tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21600697326569193232024-03-14T19:16:38.360+13:00These Rough Notes - the VUP blogHelen Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844370992595871236noreply@blogger.comBlogger124125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-22634751052334005042017-06-22T11:10:00.006+12:002017-06-22T11:16:25.983+12:00Interview with Maria McMillan<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maria McMillan (Grant Maiden Photography)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Your new
book </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">The Ski Flier <i>begins with a sequence of poems titled ‘11’.
What are these? What is it about the number 11 that people get obsessive about?</i></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: small;">It’s a good number isn’t it?
And I did get kind of obsessive. These are strict syllabic poems. There’s 11
poems of 11 lines each and each line has 11 syllables. When I told my mother I
was working on these she said it made her think of the Armistice, you know the
11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And that fitted well too. There’s
a lot of violence of various sorts in this sequence, wars I suppose, waged in
places other than battlefields. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: small;">I liked how relatively long
lines gave a conversational tone to the lines, a natural speaking voice I
think, but the syllabic restraint still provided a structure and some tension
in what could have been become something entirely rambling. Eleven syllable
lines forced me out of being too pared back or poetic. It gave me time to figure
out things. I got trained into being really sparse in my poetry and so this was
good for me. I keep thinking of when Sinead O'Connor grew back her hair, I've
earned big hair she said, or something like that. After years of being bald. I
reckon I've earned 11 syllables.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">Often when I read your
poems your concept of space – particularly uninhabitable space like mountains,
crevasses, sea floors – reminds me of how Ursula le Guin uses space in </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">A Wizard of
Earthsea <i>and </i>The Left Hand of Darkness <i>and Madeleine
L’Engle’s </i>A Wrinkle in Time<i>. People do battle with evil and
philosophical conundrums out in these spaces. What is it about uninhabitable
spaces that attracts you as a writer?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">I had to think about your question for
about three days so I didn't just say yeah crevices cool eh? Abysall Plains,
woah. What about them mountains? So cold. Deadly mate, deadly. Wicked.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">I haven't read enough le Guin. I have an
enduring love Madeleine L'Engle's <i>A Wrinkle in Time</i> (don't
read the last in that series her morality takes a weird dive into a whacky form
of Christianity, AWIT is the best). I love the skipping scene in AWIT. When all
the kids are creepily skipping in perfect time in some city controlled by a
gigantic pulsating brain. It's so much easier just to be taken over by the
brain. Resistance is painful. I love you associated with this book, please
continue to do so. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;"><br />
A teacher I once had said he liked poetry which asks an unanswerable question
and then answers it. It feels a bit like that, poems inhabiting an
uninhabitable spaces. Going to the extreme of an idea or a situation or a
place, to the furthermost point, to the place you can't go past and then going
further. It's romantic but interesting, the idea of extremity forcing us into a
more pure form of ourselves. Adrienne Rich's Phantasia for Elvira Shayatav,
(the leader of an all women's climbing party) is amazing on this</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">In
the diary I wrote: Now we are ready<br />
and each of us knows it I have never loved<br />
like this I have never seen<br />
my own forces so taken up and shared<br />
and given back<br />
After the long training the early sieges<br />
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">It is
kind of fantasy too. All the women in that trip Rich is writing about died.
Jennifer Peedom's film <i>Sherpa</i>, is a good one for interrogating some of
the heartfelt spiritual urges people have to go really really high, some of the
Everest climbers were gobsmackingly arrogant. There's places in this world that
should be left alone.<br />
<br />
It seems to me (tonight anyway) that what I was grappling with in <i>The
Ski Flier</i> was that concept of how do you inhabit somewhere
uninhabitable. Both physically hostile and politically hostile spaces. How is
it to be on a mountainside where you can't breathe both because it's so
beautiful and because you don't have enough oxygen, and you might be about to
die. What are you doing going to mountains whose inherent instability is
exacerbated by climate change. Everything's falling down. How is it to
come into adulthood as a young woman and have your own sexuality explode at the
same moment as having your illusions of a basically just society explode? How
can we live knowing and witnessing the terrible cruelties in the world? Why
aren't we consumed by hopelessness? Why don't we curl up on a nice snowy rock
and let the cold take us? (I am not advocating this, please don't do this) How
do, despite it all, hope and kindness undo us? </span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">Maria McMillan reads at her launch at St Peter's Hall, Paekakariki</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">You had a reasonably long
apprenticeship as a poet before you published a book and now you’ve produced
two full length poetry books and a chapbook in the space of 3 years. Does
poetry come readily to you? Or did you just have a lot of work backed-up?</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">Hmm. I wrote the poems that would become <i>The
Rope Walk</i> (2013) and <i>Tree Space</i>, (2014) concurrently for
about 10 years, figuring out what and how I wanted to write (and this changing
all the time of course). By the end I knew they were two different books. But
as you know, the lead up to publication is long and probably I'd written
95% of the poems by 2012. So <i>The Ski Flier </i>is really a sort of
themed best of 2012-2016 which makes me seem a bit less prolific. Like lots of
writers I know I have long periods of torpor and over-engagement with social
media and self doubt punctuated by rare and ridiculous bursts of elated
productivity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">Can you tell us the
last 3 books of poetry you read that have stuck with you? </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">The Collected Poems of
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "eb garamond" , serif;">, <i>Spirit House</i> by Tusiata Avia and <i>The
Internet of Things </i>by Kate Camp. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-NZ"><i>The Ski Flier</i> by Maria McMillan ($25, pb) is available for purchase now at excellent bookshops and through our online <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/the-ski-flier/">bookstore</a>. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ"></span><br />Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-12677203261344512502017-06-15T14:53:00.001+12:002017-06-15T14:53:19.133+12:00Interview with Pip Adam – The New Animals
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGLScq8-UY_YoOJ5280vjFRZl-YSnsVorCPE38ZsIhGvd78tkz-5uD46COnH8TgTQsN0MU4fkGgwCTWS9cVn4YypYOJfykWih8_oEsJl3BIPzb1iz5CH-yD_DKHA8cvn8ddSCU553ObKc/s1600/Pip+Adam+2017+web+photo+credit+Victoria+Birkinshaw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="591" height="337" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGLScq8-UY_YoOJ5280vjFRZl-YSnsVorCPE38ZsIhGvd78tkz-5uD46COnH8TgTQsN0MU4fkGgwCTWS9cVn4YypYOJfykWih8_oEsJl3BIPzb1iz5CH-yD_DKHA8cvn8ddSCU553ObKc/s400/Pip+Adam+2017+web+photo+credit+Victoria+Birkinshaw.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pip Adam (photo by Victoria Birkinshaw)</td></tr>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">The New Animals<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> is partly about the fashion industry. Is something you’ve wanted to
write about for a while now?</i></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">Yeah, I think so. I worked as a
hairdresser for about 15 years and loved it. I first became aware of ‘fashion’
as a living thing in 1992. I’d been hairdressing about seven years and someone
brought in a copy of the Vogue which included Marc Jacobs’ <a href="http://www.vogue.com/article/marc-jacobs-perry-ellis-grunge-collection-90s-fashion%20http://modearte.com/vogue-editorial-launched-grunge/">grunge collection</a>. </span><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;"></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">It was astonishing and exciting for
lots of reasons. I remember a group of us slavering over it out the back of the
salon – like vultures on a corpse. It felt like a life changer. Several of us
were running two wardrobes at the time, one for work in the salon (which was
pretty commercial) and one for the weekends which was all flanel shirts and Doc
Martins. There was a real sense in those photos in Vogue that fashion could be
cataclysmic. Our lives kind of changed over night – the next day I remember
wearing a massive fisherman ribbed jumper and see-through skirt over big black
boots to work. I got this sense then that fashion often starts outside the
fashion industry – that it answers some kind of societal question as well as a
commercial one. It was really exciting. I’m also interested in how fashion is
kind of like art but is so effemeral and also functional. I love design for
that reason. </span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">Also, I guess, I’m really worried
about the environmental impact of the fashion industry and that dark side of it
really intrigues me too. The way the industry is run by this idea of ‘the new’.
Like clothes become obsolete not because they stop working but because they’re
out of date. I don’t know how this fits with my excitement around fashion.
Maybe that is part of what draws me to it as a subject, the fact that<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-themecolor: text1;">I can’t comfortably reconcile my love of the
clothes and fashion and the destruction I know it’s causing. So yeah, this
is something I've wanted to write about for a long time, maybe to try and find
some sense in my own contradiction and hypocrisy. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4kJS3peBHk_ZKxjlISn4hvc9G7ovrjv6yci4vQkVD-0D2r9gte7zuzkh8IFeYhOI6ALf3-QHcsflm2JNRxP3xAUhZ5yVDnpgThJI7OyskF_VMEbETHnlL3f0a4uhaDj7sEqYmCQqyCAk/s1600/Pip+Adam+Insta.mp4" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4kJS3peBHk_ZKxjlISn4hvc9G7ovrjv6yci4vQkVD-0D2r9gte7zuzkh8IFeYhOI6ALf3-QHcsflm2JNRxP3xAUhZ5yVDnpgThJI7OyskF_VMEbETHnlL3f0a4uhaDj7sEqYmCQqyCAk/s1600/Pip+Adam+Insta.mp4" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pip Adam reads from The New Animals (vid by lo&behold)</td></tr>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">The
story in </span></i><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">The New Animals <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">takes
place over the period of 24 hours on a day in September 2016 in Auckland – how
did this time constraint play into the story and construction of the novel? </i></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">Um. Yeah. So, I think it was always
going to be a day, and the only thing I think can be tricky with writing a
story that takes place in one day is that it runs the risk of slipping into an
episodic ryhthm. I guess the real constraint I placed on myself was that it
took place on one particular day. I went to Auckland on this day and ‘walked
the novel’. So I had a timeline of the book and I followed that. One of the
biggest problems in this was that a restaurant I really wanted two of the
characters to eat at, was shut on the day of the novel. I had a real conflict
about whether to include the scene anyway (I had written a scene I really liked
that took place in the restaurant). I decided I wouldn’t. I had set this task
and I wanted to see what happened if I stuck inside the constraints of it. What
happened, as is often the case with constraint, is that I was forced to solve a
problem (possibly the most creative of acts) and something interesting
happened. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">The
novel is concerned with many things – the consumerist and throwaway nature of
fashion, the perversity of what is ‘fashionable’ and how we decide that, and –
this is what I think of as a recurring theme throughout your writing – the need
for humans to be involved in meaningful work. Can you talk about this, whether
you see it as one of your themes? </span></i></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">I am really interested in work. I
think it stems from working from a young age. I left school when I was about
fifteen and work has kind of been my life since. Even when I finally got to
university at 21 I still worked. My undergraduate degree took another ten
years, and I always worked. My first jobs were at factories and bakeries and
hairdressing, so I saw the direct result of my work – things got packed, bread
got baked, hair got cut. After university I started getting jobs where the
results weren’t quite so directly observable. Which was a weird experience. I
often felt, in some of these jobs, that work was just this weird game where I
was doing tasks that didn’t produce anything and that the purpose of the game
was to keep me entertained until I died. So yeah, I am really interested in
this idea of work. </span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">This idea of ‘meaningful’ work, or
finding meaning through work, is another interesting thing to me. I feel really
strongly about the way capitalism values some work over others. Like the way we
think people shouldn’t be paid to look after their children or their parents or
their relatives. I find ‘work’ a really problematic thing. One thing I really
struggle with is that, actually, to have ‘meaningful’ work, what does that
mean? So many people are working in such awful conditions for so little money,
there are millions of indentured workers and slaves around the world, and then
there are some of us with this weird opportunity to think, ‘Do I enjoy my job?’
I have so many conflicted thoughts about it and I think a lot of my writing,
like from the start, has been about trying to figure out these things about the
world. So yeah, it’s a theme in me so it’s almost certainly a theme in this
book.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">The New Animals<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> has one of the strangest endings I’ve encountered in a long time, and
yet, it feels so right. Without giving anything away, can you explain a little
about this mixture of reality and can we call it ‘fantasy’ aspect of your
writing?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It feels like something new for
you, but also entirely in keeping with the sort of formal experimentation
you’ve played with in your short stories and your first novel.</i></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">I think the last section of the
book has a lot to do with two books. Janet Frame’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Intensive Care</i> which Maria McMillan recommended to me and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Martian</i> by Andy Weir. Frame’s book
is in two halves, the first is a social-realist story and the second is science
fiction. I was really interested in how the two halves talked to each other.
