other work including her work-in-progress which has Katherine Mansfield as its subject. She is speaking as part of the Writers Read series, THURSDAY AUGUST 6, 6 PM, Massey University Wellington campus, Buckle Street Entrance [follow the signs to the Theatrette] or FRIDAY AUGUST 7, 7 PM, Palmerston North City Library.

I'm chairing both events and looking forward to discussing Kirsty's work and her search for a new form that eshews the 'narrative arc'. She spoke on Monday at Te Papa and captivated the audience with the insights into her writing life.

Kirsty is pictured above at Randell Cottage Thorndon where she is the writer in residence.

Photo Credit: Mary McCallum

Beads on a String - Kirsty Gunn's art of writing

I've read Rain again. Author Kirsty Gunn is in Wellington as writer-in-residence at the Randell Cottage - a NZer, she's returned home from the UK and Scotland to pursue a project centred on Katherine Mansfield - and it's been a pleasure to catch up with her and hear her speak about and read from her work, and talk about other writers and their work.

It made me want to read something of Kirsty's again. So I opened up Rain. The lyricism and tautness in this short novel makes re-reading - not something I usually do - a wonderful pleasure. It's like reading poetry: the skilled and lovely language transports you.

When I first knew Kirsty, she was a poet like me. We were the two youngest members of one of Bill Manhire's early Original Composition workshops. There seemed to be a bunch of older, more experienced writers there including Jean Watson who published Flowers from Happyever at the end of the course. Kirsty remembers us explaining away the 'things' we brought along with the phrase 'this is just an experiment.'

Kirsty's poetic sensibility informs all of her fiction - in the way her language is exact, concise, freighted, original; and the way that language circles and pounces and uses repetition to create something incantatory, mesmeric. Rain, for example, brims with water in all its expressions. The breadth of Kirsty's vision in this concentrated drop of a novel is astonishing, almost shocking at times. Water is threatening, embracing, implacable, beautiful. The way people interact with it is an expression of them - the father with his fly fishing, the girl with her institute-learned swimming, the boy playing on the edges of the lake.

Speaking recently at a NZ Society of Authors meeting at the Thistle Inn in Wellington, Kirsty said that when she writes she gets the first line and 'a clear sense of place' and then she lets the story unfold piece by piece. By that, she means she writes a section over and over [sometimes seven or eight drafts] until it's done and then she moves on to the next section, and so on.

Kirsty Gunn:

It's like beads on a string [the way she writes a novel self-contained piece by piece ].

The story tells me what it's going to be.

She says an intense sense of place is pivotal in her work as it was in Katherine Mansfield's: the light, the colour, the setting. And she doesn't name the places but they are particular places nonetheless. Kirsty says by not naming the places she writes about she protects the privacy of the individual's sense of place. New Zealanders knew Rain was set in Taupo [there's the lake, the desert road....] but Scots imagined a lake in Scotland, Americans in America...

Then there's the tone or key of the story. Kirsty calls that her 'grounding place'. She likens this to painting and how artists build up colour layers in a painting - her novels [or 'things' as she prefers to call them] have an underlay of tone which cannot be argued with. It is, she says, like a kind of synethesia - she 'sees' the tone in the work.

Kirsty also talks about how the short story, being of limited space, sets 'an emotional temperature.' She suggests that to find this same thing in her longer work, she has been steadily shortening the time period covered - Rain is set over a summer, Keepsake at a time in a girl's life, Featherstone in a weekend, The Boy and the Sea over a summer's day.

While she's in Wellington [leaving September], Kirsty Gunn is working on a collection of short stories and a 'thing' called Thorndon which leaps genres and has Katherine Mansfield at its core. This is rather nice because the historic Randell Cottage is in Thorndon just up the road from KM's birthplace.

Kirsty will be talking more about her work at:

the IIML's Writers on Monday series: 12.15-1.15 pm, August 3 at Te Papa

the Massey University Writers Read series : 6 -7 pm, August 6 at the Wellington Campus 5D16 [Block 5] - drinks to finish, and 6 pm, August 7 at Palmerston North City Library.

These events are free. I'll be chairing the Massey events, so I'll continue to dip into Kirsty's books over the coming month or so. It's not all re-reading. Next up is 44 Things [Atlantic] which I haven't opened before - except to peek in the bookshop.

To find out more about Kirsty go here, and the Randell Cottage website will be updated with Kirsty's events over the coming weeks.

Come and hear French novelist Olivier Bleys

On Thursday 12 March 5.50-7 pm
Alliance Française
level 3, 78 Victoria Street, Wellington.

Author of more than a dozen historical novels on subjects as diverse as the construction of the Eiffel Tower, a tulip merchant in the Netherlands and the introduction of the piano to Brazil, prizewinning writer Olivier Bleys will discuss his work in English and read extracts from published and unpublished work (in French with English translation by Jean Anderson).

Olivier is French writer-in-residence at Thorndon’s Randell Cottage here in Wellington which I'm involved with - there is a French writer for six months funded by the French Government and a NZ writer for six months funded by Creative NZ. The next writer up is kiwi ex-pat Kirsty Gunn (Rain, Featherstone).

Olivier's currently working on a contemporary novel set in New Zealand about an astronomer, a meteorite and an art exhibition…

All welcome, refreshments provided.
RSVP to 04 472 1272 by 10 March appreciated.

See you there!