Samoa once

Savai'i

she steps into the garden
on slender feet
under a hat of brimming whiteness
a startling face of teak


and round her skirts
a hundred blue butterflies rise
their wings
snippets of sky
                                              

                                              Mary McCallum

We were in Samoa 12 years ago. We stayed for six weeks. We stayed on Upolu where we swam in the deepest bluest pool with secret chambers inside the rocks, ate palusami and papaya, saw a church with an enormous round window without glass that framed the sky, and swam with schools of iridescent fish - one of which, a trigger fish, bit our son. One night an enormous beetle flew inside the shirt of our friend Leo as we sat outside in the moist night air drinking whisky. In the evenings, we drove past the matai in their shirts and dark lava lavas flanking the road. 


Every day I would try out the Samoan my friend Lualemana Tino Pereira had taught me long before that: Oamaioi? Manuia fa'afetai. I read Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel and that got me inside the fales, inside the minds of the locals, just a little bit. When we took the ferry to the 'Big Island' of Savai'i, a young woman on the upper deck told me she wasn't allowed to read Figiel because the author told stories she shouldn't about what went on inside the fales. The young woman saw the way our boys didn't always listen to what we said. She asked what my husband would do to them when we got home.


On Savai'i, we saw the blue butterflies at a place run by a family of Samoan Italians. Our younger son climbed trees with the grandson of the woman in the white hat; he picked up enormous beetles and held them in his hand. On Savai'i, we swam in a pool with giant turtles and saw one wrap its flippers - surely, lovingly - around the man who cared for it. We climbed a secret 'pyramid' that could have been built as a tower to watch for Tongan invaders. We jumped off rocks into waterfall pools and slept in a fale on the beach and watched our chubby baby daughter carried around on the hips of young Samoan women as if she weighed nothing at all. 


Back on Upolu, we stayed a few nights at a smart resort to end our visit. It was called Coconuts. It rained nearly every day but it was always hot - a hot wet heat that didn't allow things to dry properly. It was like we were always swimming. When the rain cleared, the sand was white and the water blue, a kind of perfection. One morning we woke to the news that Princess Diana had died.


Every night at Coconuts, an older Samoan man sat outside our fale to guard the baby while we went to eat. I would sit with him sometimes after we got back and we'd talk in halting English/Samoan. He told me where all his family had scattered to: New Zealand, Australia. Like many Samoans, he told me these things with pride. The children were making money and sending it back. They were doing well, achieving things. We managed to exchange a lot of information despite the language differences - so many Samoan words are similar to Maori, with an 'l' where the 'r' is. So many words for family don't need translation. Each night he would ask me, Oamaioi? And I would reply, Manuia fa'afetai, oamaioi? Manuia, he would say. Just fine.

After you've admired the tulips

The tulips at Wellington's Botanic Gardens are perfect cups of buttery yellow and blood red and streaked lipstick pink right now. I couldn't miss them when I drove past today. I recommend a visit this Sunday, and when you're sated with all that colour, pop down Glenmore Street to the elegant white nineteenth century cottage on St. Mary's Street for a quieter aesthetic experience [take a left before you hit the Bowen St. intersection and head up at a 60 degree angle.]

Here's Kirsty Gunn on the cottage in the latest issue of Booknotes:

I felt like I was coming home. Everything about the place was familiar - from the New Zealand timber floorboards to the very positioning of the sash windows that looked out to a garden of native trees and hydrangeas.

The link to the rest of that piece is up on the Randell Cottage website.

Randell Cottage is one of the city's oldest cottages built by William and Sarah Randell in 1867 and home to them and their ten children.  Now it houses a French writer over summer and a NZ writer over winter. Kirsty Gunn has just left and French-speaking Iranian exile Fariba Hachtroudi is about to arrive. A team of Randell Cottage Friends and Trustees, of which I am one, will be on hand to show you around.

And back to those tulips. Looking at this photograph [thanks to panoramio.com] reminds me of my first days in New Zealand at the age of four. We'd arrived from Bermuda by ship and were staying at the Sharella hotel - pictured behind the flowers - until we found a house to rent. I seem to remember tulips then, or perhaps they came later. It was cold and windy, for sure, but then after the hot, still, crayon-coloured world of Bermuda, that was no a surprise. I do remember the sensations on moving here of a world leached of colour, and buffetted. My memories switch suddenly from colour to black and white for a while. The edges of things were less clear.