About how what couldn’t be said in the realist part could be said in the book’s
science fiction section. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Martian</i> is
a wonderful read about, as probably everyone knows from the movie, a human left
for dead on Mars. The thing I love about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Martian</i> is that it’s very ‘hard’ science fiction. Survival is on reality’s
terms. No one gets ‘beamed up’.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">I’ve read and been in awe of
science fiction from a moment in Dunedin in about 1999 when I met my friend
Jenn Martin in a Victorian English paper and in our first conversation she told
me about Ursula LeGuinn’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Dispossessed</i>. If I had my way, I’d be writing science fiction – huge, fat,
trilogies about intergalactic travel. </span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">So to me, that last part of the
novel is a science fiction exercise, not a fantastic one. I read heaps about
human bodies and how they work and don’t work in certain environments. The
science probably doesn’t stand up as strongly as I’d like it to but I hope
there is something in there. </span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">In my mind the ending is trying to
do what Frame did. I got to a point where social realism failed me. I was
unable to say what I needed to say in the contemporary terrestrial setting so I
had to take it somewhere else. The place I took it, like Mars, needed to be the
rule-maker, needed to change bodies and minds in ways that were useful for the
story I was trying to tell. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHAfIKUoePgku_hdLnBhhqSBMNdcH1_ITmwfcUVOSZRdzuYdGJuAnSgHqrl-YhGbVXqrlkM-6fHgOwJoz-q7nOytQAmfMY8QDDfUc0C9qJjHQdRxN6iG23vuFfsiNwtFcoBb7aP_r3oVk/s1600/The+New+Animals.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1054" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHAfIKUoePgku_hdLnBhhqSBMNdcH1_ITmwfcUVOSZRdzuYdGJuAnSgHqrl-YhGbVXqrlkM-6fHgOwJoz-q7nOytQAmfMY8QDDfUc0C9qJjHQdRxN6iG23vuFfsiNwtFcoBb7aP_r3oVk/s400/The+New+Animals.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;"> </span><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">Pip Adam's third book, <i>The New Animals</i>, is released today. You can buy it at the best bookshops, or through our online bookstore <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/the-new-animals/">here</a>.</span><br /><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;"></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">There will be a launch for <i>The New Animals</i> and for Tim Corballis's time travel novel, <i>Our Future is in the Air</i>, on Tuesday 18 July at Unity Books, Wellington, 6pm on. To receive invites to our launches and information about our books, sign up to our enewsletter on our homepage <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/">here</a>.</span></div>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-75636953995891678832017-05-02T15:11:00.003+12:002017-05-02T15:11:46.065+12:00What are they wearing?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<h3 class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
We asked our finalists in the Ockham NZ Book Awards some very relevant questions.</h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-NlrNkwXYACSXSC8CF8FaC7TkLN1ZUOkytgpEgQtJ0TWDaCX4tL3vSJ6S5L0e36iy2H_9FuRsR6EGDXULyBwL34_0UcPCx_f_2gn5qikZEknog94s0NwZommrqddyLuT8bjDCfWAith0/s1600/tusiata+46.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-NlrNkwXYACSXSC8CF8FaC7TkLN1ZUOkytgpEgQtJ0TWDaCX4tL3vSJ6S5L0e36iy2H_9FuRsR6EGDXULyBwL34_0UcPCx_f_2gn5qikZEknog94s0NwZommrqddyLuT8bjDCfWAith0/s320/tusiata+46.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tusiata Avia (Hayley Theyers)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<i><a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/fale-aitu-spirit-house/"><i>Fale Aitu</i></a> </i>by Tusiata Avia is a finalist in the poetry category.</div>
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<i> </i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<i>What are you wearing to awards night?</i> </div>
A fresh, fruity, fobby frock.<br />
<i><br />If you win your category what is the first thing you’ll spend your award winnings on? </i><br />
Maybe a wedding dress - just in case.<br />
<br />
<i>What lucky charm or ritual do you perform before things like awards? </i><br />
Umm, human sacrifice?<br />
<i><br />Who are you bringing with you to the awards? </i><br />
My BFF and hopefully my cousin.<br />
<i><br />Which writer at the AWF would you most like to meet and why? </i><br />
Mpho Tutu Van Furth!!<br />
<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7h_mf1PR8jBRJBxj3s3d6s7eMhuoaPKp7-KxfFynb0Yo0TO-ZSPRxUCDNBHn_6VA4MDulc5lNaQlL0149pTg4Bml3RWaEtFjPfsywy0aH5STlHfU9XcId4-ee8PvyS-dou7ktIwEjeT8/s1600/HERA+Lindsay+Bird+author+picSMALL+WEB+-+Russell+Kleyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7h_mf1PR8jBRJBxj3s3d6s7eMhuoaPKp7-KxfFynb0Yo0TO-ZSPRxUCDNBHn_6VA4MDulc5lNaQlL0149pTg4Bml3RWaEtFjPfsywy0aH5STlHfU9XcId4-ee8PvyS-dou7ktIwEjeT8/s320/HERA+Lindsay+Bird+author+picSMALL+WEB+-+Russell+Kleyn.jpg" width="307" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hera Lindsay Bird (Russell Kleyn)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/hera-lindsay-bird/"><i>Hera Lindsay Bird</i></a> by Hera Lindsay Bird is a finalist in the poetry category.<br />
<br />
<i>What are you wearing to awards night?</i><br />
A dress, some shoes and my Britney Spears handbag<br />
<br />
<i>If you win your category what is the first thing you’ll spend your award winnings on?</i><br />
I am saving up to catch some trains overseas. Maybe one of those internet perfumes that smell like bread. <br />
<i><br />What lucky charm or ritual do you perform before things like awards?</i><br />
I brush my hair..............for luck<br />
<i><br />Who are you bringing with you to the awards?</i><br />
My mother and my father and my father’s wife and my boyfriend and my friend and her boyfriend who also happens to be my boyfriend’s brother, it’s very complicated.<br />
<br />
<i>Which writer at the AWF would you most like to meet and why?</i><br />
Shirley Jackson, but she’s dead so I’m excited to meet George Saunders who isn’t.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju3uHWb7LKt2NAo9zBAO0-sbHDQEEvtkbKt7VlSfTTyAQLexJjJK9Ntyj0ZovW6xuMfBEbw0Eb_w116gM_sulpBQi7_BJAnIzK2ggVNMLCH7G_mj9iu8XCkltQRiUEJUL7xVoxdMNquCw/s1600/Andrew+Johnston+by+Peter+Black+2017.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju3uHWb7LKt2NAo9zBAO0-sbHDQEEvtkbKt7VlSfTTyAQLexJjJK9Ntyj0ZovW6xuMfBEbw0Eb_w116gM_sulpBQi7_BJAnIzK2ggVNMLCH7G_mj9iu8XCkltQRiUEJUL7xVoxdMNquCw/s320/Andrew+Johnston+by+Peter+Black+2017.jpeg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrew Johnston (Peter Black)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/fits-and-starts/"><i>Fits and Starts</i></a> by Andrew Johnston is a finalist in the poetry category.<br />
<br />
What are you wearing to awards night?<br />
A shirt by Liberty of London (and a few other things).<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>If you win your category what is the first thing you’ll spend your award winnings on?</i><br />
Time to write - a month this year, more later. <br />
<br />
<i>What lucky charm or ritual do you perform before things like awards?</i><br />
I don’t have a charm or ritual, but if I have to speak in public I imagine that I am standing up to my neck in water.<br />
<br />
<i>Who are you bringing with you to the awards?</i><br />
No one!<br />
<br />
Which writer at the AWF would you most like to meet and why?<br />
Lloyd Geering, because his book <i>Tomorrow’s God</i> is a favourite.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7F60gLIOFCZY4qPzSPKH_KSaI1J5VpY0U2SgzETVNvvII_QXQHNIjE9A4tCsuMMog51Ud2MNJVOjYdjPcfFIJ2H8_z1Dw_Vu43DiQWUbzmfnhRA9MFAs5N1wCLwVyCpajFtCGzKvvDrA/s1600/Adam+Dudding+by+Lawrence+Smith.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7F60gLIOFCZY4qPzSPKH_KSaI1J5VpY0U2SgzETVNvvII_QXQHNIjE9A4tCsuMMog51Ud2MNJVOjYdjPcfFIJ2H8_z1Dw_Vu43DiQWUbzmfnhRA9MFAs5N1wCLwVyCpajFtCGzKvvDrA/s320/Adam+Dudding+by+Lawrence+Smith.jpeg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adam Dudding (Lawrence Smith)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<i><a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/my-fathers-island-a-memoir/">My Father's Island</a> </i>by Adam Dudding is a finalist in the non-fiction category.<br />
<i> </i><br />
<i>What are you wearing to awards night?</i><br />
Mostly my favourite designers Farmers and Hallensteins, though I may bust out some of my fancier socks from Barkers.<br />
<br />
<i>If you win your category what is the first thing you’ll spend your award winnings on?</i><br />
Paying down the debt on irrational purchases made in a spirit of optimism since the shortlist came out.<br />
<br />
<i>What lucky charm or ritual do you perform before things like awards?</i><br />
Spend inordinate amounts of time attempting to write profound and thoughtful responses to foolish <br />
questionnaires about what I wear to awards nights, before abandoning the task and spending a few seconds coming up with something glib and misleading instead.<br />
<i><br />Who are you bringing with you to the awards?</i><br />
My first wife.<br />
<i><br />Which writer at the AWF would you most like to meet and why?</i><br />
Ashleigh Young, because although I’m grateful that she edited my book at VUP, if I can slip<br />
hemlock into her drink early in the evening, my odds of victory in the non-fiction category rise from a quarter to a third. Also, because though we bonded deeply via email, I’ve only met her a couple of times in the flesh. I also wouldn’t mind touching the hem of the robe of Susan Faludi, Armando Iannucci, Lauren Child, Teju Cole, James Gleick and a few others, just cos they’re great.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHB71n35EjvCY8taordj5SPPa-RUjLT97hvOf7ze9Pkps6bdKb6knugfZ-7lMjz-7P53-iRN4uRCvOlSeTHkF1UHmoHiTmHJVy9kXYepox7YRqBUxbzfPtB6H_pz55jX56NiyFWRzpnHc/s1600/Ashleigh+web+small+editorial+1+by+Russell+Kleyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHB71n35EjvCY8taordj5SPPa-RUjLT97hvOf7ze9Pkps6bdKb6knugfZ-7lMjz-7P53-iRN4uRCvOlSeTHkF1UHmoHiTmHJVy9kXYepox7YRqBUxbzfPtB6H_pz55jX56NiyFWRzpnHc/s320/Ashleigh+web+small+editorial+1+by+Russell+Kleyn.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ashleigh Young (Russell Kleyn)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<i><br /></i>
<a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/can-you-tolerate-this/"><i>Can You Tolerate This?</i></a> by Ashleigh Young is a finalist in the non-fiction category.<br />
<i> </i><br />
<i>What are you wearing to awards night?</i><br />
Maybe just, like, a big pile of snakes. Non-venomous snakes.<br />
<br />
<i>If you win your category what is the first thing you’ll spend your award winnings on?</i><br />
I will take the VUP team out for breakfast the morning after the ceremony!*<br />
<br />
<i>What lucky charm or ritual do you perform before things like awards?</i><br />
I don’t have any proper rituals, but in an ideal world I would swaddle myself in a luxurious robe and then just sort of lie motionless under a tree for an hour. Like a huge baby in a nursery rhyme.<br />
<br />
<i>Who are you bringing with you to the awards?</i><br />
My mum and dad.<br />
<i><br />Which writer at the AWF would you most like to meet and why?</i><br />
I would love to meet Dr David Galler, whose work is so great. But also he seems like a very calming presence and I think he would help soothe my nerves. So I would like to meet him right before my AWF session with Roxane Gay and Teju Cole, which I’m very nervous about. I guess I could also ask him to inspect this funny-looking mole on my arm.<br />
<br />
*Conditions apply: No talking! Each person is to spend no more than $5 on their breakfast!<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjueZKL8sotKh0ukJpy08Qk3On4noU12xX12BEv2Zir3HwfIJCNrwmSXgPM3Xq4RE6Ava2oA2v_vWjVCRn0NZB1lKGon6XEfOAbnqCqZDpgkUaFwH82rHOXOd_xFVgDYd7VZtnuO-jH3FA/s1600/Catherine+Chidgey+blue+dress+WEB+by+Fiona+Pardington+2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjueZKL8sotKh0ukJpy08Qk3On4noU12xX12BEv2Zir3HwfIJCNrwmSXgPM3Xq4RE6Ava2oA2v_vWjVCRn0NZB1lKGon6XEfOAbnqCqZDpgkUaFwH82rHOXOd_xFVgDYd7VZtnuO-jH3FA/s320/Catherine+Chidgey+blue+dress+WEB+by+Fiona+Pardington+2016.jpg" width="211" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Catherine Chidgey (Fiona Pardington)<i><br /></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/the-wish-child-pb/"><i>The Wish Child</i></a> by Catherine Chidgey is a finalist in the fiction category.<br />
<i> </i><br />
<i>What are you wearing to awards night? </i><br />
Probably my Tanya Carlson black lace.<br />
<br />
<i>If you win your category what is the first thing you’ll spend your award winnings on? </i><br />
The bit of our mortgage that covers the living room and my office, where I do most of my writing.<br />
<br />
<i>What lucky charm or ritual do you perform before things like awards? </i><br />
I try to wear something meaningful. This time, in honour of the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize, I’ll accessorise with a 1920s silver mesh bag that has little silver acorns hanging from it.<br />
<br />
<i>Who are you bringing with you to the awards?</i> <br />
My husband Alan.<br />
<br />
<i>Which writer at the AWF would you most like to meet and why?</i> <br />
Susan Faludi, because she’s Susan Faludi.<br />
<br />
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––<br />
<br />
Sign up to VUP's e-newsletter during May and you can win one of three prize packs of 6 books by the above Ockham NZ Book Awards finalists worth $175.<br />
<br />
Sign up on our homepage <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/">here</a> and be into win!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-12643890106994006992017-04-07T16:16:00.002+12:002017-04-07T16:16:50.226+12:00Fiona Kidman launch speech for Marilyn Duckworth's The Chiming Blue
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">Last night Fiona Kidman helped to launch Marilyn Duckworth's new poetry collection <i>The Chiming Blue</i> at Unity Books. She has kindly let us reproduce her speech below.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">"The chiming began for me somewhere
around the early 1960s. I lived in a provincial town, in the suburbs, and the
game of the day was trying to keep the nappies on the line as white as those of
the neighbours. That is unless you wanted to be a writer, and I did. I had a
little clutch of literary heroines, especially those who were New Zealand women
writers. Janet Frame, of course, Jean Watson, Joy Cowley. At the top of the
list was Marilyn Duckworth. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to <i>be </i>her.
