The Exercise Book

Reviewed this fabulous book on National Radio Wednesday - you can listen to it by clicking on the player above (you need to jig the little dot on the left a little to get it moving for some reason).

Terrific exercises in this book for the beginning writer, for teachers of creative writing courses to plunder, and for established writers who want a pick-me-up. It's been put together by the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington to fund their scholarship programme.

I've already used some of the exercises with an adult writing group I'm running locally and had huge success with them - tried a few myself, and been excited by the results. Some of the exercises are old chestnuts, others are brand new, and range from the randomly crazy e.g. Hinemoana Baker's 'Remix Mashup' to get to a poem -- to a careful unlayering of writerly craft e.g. Laurence Fearnley's exercise on writing the Big Scene in a novel.

There are warming up exercises, exercises that 'steal' from other writers, memory prompts, script writing and performance exercises and much more. Something like 60 writers contributed from Baker and Fearnley to David Vann from the US. Highly recommended.

Thursday update: My heart goes out to Radio NZ staff as they mourn the death of their colleague Phil Cottrell murdered in the weekend. While I was doing the book review, Kathryn Ryan was handed the media release about two young men being charged with his murder. You can hear the paper crackling while I'm talking. She was visibly upset as she read it out after the review ended, but being a consummate professional she continued on with the show.

the summer without men (review)

Reviewed The Summer without Men by Siri Hustvedt on National radio this morning. What a book! I wasn't well yesterday and read it in one blissful afternoon. Absolutely recommended. As one reviewer said about Hustvedt's last novel, 'The Sorrows of an American': it's “a rare writer who can rouse the mind and grip the heart”.

This is the story of Mia, 55, whose husband wants a 'pause' in their relationship so he can pursue a French colleague (henceforth called 'The Pause'), leaving her in a situation where she finds herself having a 'pause from men' of all sorts, at the same time as going through the 'menopause'.

Shot through with cleverness, mordant humour, insight, and warmth, the novel explores the quotidien domestic life of women (Mia herself, her elderly Mum and her mates The Swans, a bunch of pubescent female would-be poets, a neighbour with young children ...) and shores it up with references to gender studies, literature, evolutionary biology, philosophy, magic - you name it. Not a straight narrative at all, this novel is a ragbag of everything from poetry to book notes to lectures to lists, and there are the welcome metafictional devices (used so wonderfully by the author's husband Paul Auster) when the author intervenes, when the reader becomes a character...

Ultimately this is a subversive book - like the subversive applique art the elderly Abigail sews inside her tea cosies and table runners. You have to be on your toes.

If you're like me, you'll laugh, puzzle, rage, and - yes - as Mia puts it in the book: take it like a woman, and weep.

[For more, check out the review.]

Can't teach an old popcorn machine... and my Best Books 2010

I had 8.5 minutes on National Radio to barrel through my Best Books for 2010, and barrel I did - despite my best intentions to go for the unhurried conversational pace of the lovely Graham Beattie who offered up his Best Books yesterday.

I have so much I want to say to do justice to the chosen books, and although I try to cull some of my thoughts to - you know - take a breath, they just come popping out unbidden and unstoppable like popcorn from a popcorn machine.

The great thing is I said most of what I wanted to say. Eight and a half minutes is a good amount of time for the review slot (Graham managed manfully on just over five), so I was lucky. And host Kathryn Ryan is a good sort, batting at the flying popcorn with a grin on her face, chomping on the odd one, and licking the butter off her fingers.

Click here for the review with Kathryn.

Here are my Best Books:

1. Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller by Kathleen Jones (Penguin NZ)
2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate)
3. Ephraim's Eyes by Brian Walpert (Rose Pewter Press)
4. How the Land Lies by Pat White (VUP)
5. These I Have Loved edited by Harvey McQueen (Steele Roberts)


And if you have trouble with the link to the review, I've had a listen back and fleshed out my notes so you can read at your leisure....

Best Books 2010: Nine to Noon 

1.    Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller by Kathleen Jones (Penguin - biography)

This book took ten years to write and is meticulously researched using new material in public domain.

I met Kathleen, a UK writer, when she visited NZ last year. She reached into her pocket and produced a brooch which had belonged to Katherine Mansfield, and was a gift from an elderly woman who’d known KM and Ida Baker. It was a gesture of thanks to the author for her sympathetic and sensitive approach to Mansfield's life. It is sympathetic writing - a story tenderly told in the language of a poet, which Kathleen Jones is. 

Most biographies have an elegiac tone in looking back over  a life - this bio has a sense of real time, of events unfolding in front of us. Two reasons: the precise details of KM’s life are given every step of the way as we follow her moving around different houses and countries, seeking a place to settle down and write, and later a cure; the structure is unusual - going back and forward in time, including on into John Middleton Murry’s life and marriages after Katherine. 

2.    Freedom by Jonathan Franzen [4^th Estate - novel]

Like his hit novel Corrections, Freedom is one of those old time literary novels - the Epic. 

It's the story of an American middle class mid-western American family in turmoil : late 70s to today (Patty & Walter Berglund and their two children). It looks at the impact of modern life on their lives and the impact of their lives on the planet. There are dollops of familial love & hate, lust and betrayal, and the book is packed with political and environmental issues e.g. over-consumption/over-population/loss of birds/Iraq war. 

Freedom is hectic, funny, erudite, intensely psychological with precise, layered characters that are beyond being hateful or loveable – they just are.

3.    Ephraim’s Eyes by Bryan Walpert (Pewter Rose Press – short stories, available at Unity, Bruce McKenzie's and other independent bookstores, or online e.g. Book Depository)

Bryan Walpert is an American who lives in NZ, an academic and poet. 