Once we settled in, we walked alot in the Botanic Gardens on regular Sunday outings. There were bagpipers [I wanted to be one], dancers in clogs [that too], ducks, flowers, the longest slide in the world, a cable car. It was a Wonderland. Later, my friend Deborah and I would walk through the Gardens to Wellington Girls College - in bare feet when it was hot [Deb was a bit of a hippy.] Then there were late night visits with boyfriends to see the glow-worms, and one boyfriend who took me there so he could take romantic photographs beside the magnolias. Or I thought that was the plan. I was surprised to find, when they'd been developed, that he'd taken almost a whole film of the trees, including close-ups of their perfect creamy blooms, and only one with me in it.

Dear reader, I married him.

See you at Randell Cottage on Sunday.

What will survive of us is love

Two friends of mine died on September 25 a year apart. Two such different friends and such different deaths - one a successful businessman with a young family whose life was cut brutally short, the other a sculptor who'd lived a long and colourful life. My heart goes out to their families, for it's still too short a time - a year in one case, two years in the other.

English author Justine Picardi lost a sister this same week some years ago and writes - in her usual lucid and meditative way - about living with the loss in a post titled: What to read in memorium. The 'what to read' is Philip Larkin's poem 'An Arundel Tomb' which ends with: 'what will survive of us is love.'

And there are these lines which Picardi quotes:

                                      ....Light
Each Summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came...

Which is apposite. For here we are in spring again, light thronging the glass, yellow kowhai littering the ground, blossom frothing the trees, tui crazy with chortling, and I remember driving to the hospital where my friend the sculptor was dying, and stopping to steal a branch of blossom to take with me. Outside his hospital window a line of birds perched shiny in the sun waiting for him to feed them - as he did on a daily basis wherever he was.  I put my stolen blossom in a vase. I sat with him awhile and said good-bye. The birds stared at me implacably.

For my other friend it was autumn. We heard he'd kissed his family, picked up his briefcase and stepped into their leafy London street. He would have felt the nip in the air. Perhaps he was already wearing his winter coat. It was spring here, of course. The day was bright and hot when the call came, and the birds were singing at full throttle.

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.

Catton among the pigeons

Murray told me off this morning. He said he read The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton [pictured] because I was reading it as part of my blog Tea Fiction Cosy Challenge [which involved reading all the Montana Fiction Finalists], and he's been waiting ever since for me to say what I thought of it.

Murray's a teacher and he knows good teaching means following up. He wouldn't be the sort of teacher, as I sometimes am, who promises 'we'll get onto that later' and never does. I said this to him when he waylaid me this morning at the local boys' prep school where he teaches, and he laughed in a convivial colleaguey way as if he might just do that too, but I know he wouldn't. I've been in Murray's classroom, and it's super-organised and high-tech with confident boys in blue jerseys. I have no doubt if Murray says he's going to do something in class, he'll do it.

Which is why I'll write about The Rehearsal like I said I would. I feel a bit responsible, too, because Murray didn't love Catton's book. He thought it was clever, but he says he didn't always know what was going on. And he's not the only one. I got lost a few times and had to go back to make sure I had it right, and even then I'm not entirely sure ... And yes, it's clever, but Murray's tone suggested 'too clever by half', and while praising its genius, The Listener's Louise O'Brien called it 'a novel from and for the head' [not the heart]. She said, 'there is no possibility for empathy with or even sympathy for the characters.'

Okay, well The Rehearsal certainly wasn't a book that opened its coat and said 'take me', but that seems to be the whole post-modern meta-fictional point. This kind of novel makes the reader work to unlayer things and find the body underneath. Satisfying if you have the time and energy and commitment and like that kind of thing, but not if you need to 'chill' or want to read the sort of fiction that goes directly to the heart.