The thought of meeting her one day was beyond my wildest dreams – a woman who
was a wife and mother, producing a novel every year, and was little divided
from me in age. Her first novel was <i>A Gap in the Spectrum</i> in 1959, the
next <i>The Matchbox House</i>, and then in 1963, the same year as my first
child was born, came Marilyn’s <i>A Barbarous Tongue</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’d done it all before I even began, or so
it seemed. There would be another ten or so novels to follow and a collection
of poems in 1975. Somewhere along the way, after moving to Wellington in the
early 1970s, Marilyn and I did meet. But it wasn’t until that first collection
of her poems, <i>Other Lovers’ Children</i>, and the same year that my own
first collection appeared, that we started getting to know each other well.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">There were readings galore and we
started appearing together. A lot of them were at the Settlement, Harry
Seresin’s establishment – there is no other word for it – and there were some
riotous nights there. It was International Women’s Year and nine books of New
Zealand women’s poetry appeared that year, more possibly than there had been in
the previous 10 years. So there were often half a dozen women reading, drinking
Harry’s red wine, talking, laughing,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
crying too when it all got too much for us, far into the nights. Sobbing too –
we were an emotional lot. There would be Lauris Edmond, Rachel McAlpine,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jan Kemp, Riemke Ensing – a whole collection
of the brave new uprising that we were. Now those were the days, my friends,
they really were. The great cohesive glue for these gatherings was Irene
Adcock, Marilyn’s mother, who hosted gatherings of poets, men and women, at her
house on Mount Victoria. The Campbells, Meg and Alistair, would be there, as
too Sam Hunt, Denis Glover. Irene, to whom <i>The Blue Chiming</i> is
dedicated, as too, Marilyn’s father Cyril, was the founder of what is now the
New Zealand Poetry Society. Marilyn’s sister Fleur – that’s Fleur Adcock, if
you don’t know the literary genealogy of this town, sometimes appeared from
England to read with us. Terrifying!</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">Well, that first collection was
terrific. We waited for the next one, but the habit of novels had descended on
Marilyn again. We waited. But here we are again, more than 40 years later, and
at last we are rewarded with <i>The Chiming Blue</i>, this new and lovely
collection of Marilyn’s, this long awaited book, published impeccably, as
always, by Fergus and Victoria University Press, with an evocative cover from
one of mother Irene’s paintings.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">It’s a rich collection, gathered up
from the years, peopled with the characters and loves of a lifetime, and
reflecting our own beautiful city of Wellington – Karori cemetery, coffee bars
that people of a certain age at a particular time in their lives – like in the 1960s
and 70s used to inhabit, sharply observed, as in ‘Decision in a Coffee Bar’
that begins: ‘Now that we have bitten back the flesh/we see each other in more
livid light/sharp limbs quiver at curious angles/like chicken bones discarded
on a plate.’ Indeed. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">There are break ups and reunions,
loss, grief and laughter, there are writers’ festivals<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and conferences, and figs for Denis – Glover
of course... Above all, perhaps, there are the voices of children, Marilyn’s
four daughters who are here this evening, one of those rare lovely times that
we as parents know as we get older, when all the children are together, and
already the wings of some of them are hovering like moths at evening, ready for
flight again to the other side of the world. So this is a special night for
Marilyn’s friends and family to remember and celebrate, the launching of a new
book <i>The Chiming Blue</i>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">Marilyn, you have had many honours,
not forgetting the Prime Ministers Award for Fiction last year. But I want to
thank you for sharing friendship over the years, for constancy and acceptance.
I’ve made one or two dreadful boo boos on occasion, said quite the wrong thing
about this or that but you have this unfailing grace that smoothes it over and
says, it’s all right Fiona, it really is all right. I love that this is you,
your way of dealing with the world. All those years ago, I couldn’t have
guessed that I’d get up this real and personal, but it happened. Thank you.
Thank you for <i>The Chiming Blue</i>, may the poems sail into the world, sails
unfurled."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;"><i>The Chiming Blue</i> by Marilyn Duckworth can be purchased at the best bookshops and through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/the-chiming-blue-new-and-selected-poems/">online bookshop</a>. $25, p/b. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;"><br /></span></div>
Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-60094609565375508692017-03-20T14:58:00.002+13:002017-03-20T15:07:19.908+13:00Bill Manhire interview<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaNQvQFEdkzXwzCmzY8BOSNEt5ECxoWHgsc-11gGI1vnSv5AqSuhjR-xnIyq3Lq6RYBQKq3lHSpTcQQmh0xOX-dkxpcH9K0IsL1AQmSDvJmjJXUjwP7MAgjI9_Fi4w5RitmRASsiukv2U/s1600/Bill+Manhire+web+small+on+sofa+by+Grant+Maiden+2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaNQvQFEdkzXwzCmzY8BOSNEt5ECxoWHgsc-11gGI1vnSv5AqSuhjR-xnIyq3Lq6RYBQKq3lHSpTcQQmh0xOX-dkxpcH9K0IsL1AQmSDvJmjJXUjwP7MAgjI9_Fi4w5RitmRASsiukv2U/s400/Bill+Manhire+web+small+on+sofa+by+Grant+Maiden+2016.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill Manhire (photo by Grant Maiden)</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">I imagine you’ve heard this a
lot over your career – but I’m going to say it anyway. In many of your poems in
</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Coffin<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> I have no idea what’s going on, but I don’t
mind – there’s something soothing about the sounds and word combinations,
something hinted at that I can’t quite grasp with my own words… It’s not reader’s
befuddlement, more a sense that what you’re creating on the page is the part of
the world we can’t quite understand. Is this your intention? </i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Emily Dickinson says that she knows she’s dealing with
poetry when she reads something and it makes her feel so cold no fire can ever
warm her. I think there’s something you want a poem to do to you as reader,
something almost physical, which is quite different from what we’re trained to look
for in poetry at various points in the education system. That’s the sort of
thing I’m after, I think. I’m not trying to be ‘difficult’ or obscure, I just
want a poem, first of all, to exist in the world in its own unparaphrasable actuality,
and then to have some resonance beyond itself. The Paul Valery
definition/aphorism sums it up for me: a poem is a prolonged hesitation between
sound and sense. I like poems that do that sort of hesitation, hovering between
meaning and music.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Then there’s the section
‘Known unto God’ which I know from reading this piece in the <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/new-zealand-listener/20170203/281565175491639">NZ Listener</a> is a poem made up of the voices of unknown dead soldiers… This
knowledge, that you’re hearing the (imagined) voices of the dead makes my
reading more poignant. So, my question is – how much do you think a reader
should know before they read a poem? Is this contextual?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">It’s interesting how after a poetry reading someone will
say, ‘I wish I knew what you said about that poem when you were introducing it.
Why can’t you give us that sort of information in your book?’ But explicatory
notes in a book would be bad for all sorts of reasons, I think. That particular
poem was written for a specific context, a commemoration of the Battle of the
Somme, and I think there’s a note to that effect on the back of the book.
Whether that helps a reader ‘get’ every moment in the poem (especially the
ending in the contemporary Mediterranean) is hard to know. Probably not.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">I’m pleased with one thing we’ve been able to do with ‘Known
unto God’ in the larger book – it’s sort of sectioned off with its own
double-black endpapers which I hope gives some sense that it’s an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in memoriam</i> piece, almost like one of
those orders of service handed out at a funeral.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Sometimes reading your work
is like reading a Calvino short story. I’m thinking of ‘What Will Last’ in
which I imagine the speaker is an old woman with Alzheimers listing ‘what will
last’ in the future. I mention Calvino, because throughout your work there’s a
thread of surrealism, a surprising strange element which is always grounded by
an earthy voice, a piece of humour. What do you think of this oddness in your
work, do you have a name for it? I say surrealism, but that’s not quite right
either…</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Yes, I think that speaker is entering the world of dementia
and memory-fail. She – or he! – is looking for what will last at a time when
things in their own life are starting to dissolve. It’s a state that can be
pretty unsettling, and the gaps and leaps do have a surreal flavour. I don’t
have a name for it, but I’ve always thought poetry needs a bit of weirdness. I
love Calvino, so am pleased that you make the comparison. And more generally I
like the way comedy can be a means of voicing something that’s also desperately
sad.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">I think the strangeness in
your work sometimes arises out of a mingling of physical body experience and
sense of the world with how the mind processes what we see and feel, which can
be very confusing! An obvious example would be ‘My World War I Poem’ – a simple,
very affecting poem. ‘Inside each trench, the sound of prayer./ Inside each
prayer, the sound of digging.’ So you’ve got the sound of the trenches, and the
psychological dread of the trenches interwoven, impossible to pull apart. Is it
this confusion of experience you’re getting at in your work?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">I’ll need to think about that, but you might be on to
something! I like readers to feel secure and insecure at the same time. I do
think you write out of your confusions, not your occasional moments of clarity.
Maybe I tend to leave more confusion in the text than other writers do. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">You’ve used erasure in some
of your poems. Erasure always slightly piques me as a reader – can you say a
bit about why you use it?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">I leave lots out, but I don’t think I use erasure all that much.
Or not in the way it’s used by Mary Ruefle or Tom Phillips in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Humument</i>, where in a way you’re
dealing with work that may involve language but is really a minor branch of the
visual arts. But I think maybe you mean the lines that I print but <s>strike
out</s> at the same time? That’s just something I occasionally try, without
quite knowing what I’m doing. I like the fact that you can see what’s been lost
or removed, at the same time as it remains awkwardly present. I think that’s
something I’ve done at the end of ‘The Beautiful World’. </span></div>
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<s><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Where our sister has opened the door.</span></s></div>
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<s><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Where our father stands beside our
mother.</span></s></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Where the trees have gathered to admire the water.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">You can see what the speaker wishes were there for him –
the family he has lost – even as you can see that it’s been deleted. His whole
life has undergone revision: all he’s got now is some trees and a lake.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">What is it with you and
lakes, Bill? They occur so often in your poems. </span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">A chunk of my childhood was spent in Mossburn, on the way
through to Te Anau and Manapouri, so some of my earliest memories are involved
with lakes. I like the fact that you can somehow see both the surface and the
depth – or you think you can. And lakes have edges – they aren’t endless free
verse. Is it Auden who says that the trouble with the sea is that it’s just too
sloppy and formless? Another especially good thing about lakes is that a hand
might rise up at any moment waving a big sword.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">You’ve collaborated with
different artists throughout your career. Ralph Hotere was an early
collaborator, and an artist to whom the title poem is dedicated. You’ve also
got a song lyric written for SJD and a new book of riddles, which is a
collaboration with composer Norman Meehan, singer Hannah Griffin and
photographer Peter Peryer. Can you say a bit about how those two collaborations
came about? </span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Some people think collaboration is tight cooperative
teamwork. I’m happy if it’s less intense, even long-distance. One person does
one thing, and the other adds to it and transforms it, and then there might be
a bit of to and fro. With Ralph, it was a friendship thing, a temperamental
affinity – we both enjoyed sitting quietly in a room and occasionally grunting.
Well, I did. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Norman had already worked with Hannah on poetry – mainly ee
cummings, and he subsequently set a few poems of mine and asked me along to the
performance. I went a bit uneasily because of course a good poem has already
been set to music in some essential way. But I sort of liked what he did, so suggested
I could try writing some lyrics for him to work with. We’re pretty much up to
four albums now. Usually the text precedes the music. There are lyrics I’ve
produced for Norman and Hannah that I wouldn’t otherwise have written, and are
very satisfyingly weird, and I’m totally pleased they’re in the world. ‘Warehouse
Curtains’, a sort of Elizabethan lyric gone wrong, would be one example.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro";">Sean Donnelly got in touch with a few poets last year looking
for texts he might work with. I like his stuff anyway, so was pleased to be in
the mix, and I really like what he’s done with the words I sent him. I’m
guessing there’ll be an album fairly soon. One of the lyrics I wrote, ‘Rescue’,
I’ve put in the new book. </span></div>
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<i><a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/tell-me-my-name/">Some Things to Place in a Coffin</a> </i>(pb, $25) and <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/tell-me-my-name/"><i>Tell Me My Name</i></a> (hb, $35, incl. CD) are both available for purchase at the best bookshops and through our online bookstore now. </div>
Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-63696404850745898112017-03-16T10:15:00.000+13:002017-03-16T10:15:00.374+13:00Interview with James McNaughton<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9f9t3AyLens8xa1lTvEYQhNUJ3uwhaRRYOeHrTTi5bk60QdJ2Hd8zMiJsFYR8hHp1maMvNAUFn93ydvVhQFLYOyDITFEXfdT7odHcsJ8eLxzzj3tdVtd4JfZi7K9CfRHLtAdQ-rurFkY/s1600/James+McNaughton+small+colour2+by+Grant+Maiden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9f9t3AyLens8xa1lTvEYQhNUJ3uwhaRRYOeHrTTi5bk60QdJ2Hd8zMiJsFYR8hHp1maMvNAUFn93ydvVhQFLYOyDITFEXfdT7odHcsJ8eLxzzj3tdVtd4JfZi7K9CfRHLtAdQ-rurFkY/s400/James+McNaughton+small+colour2+by+Grant+Maiden.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James McNaughton (Grant Maiden Photography)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">Your new novel, </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ">Star Sailors<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, is set in a version of Wellington in the near
future where climate change has severely changed people’s lives. Your first
novel, </i>New Hokkaido<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, was also set in
a reimagined Wellington in the 1980s, one in which imagines the Japanese occupied
New Zealand in WWII – can you talk about the attraction of turning Wellington
on a fantastical slant like you’ve done in two books now? What is it about speculative
fiction that motivates you as a writer?</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">With <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Hokkaido</i> I wanted to try something I
hadn’t done before: a page-turner. My previous attempts at long fiction were
reflexive, digressive and plotless, so this was a big departure for me. It was
fun to go forth and tell a love/detective story, but I felt the genre
conventions a little restricting. What I like about speculative fiction is that
it offers dramatic possibilities and ways into issues that straight literary
fiction isn’t allowed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">One of the problems
with climate change as a future global catastrophe is that it’s all rather dry
and abstract. For a lot of people in first-world countries climate change and
inequality have become bothersome background noise that only sharpen into a
sense of guilt and hopelessness when attention is paid to them. To travel into
the near future transforms vague forecasts of catastrophe into something
concrete. Risk becomes reality<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. Star
Sailors</i> shows the disastrous possible effects of climate change and
inequality on a day-to-day basis. But the prerequisite for any novel to
effectively tackle issues is that it be entertaining. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Sailors </i>is character-driven. It’s humorous. It’s cinematic. It
has momentum. It was written in the golden era of the TV mini-series. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">Star Sailors</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ"> is not a dystopia. I’ve
attempted to create a plausible geo-political 2045 in which emission reductions
have not occurred. Given the current political climate in the US, for example, this
is plausible. To imagine NZ as a haven for international elites doesn’t feel
like speculation but highly likely. (Since I started writing the novel, which
imagines an elite gated community in the Wairarapa, rich Americans have bought
land there.) The future I’ve depicted in which ‘business as usual’ prevails is
distressing, but power is never given up willingly and the science is clear
that if we keep doing what we’re doing now in terms of emissions and
deforestation we are bound for global disaster within decades. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">There is a
perception that climate change is just about drought and waves beating at the
doorstep. My view is that rising sea levels, worsening weather shocks and the
spread of pests and of disease will greatly exacerbate existing problems around
fresh water, food security, migration and inequality, resulting in
unprecedented social unrest. A wheat crop failure in North America due to
climate change, for example, can affect the price of bread in Eastern Europe.