Like Franzen, his characters are pitch-perfect with authentic lives, but there's nothing hectic or epic about these stories. They are what I call Black Diamonds: crafted, polished, cerebral, compact with a dark undertow – and cleverly linked.

Brian won the Manhire Science Prize for  one of the stories; he often uses prism of science and philosophy to explain life’s vicissitudes. He believes the way to the heart is through the head. Their impact reminds of Charlotte Grimshaw’s story collections. 

Each story contains someone’s grief - man damaged by war who owns a magic shop and finds himself teaching tricks to a needy boy, a man whose job is to check billboards for damage but who is taken up with checking the perceived wreck of his own life, a woman with a secret needs a new cupboard, and gets a mycologist in as a flatmate to help pay for it.

Now two other New Zealanders whose work has had an impact on me this year: 

4.    How the Land Lies by Pat White [VUP - memoir/essays]

This book charts the life of a man who felt the odd one out in a West Coast family. Sensitive, intellectual and vulnerable, he was drawn to art and poetry rather than farming. He writes of how he lived on the land down South and ended up in the Wairarapa growing olives. This book is also a contemplation on the healing and overarching power of nature – and of the need for people to slow down and take care of and enjoy what is god-given.

There are two outstanding chapters on the kahu/falcon and the power to be had in walking, and a  tender evocation of the Wairarapa and of farming there. 

5. These I Have Loved ed. By Harvey McQueen [Steele Roberts - anthology]

The last book by poet, educationalist, and ground-breaking anthologist Harvey McQueen who sadly died on Christmas Day. This is an anthology of a 100 NZ poems Harvey loved. A great range from old classics like Milking Before Dawn by Ruth Dallas to James K Baxter to Jenny Borndholdt to Mark Pirie’s poke at NZ nature poems.

It's like reading one of my mother's well-thumbed anthologies for its comfortableness. Harvey mentioned one of them: 'Other Men's Flowers' by Lord Wavell as an inspiration. 

Wonderful introductions to each section giving the reader a taste of what one of Harvey’s students said was – ‘the best poetry teacher I ever had’. They put poets and poems in context and give them each  Harvey's personal stamp of approval. This is the same unhurried, erudite, thoughtful writing as This Piece of Earth, Harvey’s wonderful memoir of life in his garden which bids us all to take more time to reconnect with the earth.      

Harvey McQueen's Memorial Service is 11 am tomorrow Friday January 28 at Old St Paul's Mulgrave Street, Wellington. 

Lovers in the Age of Indifference

I reviewed Lovers in the Age of Indifference by Xiaolu Guo on National Radio today. A powerful collection of short stories by the author of the Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, who lives in London and Beijing. I didn't say everything I wanted to say, but I did get a good chunk of time on radio today which was wonderful, and gave me a chance to read an extract as well as natter. So here's the review

Mirabile Dictu

Reviewed this marvellous book of poetry this morning on National Radio. Here's the link.

If you don't want to listen, here are my notes tidied up and joined into sensible sentences...

This is Michele Leggott's 7th book. She is the inaugural NZ Poet Laureate [2007-9] and has just finished her term. She is losing her sight to retinitis pigmentosa. She has spoken movingly of this in her previous collection AS FAR AS I CAN SEE: "I give what is left of the light of my eyes, I have fallen out of a clear sky."

Mirabile Dictu is a year in the life of the Laureate. She wrote a poem a week. At 154 pages, her AUP publisher pointed out it is the same length as a novella. Some poems are as long as eight pages. He says that as Poet Laureate she's gained confidence and knows now she has our attention.

BLINDNESS: The poems capture the darkening world of Michele Leggott and show how she copes: learns to touch type, uses a white stick, deals with grief, travels around NZ and to Italy, tracks the history of her family – joins with family and friends in funerals/weddings/feasts. And writes poems.

POETIC EMPORIUM [from the Greek emporos – a journey]: This is how Michele Leggott describes this collection. It starts with a bunch of poets heading to Hone Tuwhare’s funeral and ends with a wedding. A host of other poets are hauled in by name along the way. There are literal journeys and then the poet's interior journey from light to darkness and then back to another kind of vision.

The poems overlap, breathe on each other, are linked by themes and images [the sky, birds, water, singing.] There is a development through the collection from the early despair of the title poem Mirabile Dictu - "only now/has my hand found the stones/I could add to the smooth interior /of my despair" – to the final poems which are lightened/enlightened and show her rediscovery of the miraculous including Wonderful to Relate [Mirabile Dictu translated] which is about a family reunited at the wedding.

In between there is the "breathing world" which is lit by "flashes of brilliance" and the fire/ahi of poetry and inspiration. "Not a white stick but a sky", she says. The sky to Leggott is light and inspiration and beauty and the miraculous and is embodied in the sky-blue tokotoko which she carries as Laureate.

‘here is the light/here is the darkness/look between them and sing/for we are the breathing world’

FINDING POEMS: they are in pockets, tucked inside books, ‘sometimes you meet the title/walking home and the first lines/present themselves at the corner …’ Leggott follows a trail into the university clock tower to track down two elephant skulls and writes a poem about them. There are snatches of language everywhere, and her delight in the history of words : in one poem, people look for vegetables while she looks for the latin word for "really big flower".

TE KIKORANGI: this is the name of Leggott's exquisite sky-blue Tokotoko [here they both are on the left]. An engraved pool cue, its power is an important part of this collection. It features as a CUE to write, an INSPIRATION [its name means the sky] and a PROD: in one wonderfully humorous poem reminiscent of Tuwhare, the stick tells her to write a poem and then goes "back to cooking up/a feed of mussels from Kawhia."

Leggott doesn't use punctuation, instead the lines have gaps which act like the breath in before the rush of words out. These poems have beauty and humour, they sing and rage, they are full of the serendipity and miraculousness of life. Read them and marvel.