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.

Red Mole on the Front Lawn

One of my favourite non-fiction writers – Martin Edmond – wrote this stunning piece on the way thoughts spin when you return to spinning on the lawn as a child, and this wherein the author goes on a long car ride - listens to a lot of old music and reveals Ezra Pound's reaction to Eleanor Rigby. Keep scrolling down the blog to the next post 'sparked' by driving past an Australian bushfire.

Where this man’s mind goes …. There are times when it’s some of the closest writing to the way I think I’ve ever read.

It’s addictive – I start, mean to skim one piece, and end up reading post after post on this wonderful blog. His collection of essays Waimarino County & other excursions (Auckland University Press, 2007) was short-listed in the Montanas last year. You can read more about this talented former Red Mole, poet, playwright and essayist here.

I had a great night in Hope, by the way. More on that later.

Tangled up in

beautiful writing here and here. The first one, from Marilynne Robinson's award-winning Housekeeping, is awash with light and dark, windows and reflections and water, what is glimpsed but not known. The second one by NZ writer, Martin Edmond, is delicious, edible, sensual.

Both pieces haunt you in the way straight narratives don't because these words have a longer life than words that simply work to take a character from home to the dairy. They are like long hairs that fall on pillows and in food, thicken a brush, tangle in a wool blanket. You keep finding them, picking them out, untangling them. Not sure that metaphor works that well as there is an element of irritation - the 'yuck' factor - with discarded hairs! But the endless discovery and untangling is just right, I think, and the work required.

It's interesting, too, that both writers have long sentences with a number of sub-clauses (long, curly hairs?) that are both purposeful and open-ended with room left for the reader to wonder (wander?) long after s/he has finished reading. Have a look and see.

An orchard you can take on your lap

With all the furore over the Montana Book Awards (mostly around the fact of their being only four finalists in the Fiction category not five as usual) it might pay to remind ourselves what we're all talking about.

My friend Quentin sent me this quote which he found clearing out his study. It's written by the great ninth-century intellectual Al-Jahiz in praise of the book:

Have you ever seen [elsewhere] a garden that will go into a man's sleeve, an orchard you can take on your lap, a speaker who can speak of the dead and yet be the interpreter of the living? Where else will you find a companion who sleeps only when you are asleep, and speaks only when you wish him to?

According to Wikipedia, Al-Jahiz wrote 360 books in his long life. Islamic scholar H.A.R Gibb said, 'The most genial writer of the age, if not of Arabic literature, and the founder of the Arab prose style, was the grandson of a Negro slave, Amr ben Bahr, known as Al-Jahiz, 'The Goggle-Eyed.' ' His writings brought together the knowledge and wisdom of the time, one book being about 'the skills of language and eloquence, the art of silence and the art of poetry.'

I wonder which Montana category he would have fitted into?

Links: Al-Jahiz on wikipedia, the blue swims into montana finals, the montana stoush on beattie's bookblog, martin edmond muses on his montana nomination

More recent links (added Saturday June 14): more on beattie's , hear the radio nz discussion, read it in nz herald

The Blue goes to University

The first night of Massey University's Writers Read series at the Wellington campus went off with a bang. Fifty people filled the campus venue: students, academics, writers, readers, the curious. They came to hear, well, The Blue.

The event was an hour long with quarter of an hour to read so I managed to fit in a domestic scene (Lilian and the chickens) and a whaling scene. I'm always torn about which way to go at readings, if I go one way it seems to edge out the other important aspect of the book.

There was a q & a led by Massey's Dr Ingrid Horrocks (also a writer and my boss -- she lectures on creative writing and she and I and short story writer Anna Horsley take the workshops).

Ingrid's questions were subtle and insightful, and the audience bailed in wonderfully too. The Blue came out of it well I think. Always nice for a book to get an outing like that and in such sympathetic company. So huge thanks to Massey Uni and especially Ingrid for her hard work on this one. Nice to see some of my students there...

Next up: essayist/memoirist Martin Edmond reading from his work on Thursday August 21 and novelist James George on Thursday September 25. Worth a trip into town for that. You go to Wallace Street, Entrance A, Room 5D16 i.e. Block 5, Level D, Room 16. RSVP to J.W.Fink@massey.ac.nz