Everything is linked. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">There are a couple
of fantastical elements in the novel. One is the arrival of a brain-damaged
alien humanoid to New Hokitika (Hokitika has been moved to higher ground and
become a rain holiday destination for Australians). The helpless humanoid becomes
the property of the news arm of a transnational and a puppet for their commercial
interests. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">Another element is
the idea of the super-elderly class. Out-of-control-unsustainable technology
has been described as the Frankenstein child of science, with technology’s
grand prize the end of illness and death altogether. But is vastly increased
life-span really the boon it’s made out to be? With the elite class of super-elderly
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Sailors</i> I’ve showed what extended
age might mean to society in terms of entrenched ideology and power. And how
creepy ancient baby-boomers might be.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">You’ve described Star Sailors as cli-fi (climate change fiction). In
writing it did you research predictions of climate change disaster or was it
fairly easy to come up with your own?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">I’ve volunteered
for the Red Cross Cred Crescent as an editor at various times, including 2004–06
when my wife-to-be was a Red Cross delegate in South Asia and we were based in
Delhi. Weather-based disasters were on the increase in the region and her job was
to advocate for those at risk. When I accompanied her on a mission to the
Maldives, I saw the vulnerabilities of low-lying communities to climate change.
The Red Cross reports I edited clearly described climate change as the major
ongoing risk in the Maldives and in the other areas in South Asia prone to
flooding and storms. Climate Change wasn’t a bourgeoisie playground or opportunity
for trolls, it was real and happening. In 2008, I volunteered for the Red Cross
in Bogota, Columbia and edited Spanish to English translations for the South
American centre for climate change, which collated and published reports from
across the continent. I’ve followed developments ever since. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">I took my predictions
for 2045 to a few experts and asked them a lot of questions. Those talks were
very helpful.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Is there
something in writing about the disasters of climate change that helps you
mitigate your fears about climate change?</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">No, not at all. The
more I learned about climate change while researching the novel, the worse the
situation looked. Discussing the subject with experts was especially grim. When
I started writing in 2014, climate change denial was not uncommon in
government. I thought the Paris Accord would make denial untenable for those in
power, if nothing else, but depressingly that hasn’t happened. The process of
writing hasn’t made me feel any less fearful, but a little less impotent. I’ve
tried. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">There have been a few stories in the wake of the recent US elections
calling for artists to write about our current troubles. Do you feel you have a
responsibility as an artist to write about environmental and political
concerns?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">Narrative is how
we make sense of time and the world. Stories have power, and symbol, analogy
and metaphor are powerful communicators. I felt that the best contribution I
could make to raising awareness of climate change was to take the content out
of unread reports and knowledge-sharing documents into a wider discourse through
fiction about people facing the effects of climate change. The decision to
write about these issues wasn’t born out of a sense responsibility exactly,
more out of anger and exasperation if anything. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">I can understand
readers avoiding social problem fiction. One of the most attractive things
about art is its exemption from having to be practically useful. You’ve got a
few free hours and don’t want to be lectured—particularly on a good cause. But
at the same time, writing which ignores the pressing concerns of the day runs
the risk of being irrelevant. It’s a balancing act for a writer. Great social
problem novels don’t preach abstract issues, they’re about people facing those
issues, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes
of Wrath</i>, and the work of Charles Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Social science
fiction classics, such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gulliver’s
Travels</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Brave New World</i>, and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>, are less
character-based, but work on an important level as entertainment. There’s no
point preaching to the choir or preaching to the sleeping.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">VS Naipaul said
novels should be an investigation onto society, which for me describes what the
great nineteenth-century writers did best. It’s probably fair to say that the
novel has since moved to more individual concerns. It could well be time for some
writers to change focus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">Climate change can be hard to talk about and get your head around. Is it hard to write about? </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">Climate change is
difficult to talk about, partly because it’s hard to visualise and then depressing
if you persist. The inertia, denial and politicisation around it is wearying.
To research and write a novel in which things have only changed for the worse
thirty years from now was sometimes hard. But this horrible possibility
inspired me to find a story. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">We need to be
worried. Emissions could quite likely continue to increase in response to
population growth and growing energy demands. War or social unrest will move climate
change to the background. Tipping points may come sooner than predicted. The earth
is a balanced system, and feedbacks (such as the effect of disappearing ice
reducing solar reflection and increasing warming) are difficult to predict
accurately. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ">Problems are the beating
heart of fiction, so from a writer’s point of view there’s plenty to work with
around our slide into catastrophe. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star
Sailors</i> is a Comedy plot, in the way that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">War and Peace</i> is a Comedy plot. It’s about people finding each
other in a time of trouble—it’s about love. Climate change and inequality are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Sailor’s</i> Napoleon—its one hundred Napoleons
tearing up the fabric of civilisation. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ"></span><span lang="EN-NZ"></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ZD2FhvtkjqkrGecdDCHNPt4LjwzCnjVnjoaMjUp6llXoc5wJkEN9nGOvAMSz26BowmLYlnWoc7VVKilONWPDFJZY5zQIvTZq2dSsZMNugXRNzZbOt7qZkuDxMMusNEtetLLKycSa_FY/s1600/Star+Sailors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ZD2FhvtkjqkrGecdDCHNPt4LjwzCnjVnjoaMjUp6llXoc5wJkEN9nGOvAMSz26BowmLYlnWoc7VVKilONWPDFJZY5zQIvTZq2dSsZMNugXRNzZbOt7qZkuDxMMusNEtetLLKycSa_FY/s400/Star+Sailors.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-NZ"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><i>Star Sailors</i> is available for purchase now at the best bookshops and through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/star-sailors/">online bookstore</a>. p/b, $35.</span></span></div>
Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-78769479306259007122017-01-27T15:12:00.001+13:002017-01-27T15:12:35.693+13:00The Relentless Search: Educational Achievement and Success
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";"></span></span>Bernadine Vester, author of <i>Southern Transformation: Searching for education success in South Auckland</i>, writes about ideas of educational success in the context of South Auckland schools.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKmMUKEl9fsBBMVJEks8MMeF7QYbpSqReijdsu3OIqO107klV8rs6HsvQY1LiOBlZPbE5gv1-aAyjYv62HvxYMLUCX_0x3ygu5K8s5QttQ-NHQ4rpYrmpcOXyQkSg1DDW3ahSsnxqDSt4/s1600/9781776560967.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKmMUKEl9fsBBMVJEks8MMeF7QYbpSqReijdsu3OIqO107klV8rs6HsvQY1LiOBlZPbE5gv1-aAyjYv62HvxYMLUCX_0x3ygu5K8s5QttQ-NHQ4rpYrmpcOXyQkSg1DDW3ahSsnxqDSt4/s320/9781776560967.jpg" width="226" /></a></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">Simon, graduate of decile two Edgewater College, is part of
a prize-winning team of engineers who have developed a drone that can operate
in strong or gusty winds and at greater angles than other models, providing
better results for cinematographers. It’s a commercial winner. </span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">Simon and his friend Hannah, who started at Edgewater on the same
day, are both doctoral students at Cambridge University in the UK. They join
large numbers of high-fliers who attended low-decile schools in South
Auckland and have gone on to great academic success. The point being, of course,
that you don’t have to attend a high-decile school to achieve educational
success.</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">However, stories of individuals don’t trump broader public
perceptions about educational success in South Auckland; too often, they are
treated as the exception proving the rule. South Auckland is ripe for educational
improvement, we are told. When you want to embark on educational improvement,
you begin by defining educational achievement and success. Is it getting the
qualification? A job? Raising the country’s GDP? Personal and family
well-being? Attending a prestigious university in a foreign country? </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">A clear, widely shared definition of education success is an elusive thing.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null"> </a></span><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; line-height: 150%;"><a class="msocomanchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2160069732656919323#_msocom_1" id="_anchor_1" name="_msoanchor_1"></a><span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">Some time ago, New Zealand
political decision-makers decided that our education system would be measured
against the number of students who achieved NCEA Level 2. This became a public
service target – a singularity that would improve our ranking in global system
measures, enable unemployed youth access jobs and higher education, and
identify which schools and students needed more funding and support to fix the
social dysfunctions of places like South Auckland.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">The top-down push to deliver on the target seems to be
winning the day: the numbers look good. Between 2009 and 2015 there was an 11.6
percentage point increase in the number of school-leavers with NCEA Level 2 or
equivalent. Asian students had the highest success rate, and Māori the lowest.
The target (85% by age 18) is a stretch but improvement seems within reach, with
an emphasis on achievement rates for students who are Māori and/or Pasifika. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">This makes South Auckland an area of focus. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">NCEA Level 2 is an economic ‘productivity marker’. It’s an assessment
of the value of state investment in learning. The qualification is a desired
‘efficiency’ for an economy demanding ever higher levels of knowledge and skill.