On the surface, The Rehearsal is a novel about a girls' school buzzing with a scandalous teacher-student love affair, a nearby drama school that acts out the scandal, and a saxophone teacher who teaches the schoolgirls and causes everything to collide. The Rehearsal of the title is the stuff the drama school does in preparing the play, but it's also what the school students and the drama students and the music students are doing to prepare for their real lives, and the sax teacher, too, for that matter. For when does the rehearsal end? And when does the performance really begin?

Catton writes her scenes as if they are rehearsals - with people in roles speaking lines that include monologues and soliloquoys. Just when a scene seems to be proceeding in a way you'd expect, a spotlight is cued or the 'scene' is replayed or a character proceeds to say the most unlikely things. The writing is incandescent at times, and the overall effect, for me, was perplexing, disarming, hilarious and, yes, eventually, moving too. The latter emerges through the 'playing out' of the self-conscious rehearsal for the real thing that is young love, and through the character of the sax teacher who watches these new shoots and remembers how it was for her, once, and considers the aridity of her life now. Truly, she is the most astonishing invention that, despite her strange role-playing reality, still manages to arouse sympathy.

'I require all of my students,' the saxophone teacher continues, 'that are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with silent fury and ardour and uncertainty and gloom. I require that they wait in the corridor for ten minutes at least before each lesson, tenderly nursing their injustices, picking miserably at their own unworthiness as one might finger a scab or caress a scar. If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong. When she realises that her body is a secret, a dark and yawning secret of which she becomes more and more ashamed, come back to me. You must understand me on this point. I cannot teach children.'

Kiss-kiss goes the snare drum over this silence.

'But she wants to learn the saxophone,' says Mrs Henderson at last, sounding ashamed and sulky at the same time. 'She doesn't want to learn the clarinet.'

Mrs Henderson leaves unsatisfied and a little later another parent arrives.

That was at four. At five there is another knock. The saxophone teacher opens the door.

'Mrs Winter,' she says, ' You've come about your daughter. Come in and we'll discuss carving her into half-hour slices to feed me week by week.'

She holds the door wide so Mrs Winter can scuttle in. It's the same woman as before, just with a different costume -- Winter not Henderson. Some other things are different too, because the woman is a professional and she has thought about the role for a long time. Mrs Winter smiles with only half her mouth, for example. Mrs Winter keeps nodding a few seconds too long. Mrs Winter inhales quietly through her teeth when she is thinking.

They both politely pretend not to notice that it is the same woman as before.

All 'stage' mothers of the world, nay mothers, read that and weep. And teachers, Murray, as we discussed, have surely never said it better.

You can get more of a taste of the genius of Eleanor Catton -- for genius it is, a gorgeous singular go-anywhere talent -- at google books preview. Or, better, just go out and buy the book. This terribly-young author is already a cat-like phenomenon in the Big Book Square of the World with its greening statues of the famous and host of perching pigeons. She's won Best First Novel here and a similar award in the UK, and is lined up for more. The book reviewers and writers' festivals love her. One UK reviewer picked The Rehearsal as the future face of the novel.

All I know is that I read The Rehearsal weeks ago now, but when Murray told me off, I sat down and wrote this post without glancing at the book once. This is unusual, given the number of books I read, as I usually need a quick refresher to get underway. But not this one. It's still there, stealthy and sharp-eyed and stalking me, while I gossip among the pigeons.

Where the cool kids hang out - Obama in Netherland

Reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, I googled the cover [to put up on the blog] and found myself on literaryobama.com which is 'a chronicle of creative works by and about our 44th President.' Above this fab pic of Obama promoting libraries, is a post - written in April - titled 'On Obama's Nightstand: Netherland.'

According to Qiana - the young-looking chap who writes the blog - knowing Obama's reading a book is enough to make him pick it up. He hasn't posted subsequently, so I wonder if he did. Meanwhile, Netherland is on my nightstand but oh how it asks to be brought downstairs and read and read and read until it's finished. There's something about the tone, the language, the voice of a book like this ...

Netherland is a post-9/11 novel set in New York. It feels as if the smoke and dust from that terrible day are still in the air and have been breathed in by the protagonist - a Dutch banker called Hans whose wife has left him for a safer life in England- making his life the kind of 'white on white' John Vanderslice sings about in his 9/11 album Emerald City. The novel is spare of language and the tone is a meditative one that is taut with the desperate stuff of longing and blame and alienation. But there is belonging too - in the game of cricket and the NY immigrants who play it on the margins of the recovering city. I am nowhere near the end, but this book is marvellous. One of the best I've read this year.

Lit blogger Mark Sarvas, like James Wood before him, gives it his highest recommendation [the review is in his 'recommended' column on the right]. He says of Netherland that it is 'a Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness,' and the conclusion is: 'a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging.'

Wonder what Obama thought of it.

Ruined in eight minutes flat

I love the way blogs work. I spotted a new Paula Morris novel on Rachael King's blog [it's her current read], so I went to Paula Morris' blog [she of New Orleans who was once of NZ.] Rolling down a bit, there it was... a new YA novel called Ruined with links to two fab little promo videos here and here - one of which gave me goosebumps [it's a ghost story.] So now I know. Quite a lot in fact. Including that it's selling fast on Amazon. And that took, oh, seven minutes? Eight? Just got to decide now if it's too scary for Issy (13) and me.

I have in my arms the scarecrow and the bells of saint babel's etc.

Books for Africa, as my friend Maggie would say! The Giant Book Fair at TSB arena [on again today] yielded up for me: The Scarecrow - r.h.morrieson, The Bells of Saint Babel's - allen curnow, Blindsight - maurice gee, Mary Shelley - muriel spark, Not her real name - emily perkins [signed], In search of a character - graham greene, I have in my arms both ways - adrienne jansen, Big Wellington - o'brien/white, some travel books for my husband [a pico iyer, a theroux and dessaix's book on turgenev which I also intend to read], and an alastair cooke book of essays plus the Henry Root Letters for my dad [for father's day].

My children got a restrained bag-full each, and Penny and Elsie and Quentin between them lugged out enough books to fill a couple of suitcases. I saw Maggie there, and her own magnificent haul is detailed in a comment on the previous post. I envy her the Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Jan Morris - a hard-back, no less.

She mentions how I'd spotted both our novels on the NZ Fiction table. It was an odd moment seeing The Blue there - I checked and it was a first edition with a Montana award sticker on the front, in good condition, too. Read? Who knows. I put it back with its spine out and mentioned it to Elsie who was piling up short story collections elegantly on her forearm, and she smiled something reassuring back, and then the woman next to her said, does she want that book? - nodding at me and The Blue. And Elsie said, no, she wrote it. Oh! said the woman, I loved that book! Oh! I said. Really? That's wonderful! And it really really was.

Later, after a rummage through Travel and Essays and General Fiction, after seeing a man yelp as he leapt on Ed Hillary's book about Everest, after a chat about whaling with Ken from the Maritime Museum over old copies of Landfall, after admiring Quentin's copy of some fabulous biography that slips my mind and Issy's book about the Titanic and Paul's book of Cheever stories, I came back to NZ Fiction. And The Blue was gone.

Giant book fair

Massive excitement in my household because the annual giant bookfair at the TSB Arena is on this weekend. The Downtown Community Ministry runs it and the books are $2 each [$1 on Sunday] with special books priced as marked.

Every year we go: me and Paul and Issy and Penny and Elsie and Quentin - we stand there in the massive indoor arena, amongst the tables and tables of books, and hundreds of people, marvelling each time at the absence of noise. This is the spooky thing, all you can hear is a kind of happy whispery-hum as hundreds of readers thumb and shuffle books, and slide them into their bags.

We lumber out with our haul - Paul and Issy and Penny and Elsie and Quentin and me - and share it in the foyer afterwards or over breakfast across the way. We always find one treasure: a perfect copy of a loved book or a falling-apart copy of a loved book. Sometimes we swap, mostly we don't. One year, I nabbed a first edition [UK] of a Janet Frame novel for $2. And every year we go home and clear a space on the bookshelves for our finds - piling up the rejected books in a box in the garage.

This year I have been organised and sent six boxes of children's and adult books off yesterday as donations to the fair. This is the first year I have done this and I think we've been going for five years now. My son Adam took the boxes into town in the back of the car, thank God, because I couldn't lift them.