For the sake of the national economy, Auckland’s students need NCEA Level 2. But
static youth unemployment rates and slow GDP growth in Auckland betray this
assumption. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">The qualification has become fraught with middle-class
angst. In a market of qualifications, assessment systems are being asked to
differentiate personal quality in a global job market. Markets work not just on
supply and demand; they also operate on branding and prestige. International
private qualifications, run by for-profit companies, play on their reputations
for class and global reward. There is no publicly accessible data about them;
they are permitted in public schools by global trade agreements and paid for by
family aspiration. Knowledge and skills are important currency, but qualifications
don’t necessarily lead to economic success. If this were so, countries and
regions with highly educated workforces would have high-growth economies – but Spain,
Portugal, the UK and the US have large numbers of unemployed graduates. Something
else is at work: social value and exclusivity. NCEA Level 2 is becoming a common-garden
qualification. Is it true that the more that low-decile schools succeed with
their Māori and Pasifika students in meeting the NCEA Level 2 target, the less
desirable the qualification they deliver becomes? In a world where status <i>is</i> the market, the goals posts shift simply
when the market replaces the local qualification with an international one. Inequalities
rise. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">Not just students, but schools too, are measured by NCEA. Schools
have responded to the 85% target to offer very differentiated programmes. There
are upsides and downsides to this. With the wrong credits, students might limit
their options. With the right credits, students become eligible for
apprenticeships and company-paid training, arguably as good a track for
well-paying jobs as any university degree. Any school can mix and match the
credits they offer, helping to shape success. Delivering the numbers is what
public services are supposed to do. Over time, NCEA Level 2 in a high-decile
school begins to look very different from NCEA Level 2 in a low-decile school. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">The curriculum offerings of public schools depend heavily
on their definitions (backed by parent-led boards) of what success looks like. To
many, success in the public mind equals</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";"> achieving University Entrance
– never mind that you don’t need to go to university to establish a solid
career (in technical trades, for example). Some have argued that schools apparently 'cheat' young people</span><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; line-height: 150%;"><a class="msocomanchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2160069732656919323#_msocom_3" id="_anchor_3" name="_msoanchor_3"></a><span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";"> out of a future by tracking
them into options that don’t lead there. NCEA is innovative, internationally
portable, quality-assured, able to be applied to both academic and vocation
futures, and flexible. These qualities make it very useful for a national
education system. NCEA Level 2 can be constructed for a job in barista services
and a job engineering for drones. This is NCEA’s strength – and also its
Achilles’ heel. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">Defining educational achievement and success is a complex
question. Simon’s chances of getting to Cambridge University and leading a team
to make a commercially viable drone did not depend solely on his school (although
clearly it added important value). NCEA was a milestone in his schooling career,
not the goalpost. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">There are many possible goals in education. NCEA Level 2 is
not, however, an indicator that poverty has been beaten, social prejudices
removed, spiritual or temporal well-being attained, or even that one has
graduated with a passport for a job. The sum knowledge of the world may never be distilled into qualifications. So we over-estimate their importance if we see them as the relentless and only goal. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";"><br /></span></span></div>
<div>
<hr align="left" class="msocomoff" size="1" width="33%" />
<div>
<div class="msocomtxt" id="_com_1">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_msocom_1"></a></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<br />
<br />
Bernadine Vester<i> </i>is the foundation chief executive of the City of Manukau Education Trust (COMET) and operates her own consultancy business.<br />
<br />
<i>Southern Transformation: Searching for education success in South Auckland</i> is available for purchase on <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/southern-transformation-searching-for-educational-success-in-south-auckland/">VUP's online bookstore</a> and at the best bookshops. <br />
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-4910262777820149562016-12-15T10:51:00.002+13:002016-12-15T10:52:00.292+13:00VUP closing hours over Christmas<br />
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VUP will be closed from 22 December 2016 until 9 January 2017. Any web orders received after 22 December will not be processed until 9 January. But if you really need our books - go to one of the excellent bookshops that stock us.<br />
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Happy summer reading everyone!Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-22687876150721529942016-11-08T12:39:00.000+13:002016-11-08T12:39:05.848+13:00Six questions for Catherine Chidgey
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Mh00aXcNYjfYxd2GfHGgZndzuz2r__vSGSzshfjYYSe1bxohvufYAv1oV6SZJtU8qE9B5LcD6tIKLfg7XDhMxDkugBmN6xG9AoWJlXKe_SJJgPpS01I3Drew53ba_2FJnz4m-0g6cUc/s1600/Catherine+Chidgey+blue+dress+by+Fiona+Pardington+2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Mh00aXcNYjfYxd2GfHGgZndzuz2r__vSGSzshfjYYSe1bxohvufYAv1oV6SZJtU8qE9B5LcD6tIKLfg7XDhMxDkugBmN6xG9AoWJlXKe_SJJgPpS01I3Drew53ba_2FJnz4m-0g6cUc/s640/Catherine+Chidgey+blue+dress+by+Fiona+Pardington+2016.jpg" width="422" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Catherine Chidgey (photo by Fiona Pardington)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">Could you start by telling me about the genesis for </span></i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wish Child</span></span><i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">? Is this a period of
history you’ve always wanted to write about?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-border-between: .5pt dotted windowtext; mso-padding-between: 1.0pt; mso-padding-top-alt: 0cm; padding-top: 1.0pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">I didn’t deliberately sit down and think
right, now I’d better produce a WW2 novel, but in hindsight it seems natural that
my work took that direction. My father was a child during the war and as an
adult he had a particular interest in the period, so I grew up exposed to books
and documentaries about it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-border-between: .5pt dotted windowtext; mso-padding-between: 1.0pt; mso-padding-top-alt: 0cm; padding-top: 1.0pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-border-between: .5pt dotted windowtext; mso-padding-between: 1.0pt; mso-padding-top-alt: 0cm; padding-top: 1.0pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">I studied German at school and at Victoria, and
when I was 16 I spent three months on exchange in Germany. One of my host families
lived in a farmhouse near Lüneburg, and some aspects of my time with them have
made their way into the book. In particular I remember Herr K talking to me one
day about the war. It was just the two of us, and he told me about his
experiences fighting in Russia – he said there was very little for the soldiers
to eat, and when they came to a field of watermelon they fell on them and
gorged themselves, they were so hungry. He also said that if he hadn’t killed,
it would have been an act of suicide. That conversation stayed with me. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-border-between: .5pt dotted windowtext; mso-padding-between: 1.0pt; mso-padding-top-alt: 0cm; padding-top: 1.0pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-border-between: .5pt dotted windowtext; mso-padding-between: 1.0pt; mso-padding-top-alt: 0cm; padding-top: 1.0pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">Then in
1993 I went to Berlin to study, and found myself living in a city in which the
past – and in particular the war – seemed always present, always visible. You
could still see bomb damage and shrapnel marks and bullet holes on the buildings,
particularly in the east, and Sachsenhausen concentration camp lay just to the
north of the city. One of the professors at my university showed us a campus
building – now the department of Political Science – that had been the site of
medical experiments during the Third Reich. He also took us on a trip to
Buchenwald concentration camp, purportedly built around Goethe’s famous oak
tree; we stayed overnight in the former SS quarters. It was powerful stuff for
a fledgling writer. I remember, too, seeing </span><span style="line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">a beautiful old Berlin building that had
been bombed in the war; the façade featured caryatids in the form of children
who were holding up the windows, but they were badly damaged. It seemed to
suggest something rather poignant about a child’s experience of war, and I
tucked it away to use in my writing. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-border-between: .5pt dotted windowtext; mso-padding-between: 1.0pt; mso-padding-top-alt: 0cm; padding-top: 1.0pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-border-between: .5pt dotted windowtext; mso-padding-between: 1.0pt; mso-padding-top-alt: 0cm; padding-top: 1.0pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">The real spark for the novel came, though,
when I stumbled across a reference to the mysterious figure who narrates the
book. I realised I had to give this forgotten person a voice, but at first I
was frustrated when researching him; the sources did not agree on the facts of
his life and death, or even on his name or gender. One story contradicted
another. In the end, however, these very contradictions were a gift, informing
and shaping the novel.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">The Wish Child</span></span><i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;"> is an
incredibly complex, textured piece of writing – all these delicate plot threads
that slowly weave together to form an incredible tapestry about war and
violence, and love and friendship and the consequences of bad deeds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How did you go about creating such a dense,
full story? How long did it take you to write it?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">This particular child demanded rather a long gestation – 13 years. That
was partly due to life getting in the way, but also because of the intricacy of
the story I wanted to tell. It took some time to find its voice – it started
off as quite a different book, actually, about a boy whose mother was a film
star in Nazi Germany – but those sections ended up on the cutting-room floor. I
don’t see that as wasted time, though – what you remove from a book defines it
as much as what remains.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">Gottlieb Heilmann’s job as Senior Retrospective Editor, Publications
Division, is a terrifying illustration and metaphor for how history gets
cleaned up, and erased under totalitarian leadership – you even have him
erasing the word ‘God’ from the Bible! I think you made this job up?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a marvelous creation to have in a novel
and for a writer to play with.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">I did invent Gottlieb’s job, yes – it’s one of a few instances in the
book that verge on magical realism. He methodically cuts forbidden words from
books, and as the war progresses the number of words on the forbidden list
increases. </span><span style="line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 15.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">When we talk about Germany under Hitler, we often use words like
‘unbelievable’ or ‘unthinkable’. We ask ourselves how something so unimaginable
could have happened. The Germany of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Wish Child</i>, therefore, although historically accurate in many respects, is
in other respects not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">quite</i> real. It
was a way for me to comment on the absurdity of a regime in which language and
meaning were routinely manipulated and abused – </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">‘special treatment’ meant execution by
lethal gas; ‘protective custody’ meant anything but.</span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">You’re a German speaker? And reader? How did you go about creating the
texture of 1940s Germany? I would think that taking a
period in history that is not only well documented in non-fiction, but also in
fiction, has its hazards and possibly makes the novelist’s job harder because
it can seem like somewhere we’ve all been before, which it doesn’t here. </span></i></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">I was already familiar with Germany, both rural and metropolitan, and
of course a lot of the architecture I encountered when I lived there was
present during the period – so I drew on my memories of particular structures,
and wandered around Google Maps (a wonderful tool for writers). I also immersed
myself in the everyday literature and ephemera of the period – ration booklets,
advertising, women’s magazines, menus, children’s books, as well as eye-witness
accounts. Being able to read German obviously came in very handy with that sort
of research. The internet has allowed me to access some fascinating and obscure
documents that would have been difficult to find otherwise – a guide for
leaders of Hitler Youth groups for girls, for instance, on appropriate
activities for 10-year-olds (singing, sewing, learning about the life of Adolf
Hitler), or a fairly deranged propaganda leaflet produced in the final
desperate months of the war in which ‘two possibilities’ are presented to
Berliners – the options including hanging themselves or being liquidated by the
Russian army.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;"><i>Your story is a story of ordinary Nazi families, and how the WW2 affected
them. It’s a fine balancing act to strike between representing the banality of
evil and not reducing the evil. I have a feeling that the point of view of the
children is important here as their understanding of what is going on is
limited, but tell me, how did you go about making ground that feels fresh to
tread here? Is this something you even thought about?</i> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">I was aware that many writers before me have trod this terrain, yes –
but I always try to come at my writing from an original angle. Discovering the
narrator’s story when I was researching was a real turning point – I knew
straight away that it belonged in the novel, and indeed that this cryptic voice
formed the heart of the novel, allowing me to shift in and out of the minds of
the two children and their parents. I can’t say too much more than that without
giving the game away, though! Something else I did was to splice in quotes from
songs, poems, speeches of the period – sometimes overtly, but often
subliminally. So for instance, a comment by Hitler on the attractiveness of
German children finds its way into the mouth of Erich’s mother; a teacher
quotes a speech by Goebbels as if the words are her own. This was a way of expressing
something of the zeitgeist, and showing how completely evil can penetrate the
attitudes of ‘ordinary’ people; I hope, too, that it lends the writing a kind
of heightened immediacy.</span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">It’s been thirteen years since your third novel, </span></i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Transformation</span></span><i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">, was published. How does it feel to be releasing
your fourth novel?</span></i></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">I feel relieved, nervous, excited. The book has been part of my life
for so long – I am more than ready to let this child find its way in the world.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvkwFOP7TOrVDedC_ceR_w54WK5WYLKTL1djpVhmg6BDDyuszoLkIIADtznL0Sj6A2oTf_7j7OImbnejfXiThWaKVvOJjFQtkWV_jUJBLWGgVeEbBt3mZG_IHjgW5zLdiPwF7m_iJGwpo/s1600/The+Wish+Child+final.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvkwFOP7TOrVDedC_ceR_w54WK5WYLKTL1djpVhmg6BDDyuszoLkIIADtznL0Sj6A2oTf_7j7OImbnejfXiThWaKVvOJjFQtkWV_jUJBLWGgVeEbBt3mZG_IHjgW5zLdiPwF7m_iJGwpo/s640/The+Wish+Child+final.jpg" width="428" /></a></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;"><i>The Wish Child</i> by Catherine Chidgey is available for purchase from 10 November at all good bookshops and through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/the-wish-child-pb/">online bookstore</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">$30 pb, $45 hb.</span></div>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-70326760365477690702016-10-12T11:16:00.002+13:002016-10-12T11:16:57.701+13:00A message from JCJohn Campbell couldn't make the launch for Nick Ascroft's <i>Back With The Human Condition</i>, but he did send this....<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcH_wIkW7Sj5GVJ8gN98Cu8KGzNucLDUoKszpPanOZy9F_QxgwKmsPg0BxgOqbs1A3RwnsGJjA2Vp3goew-UZCu5i5GxfgRQfDuPnC7CjhwSnJ6BOCBNLZCk84iemt6kj-kOEnE9txki4/s1600/FullSizeRender.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcH_wIkW7Sj5GVJ8gN98Cu8KGzNucLDUoKszpPanOZy9F_QxgwKmsPg0BxgOqbs1A3RwnsGJjA2Vp3goew-UZCu5i5GxfgRQfDuPnC7CjhwSnJ6BOCBNLZCk84iemt6kj-kOEnE9txki4/s400/FullSizeRender.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ashleigh Young reads a telegram at Nick Ascroft's launch</td></tr>
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Dear Nick,<br /><br />Hello, it's John Campbell here.<br /><br />I'm so sorry I couldn't be there tonight. I'm in a coma. Or hosting Checkpoint, which, depending on who I'm interviewing, may feel like the same thing. <br /><br />Ashleigh kindly invited me. And I would have loved to have come. I think your book's fantastic, not withstanding the inexplicable mystery of why you didn't help that Chinese grandmother with her shopping bags?<br /><br />Jesus, Nick. What kind of person are you? <br /><br />And while we're asking the big questions – whose idea was it to use a photo of you in a dressing gown on the back of the book? <br /><br />Did Hera Lindsay Bird put you up to that? <br /><br />Fergus must have been appalled!<br /><br />You'll regret it. <br /><br />Later, when a signed first edition inevitably makes its way to the Houghton Library at Harvard, to sit beside Dickinson, cummings, Frost, Stevens, Williams, and the like, and you go to visit with your grandchildren – those hallowed halls, all hushed reverence before the magnificence of such words – they'll ask you: "Granddad, why are you in a dressing gown? Did Hera Lindsay Bird put you up to that?" <br /><br />And an older one will ask, incredulous that anyone would confess to this: "Granddad – did you really have sex in your socks?" <br /><br />Having said that, and overcoming my deep disappointment at not being there to see Kate's haircut, I'd like to say, Nick, that your poetry is gorgeous. <br /><br />Sparkling and delicious. <br /><br />So full of wonder, and curiosity, and a profound but not reverent awareness of life – of how absurd it is, and funny, and great, and seriously unserious. <br /><br />Nick, there are poems that are so superb, I wish I was there to hear you read them. <br /><br />What a great book this is! <br /><br />I shall cherish it. <br /><br />And return to it over and over for years to come. <br /><br />I'm better dressed than you, obviously, but am gratefully in awe of the way it pops at me, again and again, every a poem a bomb, making me arise from my slumber - my coma - line after line, poem after poem. And you, there - "a moon, punched all over with old bruises, but whole, orbiting on, pressing on, whole."<br /><br />Congratulations, Nick.<br /><br />What a great book. <br /><br />And thank you. <br /><br />Yours, in admiration, <br /><br />John.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Be like John Campbell and order your copy <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/back-with-the-human-condition/">here</a> today!</td></tr>
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<br />Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-29572715393963129412016-10-11T14:41:00.000+13:002016-10-11T14:41:10.394+13:00Nick Ascroft – 4 Questions<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nick Ascroft (Grant Maiden Photography)</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<i>You are counted in the pantheon of genuinely funny poets – let’s not name the others in case we hurt feelings... Did you make a conscious decision to not write in a serious timbre or is it simply the way it came out? Were you writing like this when you started to write poetry?</i><br /><br />
There’s a great song from last year by Wilco called ‘The Joke Explained’ off the album they inexplicably called <i>Star Wars</i> and put a cat on the cover of. I think this somehow encapsulates my answer to your question. Ah, it doesn’t, does it. Gah. Nonetheless I love a line in the middle of the song: ‘It’s a staring contest, in a hall of mirrors.'<br />
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Poetry can seem a little high and grand to people, and writers of it, wary of this public and their idea that a certain height and grandeur is expected, can try and force the stuff out. But it’s a nasty trap, this temptation to write in a style that sounds to the ear like something that will convince others it bespeaks poetry. TS Eliot bumbled into it. A funny poet, writing about buffoons with rolled up trousers, he became popular and felt he had to write poetry worthy of his ideas about poetry. Four Quartets? Snore me a sickbag.<br />
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I think of Kushana Bush’s art. It’s full of depth, insight and historical reference, but it’s haha-funny, and she’s kept it funny while art-world chin-strokers have praised it in solemn tones. That isn’t easy. So she’s the paradigm I follow.<br />
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Do I try to be funny? Yes, as shameful as that sounds to admit. And often enough I really bomb, and the tumbleweeds whistle past. I remember Pamela Gordon once saying that poets were just failed stand-up comedians. And it’s a little bit true. Poetry also allows you to be funny-hmm, you know: ‘I find that funny. Right now I am experiencing amusement at your witticism.’ Or epigrammatic. In 1994, I wrote the first line of poetry that wasn’t just intended for a friend or family member to read. Kapka Kassabova had recommended I enter a student competition with Rob Allan as one of the judges. The first line was: ‘Let’s consummate our divorce with a documentary.’ It was funny to me anyway, and as ever I didn’t win but got my first of many ‘commendations’. I had a punkish outlook on poetry when I started and that’s easy in your twenties. But it gets harder to sell: that middle-aged public servant is so irreverent.<br />
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The ultimate answer to your question though is I don’t have as much control over what I write as I think I do. I write mostly quite traditional sonnets and unfortunately a lot of experimental poetry. I hate experimental poetry. What’s the experiment? What’s even the hypothesis? I hypothesise you won’t want to read this twice? Bullseye. It’s another veil in the seeming of poetry: that’s so weird it must be poetry and not an annoying five minutes I could’ve spent on biscuits. And yet, yes I write the stuff and I desperately want you to read it.<br /><br />
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<i>Your new book is split into four sections: ‘Love’, ‘Money’, ‘Complaints’ and ‘Death’. Explain ‘Complaints’? Is that instead of ‘Family,' or is it the same thing?</i><br /><br />
The splitting is convenience and an afterthought. It was about sandwiching the poems into the themes they seemed mostly to be falling in. ‘Complaints’ was the ‘everything else’ probably, as I generally whine about something as some point in a poem. ‘Death’ is the best section I think, and perhaps I should’ve shuttled it to the front, but I’m too much of a boring pedant to start with death.<br /><i> </i><br />
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<i>This is a minor point when considering your work, but there is something un-New Zealand about your poety – no gazing upon our ‘pure’ skies or water, no laconic references to sheds. Your landscapes, in their rare appearances, are northern hemisphere, or a mix of places. What are your influences and do you see yourself as a part of any mode of poetry writing?</i><br /><br />
I think my last two books were more NZ-centred, and the lack of the shearing-shed backdrop is simply a product of having lived most of the period writing this book in the UK. I’m self-publishing a sci-fi novel set in Southland later this year which will redress the balance.<br />
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I’m a big fan of Richard Reeve’s poetry, and you can’t imagine his poems without the place they are happening in. But for whatever reason I can be a bit blind to the world beyond the walls. Things happen in human habitation zones: houses, offices, streets and rookeries. OK not rookeries yet, but I’ve been trying to work the following line into a poem all year: snug as a buggery in a rookery.<br />
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As to my influences, it’s difficult to say. Everything you read and hear and see has its effect and response. Certain writers’ voices stick in my head – Richard, John Dolan, David Eggleton and Cilla McQueen spring to mind – but I don’t think I mimic them. Perhaps I occasionally mimic certain nineteenth and twentieth-century poets I admire. Song lyrics certainly. I think the screenplay to <i>Withnail & I</i> by Bruce Robinson has been massively influential, as have the wordier skits Monty Python, Peter Cook or Fry & Laurie. I’d like to say PG Wodehouse. Is it true? I don’t know. Tina Fey, that’s demonstrably the case.<br /><br />
<i>You delight in language – have you always done so? Do you keep the OED in your brain? And how, if at all, does this connect to your Scrabble playing? Are the Scrabble brain and the poetry brain connected?</i><br /><br />
Delights are dangerous of course. There are some poems where I know I am just delighting myself. Why has he used the word ‘impachydermatous’ or rhymed ‘cowlick these’ with ‘galaxies’? These days I try to invent fewer words, as it is a kind of excess. But this is my whole problem.<br />
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I remember interviewing Vivienne Plumb and she spoke of how writing poems involves whittling down the words into a minimally perfect skeleton. I was shocked. This should’ve been educational but I still see ‘overwriting’ as poetry.<br />
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I am genuinely delighted by language, which every drab old poet says, but it’s just true. And the delight is what sustains both my reading of others’ poetry and the writing of my own. Perhaps my most successful poems are those where I don’t wear that delight so loudly on my sleeve, or I distract you from it, but I need the delight to bother at all.<br />
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I think the Scrabble urge and the sonnet-writing urge are similar. It’s the mathematical puzzle. Scrabble also sneaks words into my poems. The word ‘eloigns’ in the poem ‘The Thirst of Lucy’s Copy’ sitting beside ‘lingos’ and ‘longshoremen’ is no accident. In Scrabble the words LINGOES (an alternate spelling of the plural), ELOIGNS and LONGIES (which means longshoremen) are anagrams, and the poem works as a mnemonic to help me remember that. Ah, a weight has lifted in confessing it. But again I try to avoid using words memorised for Scrabble tournaments in poems. Slowly I will clamp down on all my delighting until I’m like that no-dancing protestant town in <i>Footloose</i> awaiting its Kevin Bacon.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/back-with-the-human-condition/"><i>Back With The Human Condition</i></a> by Nick Ascroft, p/b, $25. Available now.</td></tr>
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<br />Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-33950737978838799982016-09-13T15:38:00.000+12:002016-09-13T15:39:04.224+12:00Tim Wilson – 5 Questions<style>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOLIXtrH0S29UB-QtmoZd7t0-w3BT-UBkpjuR80dge1KDj39WcQeZV3zh3EqHzBcdtR_-xXpR9ybwoJWV3M9LPQmytz9xUic17JmmYhjeu4tuPwTtXxXjFjQ9bwqfM2vC15fXy7R15Ugw/s1600/Tim+Wilson+credit+Nicholas+George+2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOLIXtrH0S29UB-QtmoZd7t0-w3BT-UBkpjuR80dge1KDj39WcQeZV3zh3EqHzBcdtR_-xXpR9ybwoJWV3M9LPQmytz9xUic17JmmYhjeu4tuPwTtXxXjFjQ9bwqfM2vC15fXy7R15Ugw/s400/Tim+Wilson+credit+Nicholas+George+2016.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tim Wilson (photo by Nicholas George)</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><i>What made you want to write a sequel to </i>News
Pigs<i>?</i> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #222222; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Neither the characters, nor New York would let me
go. I had some things to say about NYC, about status, about anxiety, about
insurgency there, and about the whole class––wiped out now––of writers and
bohemians that scrounged out a living pre-Internet Ascendancy. This novel
seemed like the right spot. As I was writing, Donald Trump commenced his rise.
How could I leave him out? I spent a pleasant anxious afternoon with The Don
through my job with TVNZ. Do you know what? His hair is real. Everything else?
I can’t say. We fell out, sadly, Mr Trump and I, and no longer talk. He didn’t
like the piece I did; I doubt he’ll enjoy <i>The Straight Banana</i> either. Note:
ignorance of <i>News Pigs</i> is no barrier to reading <i>The Straight Banana</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The main character in </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The Straight
Banana</span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> and </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">News Pigs</span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">, Thomas Tudehope Milde, is a New York
correspondent for Erewhon TV of ‘the PLC’ (Plucky Little Country). You spent
ten years as the New York correspondent for One News. How much of Tom
Milde is you?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">What an outrageous suggestion! True, I was working
for TVNZ for most of my time in NYC. I once worked in print, like Milde. I’ve
botched stories, like Tom; my first job for TVNZ was a total washout. I’ve read
widely, but without depth. I know what a bar looks like at 9.10 pm; 11.20 pm,
1.45 and 3.38 am. I’ve roistered with vivid, insalubrious characters. I
remember a cameraman in Portland whose strategy for parking was to vandalise
every meter he parked at, then send an immediate letter of complaint to the
local authorities. The notion of fictional biography fascinates me, just as it
mesmerises Milde. My mother’s middle name is Tudehope; so what? I love reading
and writing, and yet appear to be a man of action; I once enjoyed dinner at the
Harvard Club, like Tom Milde. Such trifling coincidences aside, this is a work
of pure imagination.</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #222222; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Like </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">News Pigs</span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">, </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">T</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">he Straight Banana</span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> is
packed with references, in-jokes, wacky fonts, quizzes and off-the-wall layout.
Do you think books have a duty to entertain the reader?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Books have no duty to entertain readers, but they
must entertain their writers. I want to write the kind of book that I’d like to
read, one that mimics the junky energy of Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ and New
York itself, a place where half a morning on the streets can leave you feeling
like you’ve been on an all-night Scotch binge. <i>The Straight Banana</i> has quizzes,
a pie graph, diary entries, and a painting by one of the greatest artists of
the era. Thumb through it, and the eye jumps here and there. But it’s also a
plot-driven story that involves increasing jeopardy for Tom Milde. Books are to
be read, devoured hopefully. One of the greatest compliments ever paid <i>News
Pigs</i> was from someone who was reading it in tandem with <i>Anna Karenin</i>. He
confessed that for relief, he kept finding himself drawn to my book. There’s
the tag line: Bored of Tolstoy? Try Wilson. </span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #222222; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Recently in a panel on comic writing, Danyl
Mclauchlan said that when he went back to redraft his latest novel he took all
the jokes out and that made it funnier. Making people laugh is hard work, are
there any tricks to humour that you’ve discovered in your writing?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #222222; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Humour is like dancing. If others agree you’re
doing it, you are. </span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: black; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">You’ve got two young children, present shows on TV
and radio, and you’ve just written a novel. Do you ever sleep?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #222222; font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">My
wife is the best; she likes me to write. I take Fridays off to do novels, but spend
a lot of time thinking about what I’m writing the rest of the week. On Friday, mostly
I’m mooching around the house with my head in other places. Fortunately, I’m
still available to change nappies, and replace dummies. Yes, we use dummies in
our house. I love writing. I’m so blessed to be able to do it. Admittedly, time