I told him where to go: Compassion House at the end of Luke's Lane [love that address]. So now I theoretically have room on the shelves all ready for this year's book fair finds. Trouble is, I can't see the space for looking. Somehow magically, it has already been filled.

Taking a mouthful of teeth - the charm of Boock and Lowry

It's one of those treats you get when you help out at the Secondary School Writers Festival up at Victoria University: authors for teens, Paula Boock and Brigid Lowry, discussing writing characters in fiction. Both women were generous, frank and funny, and their panel discussion led by Linda Burgess was more like something you'd eavesdrop on in a cafe [if you could ignore the icream-sized mikes].

These two writers told the gathered-talented-young that they wrote everyday, both good stuff and bad stuff, and that's what being a writer was about: doing it. Lowry talked about how she entered her study in a 'dreamy' state and sat down without knowing where a story was going and 'just made it up.' She used that phrase a lot - 'making it up' - which had a delicious slightly naughty child feel to it. Which was how she was, really, despite her declared age of 54 or 56 or something like that.

Boock agreed that she was an instinctive writer, too, and went with where the story took her. Like Lowry, she often started with a character and worked from there, although sometimes she had in mind something she wanted to explore e.g. two young women falling in love ['Truth Dare or Promise'], and then looked around for characters to do that. Both women said they blend real people they know into their characters, including elements of themselves. And Boock - a screenwriter as well as a novelist - will go somewhere where she can 'act out' her characters to try on dialogue and see if it works.

The women talked about the embarrassing fall-out when a friend or family member recognises one of their traits in a character and assumes the whole character is them. This happened to Boock once when she took a mouthful of teeth from a friend - small white teeth that made for a charming smile - and planted them in a book. As Boock tells the story, she smiles in that way writers do which is a mix of charming, acquisitive and don't-mess-with-me. The subtext being: she needed the teeth and she took them, end of story. Both women said care needed to be taken, for sure, but at the same time the gathered-talented-young needed to understand that characters in fiction are fictional. Or, put more simply, they're made up.

And that, you understood from the conversation between two of our best writers for teenagers, is much more fun.

Whero's New Net

I am still reeling from Whero's New Net - a Massive Theatre Company production touring the country at the moment. It's a bitter sweet tale written by Albert Belz in collaboration with the cast and crew of Massive, and integrating stories from The New Net Goes Fishing by Witi Ihimaera. Here's more on Massive and the show that took three years and multiple drafts to create - and view the trailer above.

The dialogue in Whero's New Net crackles and when you're not cracking up, your heart lurches with the fortunes of these tough, vulnerable, gorgeous young people. The haka scene is one of the funniest I've seen on stage, and at the end I had tears down my face, but not from laughing. The play is on at Downstage in Wellington until Saturday, and then at Upper Hutt's Expressions Theatre Sept 4-6, and elsewhere after that. Go and be amazed.

Harbinger of Spring

Two words surfaced today out of a day of words that rose and fell in the usual way - breath in breath out, that sort of thing. These two stood up, and held their nine-lettered selves straight as posts, so I could see their puffed-up chests and their vibrating throats.

Asparagus. The girl came over to us as we drank the coffee she'd made, leaned into our conversation and said it quickly, losing the 'a' so it sounded like sparrer grass. 'I just can't think how to spell it today.' She was opaque with embarrassment. We stopped and were helpful, although I always prefer to write words down to be sure. A-s-p-a-r-a- ... and Hilary took over, g-u-s. And we nodded and sipped, and the girl smiled, trusting us, and turned to walk back to the blackboard where she was writing the specials for the cafe. A sparrow for gus, I said, to give her a way of remembering next time [it works best with a cockney accent], but she was intent on her chalk. I always did that when I was learning to spell: took apart the sounds a word made, or made the word into a sentence of its own like bee - ay - you - ti - full. Which sounded like I was talking to a bee full of tea.

Harbinger. The nine-letter word in Target today. Paul already had it by the time I arrived home girded with the story about Asparagus. He does Target every day in study break and sometimes I lean over his shoulder to help. I stare at the nine letters - with the letter in the middle highlighted because it has to be part of every word - and I kind of clear the space around each letter and let them hover there uncluttered, and sometimes the nine-letter word clears the page and hovers in the air, and I pinch the edge and lick it and stamp it down. The other day I got handbrake but harbinger is better. We always make a bit of a song and dance of getting the long word, or I do. Paul is more businesslike. He didn't say a word today until I picked up the paper and put it on the kitchen bench. Harbinger, he said through the wall, I don't know what it means, I just know it's a word.

Only later I think of them as going together somehow: one growing spear-straight, the other standing upright to do that trumpeting thing. About doom and such like. No, spring.

Fiddling while the computer burns

I've fiddled with my blog colours this morning despite clear evidence that the family computer is about to die. It did a bit of a meltdown last week and Becky the Techy fixed it up, backed-up everything onto a very expensive portable hard drive [which is why I am so sanguine now about the death throes of my aged darling], told me I should 'heed the signs' and gave me blood-freezing quotes on a new computer. And here I am today with that 'blue screen' thing popping up and a response time to my clicks and taps that could only be described as glacial.

So the time has come.

There's always the laptop - currently being 'backed-up' by Becky who tells me laptops only last 2-3 years now and mine is three years old - but we need a family computer, too.

Oh well. Nothing like a blog make-over to perk you up when things are malfunctioning. And it's not only the computer. Second son delivered my car home on Sunday morning with a broken seat belt and a rattling exhaust. Says it was 'bad luck'. It was 'bad luck' that other time too when the car transmission gave out while he was driving it, and 'bad luck' when the brake pads gave out over night - after it had been in his care. With its scratches and peeling paint, I've been driving a 'hoon' car for a while now, but the rattling exhaust garners me strangely hooded looks when I pull up outside the butcher's between an SUV and a Beemer.

On the writing front, I thought this was a useful post about believing in yourself as a writer ... but to a point ... on the very useful blog How Publishing Really Works. It's a practical and clever post by writer Dan Holloway. Thought I might apply his logic to a few other things in my life....

Free Pinky Bar and badge

It's not often I eat a Pinky Bar, but tomorrow I will, and it's free. Author Fifi Colston is launching her new novel for junior fiction readers 'Glory' at the Storylines Family Day in Wellington this Sunday. And everybody who buys a copy gets a free Pinky and a cool Fifi-made badge. As I'm launching the book I reckon I get a Pinky Bar too. And a badge. With my name on it.

I've just finished reading 'Glory' and it's Fifi at her best - funny, sharp, subversive, with some terrific scenes that leave you rolling around laughing or turning the pages as fast as possible to see what happens next. The main character Florence Bright is - well - she's like Fifi: funny, sharp, and subversive. I liked spending time inside her convoluted 13-year-old mind, and I liked spending time in her home town of Oamaru [beautifully realised] and in her school of Rawhiti Normal [it's exactly like every 'Normal' school I attended.] I liked the mad little story that unfolds as Florrie takes it on herself to right the wrongs done to children at the unforgiving hands of school prizegivings. Her plan involves an overweight cat, a native bird and a pyromaniac brother. Oh, and there's a Pinky Bar. And a mystery blog.

'Nuf said. If you want to get to know Florrie, the launch is at the Storylines Free Family Day, 12.30 pm, Sunday August 23, at Te Whaea, Hutchison Road, Newtown. And you can do craft with Fifi afterwards before heading off to see the Weta Workshop guys and a whole host of other writers and illustrators. Storylines goes from 10-3.30 pm. It's always a great day.

Keepsake or Library Book?

Just thinking how I have an overdue library book that needs returning to the Wellington City Library. As usual, I think my overdueness comes down to the fact that I like to keep the books I read. The reason is simple, just glancing at the spine of a loved, stimulating, challenging etc book retrieves the feeling I had reading it. A whole wall of them is better than any other pick-me-up I know [I'm looking at them now as I tap upon the laptop].