is a problem; if I’d had more of it I might have written a shorter book.</span><br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisKI73LAdKNpnivmm1pXXn_u3hLy-zrTJvCpbM5-hnNfjAWMhipwD5Oi-y3-v8UmsaL42A8jWhHvvpixvfcMCbBVpPLCoi8-IPWDktTdfgZmLugeZ0x7XCEFoNmATuXvQeuXdxsRGMSD0/s1600/The+Straight+Banana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisKI73LAdKNpnivmm1pXXn_u3hLy-zrTJvCpbM5-hnNfjAWMhipwD5Oi-y3-v8UmsaL42A8jWhHvvpixvfcMCbBVpPLCoi8-IPWDktTdfgZmLugeZ0x7XCEFoNmATuXvQeuXdxsRGMSD0/s400/The+Straight+Banana.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><i>The Straight Banana</i> by Tim Wilson is available at the best bookshops and online at <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/the-straight-banana/">VUP</a> now.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">$30, p/b. </span>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-88673922367809531952016-08-11T12:06:00.002+12:002016-08-11T12:06:31.477+12:00An interview with Jenny Bornholdt<style>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMjt6Q7tEANbh6kFzdy2lFUZlDV0EnpBmlbS8jh_7vi_8dIlJZ8aKv-vf3PpxoV0nAEVP_6bNRcqr0A05Mk0foEX_EiRM3wdhlR3QqFrk3WwdNiVNN84VTHf0Thr07kcwCFouGrsyy-wY/s1600/Jenny+Bornholdt+%2528Deborah+Smith+2016%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMjt6Q7tEANbh6kFzdy2lFUZlDV0EnpBmlbS8jh_7vi_8dIlJZ8aKv-vf3PpxoV0nAEVP_6bNRcqr0A05Mk0foEX_EiRM3wdhlR3QqFrk3WwdNiVNN84VTHf0Thr07kcwCFouGrsyy-wY/s640/Jenny+Bornholdt+%2528Deborah+Smith+2016%2529.jpg" width="425" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jenny Bornholdt (photo by Deborah Smith)</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-AU"></span><i>What is like looking back over such a large body of work to make decisions for what to include in the </i>Selected Poems<i>?</i><br /><br />It was like watching an old home movie––black and white and a bit shaky. I felt overwhelmed by it; by the way it took me back to when I was in my twenties and thirties. I had to stop looking at the poems for a while, then it was okay again. I was surprised that the poems affected me in this way ––I don’t mean because of their brilliance! Just that because they are emotionally pretty open, it was like bumping into an early version of myself and that was unsettling. <br /><br />I’d already done this once before, for <i>Miss New Zealand</i>, and it’s not as though I don’t look at the early poems, or read them at readings, but there was something about methodically working my way through those books.</div>
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<i>Were there poems you felt particularly pleased with after all these years? Or some you thought, what the hell was I thinking?</i><br /><br /> I didn’t ever think ‘what the hell!’ but I sometimes winced a bit. I still feel very fond of the ‘Sophie’ pieces––I remember the feeling of writing those––it was the first time I felt that everything I read or saw or felt or thought fed into the work. A bit like when I wrote <i>The Rocky Shore</i> poems, though that was different again.<br /><br />It was interesting to read the books in order––I could see a progression, though there are things common to most of them––that mix of short/long/prose...I do think I’ve got better, so that’s something.<br /><br /> It’s the later poems I felt especially good about, but maybe it’s like that for all poets. <br /><br /> </div>
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<i>Do you have a favourite poem or book of yours?</i><br /><br /> <i>The Rocky Shore</i> is my favourite book. It’s the one I loved writing most––I felt completely inside those poems when I was writing them. They were exciting to work on. I had them in my head the whole time and I remember running up the steps to my shed every morning because I couldn’t wait to get back to work. <br /><br /> <i> </i></div>
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<i>When you look back over your body of work does it seem to you that you’ve changed how you approach writing poetry? Is there anything you’ve learned over your writing career that’s been a hard won lesson? (For example, I’m learning about patience in writing. I’ve not got it yet, but I’m learning that I need to find some!)</i> <br /><br /> I’m not sure about that, because I don’t know that I have an approach. On the back cover of <i>This Big Face</i> I wrote that the poems were ‘going for some kind of clarity.’ That’s certainly changed. Now I think life is mostly a great big shambles and I’m happy to go along with that. The earlier poems seem quite neat, as in tidily put together, whereas I think the recent poems have an unruly element to them, which I like. I’m probably more relaxed about writing now–– maybe that’s my answer. <br /><br /> <i> </i></div>
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<i>One of the things that is obvious reading over the selection is how your poems have become longer. Of course there was the wonderful early ‘Sophie travels backwards on a train’ which I often think of as a short film, but by the end of your Selected you’re striding out with feature films like ‘Big Minty Nose’. What is the delight of the long poem for you? A desire to tell a story? I know you’re a great reader of novels and stories. It was you who put me onto one of my favourite books of the last ten years </i>Olive Kitteridge<i>.</i> <br /><br /> It’s nice you think of ‘Sophie’ as a short film. I did Russell Campbell’s great film courses at Victoria University in the early 80’s and always wanted to make a film, but was completely intimidated by the thought of having to operate a camera. Ridiculous, but that was how I felt, so ‘Sophie’ is probably my short film in print. And yes, the poems have got longer. I do love narrative and the longer poems are me wanting to tell something––a story I guess, or stories, saying ‘this happened, then this happened and then this’, but I hope they’re not as straightforward as that. I like the way you can play with narrative ––the loops and moves and echoes that are possible. Much of the delight is in feeling able to stretch out, especially in <i>The Rocky Shore</i> poems. I really felt I hit my stride with that book. <br /><br /> I do read a lot of novels and I’m very pleased you liked <i>Olive Kitteridge</i>. It’s still one of my favourite books. Her (Elizabeth Strout’s) new novel <i>My Name is Lucy Barton</i> is extraordinary––I’ve read it twice and am about to embark on it again because I want to work out how she does what she does. It’s quite strange and compelling. <br /><i><br /> Your voice has spawned a thousand imitations over the years, but no one quite gets it right. I think the thing with you, Jen, is your writing voice combines a light glance around the beautiful horrible wondrous things of the world, but the eye that’s watching them, and the mind that’s thinking and reporting back is steely and fierce. I think your imitators don’t get how important those two things in tango are. Your poems are, as Jane Stafford pointed out in one of my undergrad English classes (she was quoting a Jen Bornholdt poem) ‘a decoy of simplicity’. Can you talk a bit about how you developed your own voice? Is it a thing a writer can ‘develop’ or are you just speaking out what you really think on the page?</i> <br /><br /> Those are very complimentary things you said. Thank you. I do feel quite fierce. </div>
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Your question about voice–– I am speaking out what I think on the page. I don’t feel as though I had to find my voice, it was just there. Sometimes I tell people things and they say ‘that sounds like a Jenny Bornholdt poem’, so my own voice is obviously very close to my writing voice. It’s probably to do with the things I write about, which, as we know are pretty down home. <br /><br /> I’m sure it’s possible to develop a voice, I just don’t have the flair or imagination to be able to do that. A poet like Frederick Seidel––his is a voice I wouldn’t like to run into in a dark alley. <br /><i><br /> </i></div>
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<i>Any writers who are really doing it for you right now?</i> <br /> <br />I’m reading a lot of NZ poetry because I’m editing Best New Zealand Poems for the IIML. There’s some great writing going on out there, but I’m not going to name names for fear of causing a riot. <br /> </div>
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Jenny Bornholdt's <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/selected-poems-jenny-bornholdt/"><i>Selected Poems</i></a> (h/b, $40) is released today, and launched tonight at Unity Books alongside Ashleigh Young's new essay collection, <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/can-you-tolerate-this/"><i>Can You Tolerate This?</i></a></div>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-15736544510932764502016-08-02T09:20:00.001+12:002016-08-02T09:47:27.180+12:00Ashleigh Young – 5 Questions<style>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><i>Can You Tolerate This?</i> by Ashleigh Young will be released on 11 August. Ashleigh's essays are already well known from her popular blog, <a href="https://eyelashroaming.com/">eyelashroaming</a>. She works as an editor at VUP and teaches creative non-fiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Ashleigh's book of poetry, <i>Magnificent Moon</i>, was published in 2012.</span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLXDAOJ0YtyLpWdewj8jFJTnYiEhdtx4HmJb6_sOJDzqGbXZsJjhNoRIipbCr7a8baK8ejLnyygOelqKIbRdN8H9dCuxugnsfaVkw9HudYJPQSyQKwEFLR7dKnmdIJWOynrbX1ciDBNuE/s1600/Ashleigh-12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLXDAOJ0YtyLpWdewj8jFJTnYiEhdtx4HmJb6_sOJDzqGbXZsJjhNoRIipbCr7a8baK8ejLnyygOelqKIbRdN8H9dCuxugnsfaVkw9HudYJPQSyQKwEFLR7dKnmdIJWOynrbX1ciDBNuE/s640/Ashleigh-12.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ashleigh Young (photo credit: Russell Kleyn)</td></tr>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">This book
has been a long time in the making – from when you won the Adam Prize in 2009
with a portfolio of essays, to now, 2016. How does it feel to finally be
publishing your essays in a book form? How much has the work evolved in the
time between your MA portfolio and the published book?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">That’s a long time! I feel glad and a bit
nervous, but mostly tired because I’ve been so busy avoiding this book for seven
years. I know all the avoidance tricks now. I could probably organise a special
conference on avoidance, or a festival. My favourite trick for avoiding this
book – because it was full of problems that I didn’t want to think about yet – was
to write things that weren’t this book. So I finished writing a book of poetry
and started writing a blog. The blog allowed me to write my way into things I probably
wouldn’t have written otherwise – cycling, odd encounters, mental health,
phrases and gestures, friendships, members of my family, inner voice …
Sometimes the posts were intensely personal and sometimes detached. Nothing I
wrote would be out of place, because it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i>
the place. Also, publishing work on a blog feels more tentative – to me – than
having it appear in a proper publication. You can say, ‘I’m just mucking
around.’ What happened was I tricked myself into writing pieces that ended up
in this book (in slightly different forms). So ultimately the only way I was
able to pick up this book again was to tell myself I wasn’t writing it. And sooner
or later, when I figured out that trick, I was able to look back at those
earlier pieces from my MA year and work on them again. I think I’d loosened up a
bit, as a writer. Maybe I was just taking my writing less seriously.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Can you
explain what an ‘essay’ is, in the context of your own work in </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Can You Tolerate This?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I would describe many of the essays in this book
as existential meditations. If that’s not too grandiose. It’s just that
sometimes, not much actively happen in them. Or, all that happens is I examine
a problem, like the problem of trying to do your work when somebody is
distracting you, or the problem of being on a long walk that you don’t want to
be on anymore and it’s too late to turn back. Or I try to see why things
happened in the way they did and why they felt like they did. I have this hope
that this book has a kind of vibrational field and that readers will come out of
it and say, ‘What the hell was that?’ Some writers who made me feel it might be
possible to try things this way were Natalia Ginzburg, Vivian Gornick, Lauren
Slater, Helen Garner, Anna Sanderson, Martin Edmond, and Lydia Davis.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">For ages I understood an essay to be an attempt,
a trial or test, a stab at something. That’s what I was always taught. When I
was starting out in nonfiction I read a lot of this guy called Phillip Lopate,
who I got a bit of a crush on because of the way he wrote so freely about
himself. For instance there was an essay just called ‘Portrait of My Body’ and
it was all about Lopate’s body and had lines like ‘I have a commanding stare’
and ‘Often, I give off a sort of psychic stench to myself’. Lopate has written a
lot about the 16<sup>th</sup>-century writer Michel de Montaigne, so it was
through him that I came to Montainge’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Essais.</i>
They are held up as the first example of a writer exploring his subject –
usually some aspect of himself – in a freeform, spontaneous way, turning them restlessly
this way and that, trying to take some measure of them, and I liked that
definition of an essay because it gave me permission to meander. But then I kept
coming across essays that didn’t seem to work like that at all, like Eliot
Weinberger’s. His famous piece about naked mole rats – so systematically,
ruthlessly described – showed me that an essay could be something utterly else.
(I recently read someone describe Weinberger’s essays as vortexes – when you
read a Weinberger essay, the vortex opens up inside your head and ideas rush
in.) I realized the essay is very slippery at heart.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">John Jeremiah Sullivan has an essay called ‘The
Ill-Defined Plot’ where he makes the point that the sense of ‘essay’ as ‘an
attempt’ is only one layer within many other layers of meaning in that word. Some
other possible meanings are: a swarm, a flourish, a preamble, a masterpiece, an
amateur work … But maybe all essays – whether formal or familiar, literary or
journalistic, academic or creative – enact the way that somebody’s mind can
shape thought. The shape can be ever-shifting and ever-changing, because
thought never quite settles into just one thing; it has to stay in motion, like
a shark. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">That was a long answer, sorry. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Two long,
deeply personal essays are what I think of as the backbone for this book, ‘Big
Red,’ about your brothers JP, and Neil, and ‘Bikram’s Knee,’ about your
struggles with your own body image. Both essays are in their own way deeply
sad, kind of hopeful and fascinating in a ‘watching a car crash’ kind of way.
Can you describe how it was to write these? It seems to me that while these are
non-fiction pieces, the experience of reading them is the same as reading
fiction – we want to know what’s going to happen to these characters.</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I was wary of those pieces seeming like straight
confession, as if I were trying to absolve myself or ask forgiveness of the
reader. I love all those ‘It really happened to me!’ stories, in the same way
that I love advice columns, but that wasn’t what I was trying to do. I wanted
to try to describe quite chaotic experiences in a way that might help people to
understand why things can feel the way they feel, and I wanted to admit where I
came up against the limitations of myself and the limitations you meet when
writing about other living people. After the piece is written you still have to
be a human being in the world. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">It was strange to realise that neither experience
had a clear ‘arc’ or a moment where things resolved themselves and all was
well. It wouldn’t have worked to impose that shape on either piece but I still
had to resist the urge to try. I guess, through the stories we tell each other
all our lives, we’re conditioned to want really meaningful endings or moments
of revelation. I think everyday life can be quite stingy with those. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Sometimes writing feels like a second chance, to
me – I often can’t articulate myself very well in person, or speak about things
at length without trailing off, which is frustrating because I really want to
connect with people, but if I’m writing I get a chance to try again. That feels
exhilarating.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Awkwardness,
oddness, shame – I’m going to make a call and say these are your themes – you
go back and back to them in the essays. Which isn’t to say that the book isn’t
funny – you’re a good comic writer. Why do you think these are your big
concerns? Or perhaps you disagree that they even are!</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Those are my concerns because they’re my concerns
in life – or, those feelings have always shaped my experience, at times much
more than was strictly necessary. I wonder whether those feelings serve any
evolutionary purpose. They make you a ruthless observer of yourself and others,
so maybe it’s a hunting thing. I’m not sure whether, if I were more at ease, I
would have been able to write any of these pieces. I also think that sometimes