The overdue book is Kirsty Gunn's The Keepsake which she says she wrote to scare herself . It resonates with The Bluebeard fairytale and is pretty creepy, but the lovely language and oblique story-telling make it feel like a long poem. An astonishing work that I would really really like as a keepsake of my own. But back it has to go.

I was fascinated to read on Beattie's Bookblog about the first Wellington City Library which was also the first library in the country. The pic above is detail from lithograph of Wellington in 1841. The library is to the left of Barrett's Hotel – the double-storeyed building in the centre of the image.

Here's more from the nzhistory.net website Graham Beattie linked to:

New Zealand's first public library, the Port Nicholson Exchange and Public Library, opened in Wellington in 1841. Established by a group of the city's first settlers, it operated for one year in a building on the corner of Charlotte Street (now Molesworth Street) and Lambton Quay, an area now occupied by the Wellington cenotaph.

In 1842, due to a combination of defaulting subscribers and competitors, it closed and offered its contents to the Mechanics' Institute that was about to be established. The Institute and other groups continued to provide library services to the city until 1893, when Wellington City Council established a council-owned public library on the corner of Mercer and Wakefield Streets, not far from what is now the central branch of Wellington City Libraries.

The foundations for the Port Nicholson Exchange and Public Library were laid long before settlers even began arriving in the New Zealand Company settlement in 1840. Prior to the departure of the first ships, a committee had been established to ‘make provision for the Literary, Scientific and Philanthropic Institutions of the new Colony'. This ensured that the first settlers arrived laden with donations of books. more

Now that's a lovely image.

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

Very sweet and contagious, i' faith

I went to see Twelfth Night with my Shakespeare-mad daughter the other night - an amateur production with a talented cast of comics which had us rolling in the aisles. Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the Clown and Malvolio were stand-outs. The magic of theatre was centre stage - the careful construction of another reality that the audience knows isn't perfect but that it comes to trust and believe in and becomes part of because it desires to; sharing the same air with actors who quickly become people and seeing the sweat on their brows as they make this magic happen; the delightfulness nay the relief at laughing into the faces of these sweating, breathing characters and seeing their muscles shift, their mouths pout to deliver more of the clever words to make you laugh again, to hear you breathe in with anticipation, see you sweat as you howl. A sweet and ancient alchemy.

And leaving a play like that, driving home with Issy and talking about the foppish asides of Aguecheek and the brilliant choreography of the scene where Malvolio reads Maria's letter, I feel again the need to write that play I've had in notes and draft form since I saw The Taming of the Shrew with an all-woman cast. Also amateur, also thick with fun and energy and sweat and magic. No, in fact, I think I started it after I saw an English comedy on stage - Aykbourn perhaps? - and went home thinking I could do this thing, this play. Surely I could.

But this play of mine requires research and time to write, and I don't have it now. I have a novel to write and a jostling host of other worthy work to do. Still, on arriving home after Twelfth Night, I put Issy to bed and then sat beside her as she slept - with a pad of quad paper I'd found and a suspect biro - and wrote pages and pages of a script. The next morning I woke to an epiphany about the climax of my play. The whole thing shifted then from something potentially unconvincing and verging on cliche to something much more subtle and interesting. It cried out for more work, more time, more research.

I read some of it to Issy over morning coffee, but I could tell she preferred Twelfth Night. Mine is not a comedy. It's a tragedy, really, and it's talky, and it's set in a watchmaker's shop not Illyria. Why, I have no idea.

But there is not enough time in the day for this play.

If only I had two brains - one for the novel, one for the play. Then I could do it. But the novel needs me. I have a contract to complete it. I want to complete it. I have to be firm. The scrawled sheets of this stuttering but insistent script have been put away somewhere and will stay there. Until.... well, until. I know that next time I go to the theatre I'll want to drag them out, for plays have that effect on me. They are, in the words of the delightful Aguecheek, 'very sweet and contagious, i'faith.' I will just have to resist. Well, until I can work out a way of writing two things at once. Or doubling the hours in the day.

[Image of Aguecheek by artist John Link http://www.johnlink.org.uk/]

The Pak'n Save Prize for Popular Fiction

With the Montanas over - people are back to talking about what the new Awards, sponsored by the NZ Post, will be like. Here's Rachael King's 2 cents worth which includes a recommendation that the award system makes room for acknowledging the popular NZ read more than it has done in the past. Writer Denis Welch would no doubt agree, calling the Montana fiction shortlist this year The Great Unread.

Having read most of the fiction shortlist(s) this year, I have to disagree with Denis' epithet. But I do agree that popular work needs more recognition in our book awards. In the UK , the British Book Awards are an eclectic counterpoint to the literary Booker Prize, and include among other things the Sainsbury Prize for Popular Fiction. Britain's Costa Award is also about readability, emphasising 'the most enjoyable books of the year' in five key areas [fiction, new fiction, bio, poetry and children's books. ]

The interesting thing is the Booker doesn't sell a lot of books in Britain compared to the popular stuff. This article points out that mega-selling author Katie Price's Angel Uncovered sold 54,362 copies in under a month, outselling the 2008 Booker longlist by more than 20 copies to one. Here in NZ, publishers say the Montana shortlist doesn't shift many books either because there are too many different types of books involved and the marketing effect is diluted.

Note the lack of interest in my Tea Cosy Fiction Challenge which was about buying and reading the fiction lists. The result speaks for itself! Or maybe no-one wanted a tea cosy....

Apparently, if a book is selling well while it's a Montana finalist it's because it would have done well anyway. A Montana win, on the other hand, does lead to increased sales, sometimes significantly so.

Can we have a NZ Book Awards for different genres including 'popular' fiction? Or are we too small to think about finding the sponsorship for such a thing? How about a Pak'n Save Popular Prize for Fiction? Or could we think of an award that concentrates on 'enjoyable reading' in the manner of the Costa? Or a Booker-type Prize that is only about fiction? You'd think an award that's solely about fiction would focus marketing and reader interest and lead to more sales.

Which reminds me that reading books isn't only about sales it's also about library readers who, I am guessing, are big voters in the Readers' Choice Award. I say this because these people are often HUGE READERS - getting through half a dozen books in a week -and the libraries are big promoters of books and of the Montanas. That's the only way I can explain The Blue winning the Readers' Choice given the size of its sales compared to some of the other books on the Montana shortlists last year.

Here's former publisher and arch defender of NZ books, Bookman Beattie's take on the vexed book awards issue:

The Montana New Zealand Book Awards were formed by a merger of the Montana Book Awards and the New Zealand Book Awards. The latter always had a more literary bias than the more commercial Montanas and in recent times more serious authors and publishers have occasionally voiced the wish that the two separate awards were still in existence to give those more serious writers more chance of recognition. This year the pendulum has swung strongly the other way with the more serious and literary work pushing aside the more popular. This clearly has much to do with the makeup of the judging panel headed by senior academic Dr. Mark Williams, Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington.

And you can follow the comments on his post here.

Interestingly, Emily Perkins' medal-winning novel this year is a racy read as well as being terribly literary. Who knows it might have won a Pak'n Save Prize too ...

Emily Perkins wins Montana Medal

Emily Perkins has won the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry with Novel about My Wife [Photo: NZPA]. The Montana NZ Book Award judges say the novel is 'highly assured' and 'sophisticated and urban' and Perkins is 'writing at the height of her powers.' I hope not - I reckon this writer will only get better. Congrats Emily - the book is marvellous. Here's my brief blogged review:

Oh what a joy -a novel that is gleefully dark, deliciously tense, packed with incisive personal and social observations and laugh out loud funny. Sad, too. Powerful. Crafted. Bloody amazing.

Runners-up for Fiction were Kate de Goldi's NZ Post Winner 10 PM Question [to do get high honours in the adult and children book awards is quite a coup] and Bernard Beckett's Acid Song.

I'm guessing, because it wasn't in the article I've just seen on the TVNZ website, that Eleanor Catton must have won the Best First Book of Fiction with The Rehearsal.

There were a host of other winners, too, of course. I was pleased to see Jill Trevelyan's book on Rita Angus winning the bio section. I wonder if it won the Readers Choice Award along with the Booksellers Award - giving it a hat-trick? Or if that went to 10 PM Question? I'll have to keep trawling through the net and the late news I guess.