our self-contortions can be hugely funny. I would like my next book to be much
funnier, actually. I wish this one were funnier. I’m in awe of anyone who can
make people laugh. (That’s one reason why I wanted to write about my brother,
JP – I just find him very funny.)</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I have to
ask this – what’s it like being the editor at VUP and having a book published
by VUP? Be honest!</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Well, it’s a bit weird. Is this even
allowed? The most dangerous thing was that I was able to access the raw files
of the book. I resisted going into them as often as I could, but a few times I
went in there and start twitching around. It immediately felt wrong, like a dog
stealing food. On the whole, though, being an editor here has given me really
useful perspective as a writer. I can see that my book is just one of many in
the pipeline, so I feel less precious about it, and I know how the process goes,
and I’m extremely grateful for the book community we have here, who show up
again and again to celebrate other people’s books. I also value my workmates’
judgement a huge deal and so it was good to have them on tap. I think if I
wrote something like ‘Often, I give off a sort of psychic stench to myself’
they would say, ‘Maybe take that bit out’. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGVYzMl-skuFTx7rBV0XQPrIGFf0FLmvdShiiJTKdHtyAqnb0o_smuodQc4jIzDoKJkQK4Q40_DEcB6QQkXrx7Cbbha6EQ9hOOq6Ok1d-XFTMSepMD-s2BNnLUsypzqVvgij-BcUbOAYw/s1600/Can+You+Tolerate+This.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGVYzMl-skuFTx7rBV0XQPrIGFf0FLmvdShiiJTKdHtyAqnb0o_smuodQc4jIzDoKJkQK4Q40_DEcB6QQkXrx7Cbbha6EQ9hOOq6Ok1d-XFTMSepMD-s2BNnLUsypzqVvgij-BcUbOAYw/s400/Can+You+Tolerate+This.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><i>Can You Tolerate This? Personal Essays</i> by Ashleigh Young.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Release date: 11 August. Paperback, $30.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Available at the best bookshops and through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/can-you-tolerate-this/">online bookstore</a>. </span></div>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-64301651301359608032016-07-29T09:17:00.002+12:002016-07-29T09:17:33.381+12:00Best Book Design AwardLast night at the PANZ Book Design Awards, <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/james-k-baxter-complete-prose/"><i>James K. Baxter: Complete Prose</i></a> won the top award for book design. We are thrilled that this magnificent beast (5.5 kgs of books and over one million words) has been recognised for its great design.<br />
<br />
The judges report said: "Shortlisted for Best Cover and Best Typography, and winner of the Best Non-Illustrated category, <i>James K. Baxter: Complete Prose</i>
excels on all fronts. It is the complete package – an object of beauty
that holds the eye and interest, and demands closer attention. The
purple ribbons and foiling work in an unlikely – but extremely
satisfying – pairing with the buttery three-quarter binding, which holds
the gorgeous full-bleed images. These aspects combine to wrap up a tidy
internal page layout. The design not only serves the content, it
elevates the work of this literary hero, creating a desirable
contemporary classic."<br />
<br />
Congratulations to Spencer Levine, for his award-winning design. There's a short interview with Spencer below, talking about the Baxter project, and book design in general.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcsLmp9uVZLJrI79Esc_ezyKBjuRfIJ64IH5tYeRwNPlYbt-HbC6ZRBVxQbrZeYajmc-QG0qUSZ2XLCkouGq09c3uYHl1P9oJnua7xbU1-uAcgTvWVp_dTWrE45FP9SYKfAnweg8CLiiY/s1600/JamesKBaxter11.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcsLmp9uVZLJrI79Esc_ezyKBjuRfIJ64IH5tYeRwNPlYbt-HbC6ZRBVxQbrZeYajmc-QG0qUSZ2XLCkouGq09c3uYHl1P9oJnua7xbU1-uAcgTvWVp_dTWrE45FP9SYKfAnweg8CLiiY/s400/JamesKBaxter11.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>James K. Baxter: Complete Prose</i>, edited by John Weir, VUP: 2015. <br />
(Grant Maiden Photography)</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
<b>Q&A with Spencer Levine</b><i><br /></i><br />
<br />
<i>First, be honest, do designers actually read the books?</i><br />
<br />
It really depends on the book, so yes and no ––for me, mostly no. <br />
<br />
<i>Where did you start with the concept and design for </i>James K. Baxter: Complete Prose<i>? </i><br />
<br />
It started with Fergus––it was his idea that Nigel Brown's work would strongly set the tone for the look and feel. <br />
<br />
The heaviness of expression in the chosen triptych gives the box a cloak; the feeling of wearing heavy coat. There is no free space anywhere, just full bleed colour. Then finally on one facet, a flash of calmer colour with the four naked spines. These exposed spines worked well with the feel and heft of the work, and also provided a good material contrast to the case. It gives it a lot of space, and plenty of room to breathe. A lone image of Baxter sits on each book. He's iconic, so an era-specific photograph of him for each volume was enough. Purple foiled type with a purple place ribbon gives each volume a 'holy' finish.<br />
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<i>In your opinion what makes for good book design?</i><br />
<br />
Good covers, and a connection to the material inside them.<br />
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<i>Do you try and differentiate the covers for different publishers in terms of the style, or does the book necessarily create this constraint?</i><br />
<br />
It's book first, publisher second... unless you're talking to the publisher!<br />
<br />
<i>Is there a publisher (anywhere in the world) that you think is consistently producing good book covers? </i><br />
<br />
I really like <a href="http://nobrow.net/shop/mr-tweeds-good-deeds/">Flying Eye</a> books, but there are hit covers all over the place.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkcALmxQvrmz_jnGBygnEfUlUq0Ece_u7MryFcnGOSJnF34fe0JEuButBdfiAtlL3JIAUk4h8iz5-J75KaYvANV1Y-Ta9IBYCXWQiS5yx7RwxnhV6xQZEtY3wWCaHGT_27WV3TuWfLjbk/s1600/JamesKBaxter02.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkcALmxQvrmz_jnGBygnEfUlUq0Ece_u7MryFcnGOSJnF34fe0JEuButBdfiAtlL3JIAUk4h8iz5-J75KaYvANV1Y-Ta9IBYCXWQiS5yx7RwxnhV6xQZEtY3wWCaHGT_27WV3TuWfLjbk/s400/JamesKBaxter02.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Grant Maiden Photography)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<i>James K. Baxter: Complete Prose</i>, edited by John Weir.<br />
4 hardback volumes with cloth spines presented in a box. Original paintings on box by Nigel Brown.<br />
$200. Available at the best bookshops or through <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/james-k-baxter-complete-prose/">VUP's online bookstore</a>.Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-12769638928516717612016-07-28T09:19:00.001+12:002016-07-28T11:49:36.486+12:00Nigel Cox (13 January 1951 – 28 July 2006)<style>
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<span lang="EN-AU">It is hard to believe that it has been 10
years since my friend Nigel Cox died. I think about him often, and I am
enormously proud to have had a hand in publishing these <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/brands/Nigel-Cox.html">half dozen essential books</a>:</span><br />
<span lang="EN-AU"> </span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQObMyGx27x42R8wjDluXLiZUARs_HSbkt8-4HRfc3G5V7SJ8uF68FYAjFe-yMRavaY1Z4YD0XMmLYX4z5uAubYpBr8J3Mityte5umQWcqQlCfS5TmfTkRnlp_H24JXFDidbrfvAoD7uU/s1600/skylark_lounge.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQObMyGx27x42R8wjDluXLiZUARs_HSbkt8-4HRfc3G5V7SJ8uF68FYAjFe-yMRavaY1Z4YD0XMmLYX4z5uAubYpBr8J3Mityte5umQWcqQlCfS5TmfTkRnlp_H24JXFDidbrfvAoD7uU/s320/skylark_lounge.JPG" width="209" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5q3EnrnXoFdHSPqxjEVSyQNLedPgDETjYf0TGv39gXKNkBWUij_7eh5eYo3T-JTn10eEqG2pXjqB2YYkJTvF8AXlI-HBBurss_TOeXunJn4zFj8kG0VAEfxWJ-ZTBBRJ0F8jTEbJnD6s/s1600/dirtywork+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5q3EnrnXoFdHSPqxjEVSyQNLedPgDETjYf0TGv39gXKNkBWUij_7eh5eYo3T-JTn10eEqG2pXjqB2YYkJTvF8AXlI-HBBurss_TOeXunJn4zFj8kG0VAEfxWJ-ZTBBRJ0F8jTEbJnD6s/s320/dirtywork+cover.jpg" width="220" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCvWy_PjuT3txR3VytvKkR76e0u2zoqSf0mZiWCoppfBsWompUWpQRVb-dKyfTHTrr0ik7Pw9O05etZ-Aiki_FXq0gXtCFouGvP7ksgdTZZTWEsRymk42H3JwdGaZkcEdoAQYqnF3P3s/s1600/Phone+Home+Berlin+-+cox.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCvWy_PjuT3txR3VytvKkR76e0u2zoqSf0mZiWCoppfBsWompUWpQRVb-dKyfTHTrr0ik7Pw9O05etZ-Aiki_FXq0gXtCFouGvP7ksgdTZZTWEsRymk42H3JwdGaZkcEdoAQYqnF3P3s/s320/Phone+Home+Berlin+-+cox.jpg" width="205" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM5Xji6up_G1kWxEpKP2_WIBShKKDhHt3muzoEq6-dJaZcitIcXWcxQNU0cCFVgkhvklxCIN6zzKa6znnvwI1quujUJW80DvTFGUvKAbWao1wEs8YEf47rIYllrDIWwiXVrywa-QYaMIE/s1600/Jungle300dpi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM5Xji6up_G1kWxEpKP2_WIBShKKDhHt3muzoEq6-dJaZcitIcXWcxQNU0cCFVgkhvklxCIN6zzKa6znnvwI1quujUJW80DvTFGUvKAbWao1wEs8YEf47rIYllrDIWwiXVrywa-QYaMIE/s320/Jungle300dpi.jpg" width="211" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiktv79vqAfRIJgcjiQAarWCuAvWcV4qeyy-EBQKF3ZO0hxlbKe2uM5UOHwDvIDPKQA6u2mRSxKNBpf9zBCtPRtcHfru_xksGY7HcwxJKoPhILorhCYAtuXJvJD71Yo7HKPbUaA9bR6Us/s1600/responsibility_final.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiktv79vqAfRIJgcjiQAarWCuAvWcV4qeyy-EBQKF3ZO0hxlbKe2uM5UOHwDvIDPKQA6u2mRSxKNBpf9zBCtPRtcHfru_xksGY7HcwxJKoPhILorhCYAtuXJvJD71Yo7HKPbUaA9bR6Us/s320/responsibility_final.jpg" width="216" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOVQ9gGG0vRgMVtK5bvg3Ly3ZUWO6MNDYRcfbrFTGCAWZqo5p03aw9W2zfzuc_xOKby-1Ruz54g2StfasunPEzGZEef0iSpyJb7x7E7umMkKnmuDdXuF5haW2LoHlY9S-cMLHJQ5YIcTE/s1600/cowboy+dog+final.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOVQ9gGG0vRgMVtK5bvg3Ly3ZUWO6MNDYRcfbrFTGCAWZqo5p03aw9W2zfzuc_xOKby-1Ruz54g2StfasunPEzGZEef0iSpyJb7x7E7umMkKnmuDdXuF5haW2LoHlY9S-cMLHJQ5YIcTE/s320/cowboy+dog+final.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Below we post a piece Nigel wrote on 28
June 2006. We will never have Nigel’s vapour novels, but I know he wouldn't
mind someone else having a go at writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Backyard
Oblivion</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Half Time at the Woburn
Pictures</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Tonight there will be a gathering at Unity Books Auckland at 5pm. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Thanks to The Spinoff for David Larsen’s NZ
Herald review of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Novel That Must Not
Be Named</i> and a giveaway. [links coming!]</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Thanks to <a href="http://www.elizabethknox.com/archives/2016/07/27/nigel-coxs-skylark-lounge/">Elizabeth Knox for her thoughts</a>
on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Skylark Lounge</i> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Fergus </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWHDtadjysdMDdK0LMhF4WhAhrEIP5HQc0qZ5JWuPG-G8hrlsBM63psMC_KN8vROIMfb0bJHXzKyncNUIWZZV08PNmsNc83cTDkKmu5Mb7oweulbl-ef6DkXDgDlqZduU-Ow7Jgk3N4Vs/s1600/A_080505NZHGPJCOX01.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWHDtadjysdMDdK0LMhF4WhAhrEIP5HQc0qZ5JWuPG-G8hrlsBM63psMC_KN8vROIMfb0bJHXzKyncNUIWZZV08PNmsNc83cTDkKmu5Mb7oweulbl-ef6DkXDgDlqZduU-Ow7Jgk3N4Vs/s640/A_080505NZHGPJCOX01.JPG" width="410" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nigel Cox</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></div>
<h2 class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-GB">What I Would Have Written</span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Sabon-Bold;"> </span></b></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">We all have
days when it seems the rain might not stop falling and for me this is one of
them. So I thought I’d just get a few things down, see if it cheered me up.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">All going well, I’m about, oh,
two weeks from the end of some kind of a first draft of my next novel, </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">The Cowboy Dog</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">. With luck, I’ll be able to follow through with my
plan to tidy it and then—well, the usual things—more work, publication, and the
world keeps turning with one more speck added to its burden. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">However, I love my books and
no matter what anyone else thinks of them, I for one will be pleased to see it.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">With luck that’ll all happen: </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">The Cowboy Dog</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">. Then there’s quite a well-developed plan, between me
and Fergus Barrowman, my publisher and close friend, to put together a book of
some of my short pieces, most of them published before, that might be made
together into a coherent whole. No name for this yet, but a first cut has been
made. If he’s forced to, Fergus might have to put this together by himself—no
worries.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">And then .</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">That’s when it gets
interesting, for me anyway. Obviously I’ve had lots of time to stare out the
window over the last few months. And at night: so many ideas, as though they
all want to get their oar in. One that has been stinking around for a year or
two is ‘a big family novel’. This is called </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Half Time at the Woburn Pictures</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">, and consists mainly of smoke and the vaguest of
thoughts. The idea is that this one wouldn’t be (too) weird, though I don’t
seem to have much control over that; they get weird. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Then there’s a plan to write a
novel set in the Masterton of my boyhood. This one has also been around for
ages—stinking. Reeking!—and for some reason the title has the word </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Backyard</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> in it. </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Backyard
Oblivion?</span></i><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"></span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">That’s a couple of weeks’ work, easy.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Then you come to a different
category of thought. No plot, no location, no shape, no name, but I always
wanted to invent my own superhero. It’s a childish notion, and the existing ones
from my boyhood—</span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Superman</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">, </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Batman</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">, etc—have all been thoroughly postmodernised. But I
always had a huge amount of time for </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">The Phantom, Captain America, </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">etc, and anyway I just want to—a figure modern and
real, a genuine character, in a serious novel (I regard all my novels as
serious). Same goes for an alien novel. I know I had a flirtation with aliens
in </span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Skylark Lounge</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">, but that one kept itself very well within
‘acceptable’ boundaries. My desire is to go further out. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">Some of that sounds a bit
immature, and it is, I accept that. But there was a point where I decided not
to be too constrained by the notions of what I thought I should be writing, and
my writing got better. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">But what I’m also thinking
about here is (ta-dah) Nigel Cox at sixty-five. At eighty! I always thought I
would live until I was seventy and in my mind I’d get better as a writer and
become mature (ha!). But definitely improve. And know more and know how to
write it. Contemplating it, it’s such a fantastic idea that I have to laugh out
loud. But it would have been inevitable, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t everyone? I
guess, looking at some writers, the answer is, not necessarily. But I was in
hope.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 115%;">And I still am. Despite all
the evidence to the contrary, I do expect to get these books written. I can see
them sitting on my bookshelf, my impulse to write played out.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 115%;">In the computer industry they
call it vapourware. So, when you think of me (and do it often) please think of
my vapour novels. Thank you.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="resptext">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Sabon-Bold;">(from <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/phone-home-berlin-collected-non-fiction/"><i>PhoneHome Berlin: Collected Non-fiction</i>, 2007</a>)</span></span></div>
Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-29111086166615333662016-07-11T16:38:00.002+12:002016-07-11T16:38:38.233+12:00Kerrin P. Sharpe – 4 Questions
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Kerrin P. Sharpe is a poet and creative writing teacher who lives in Christchurch. <i>rabbit rabbit </i>is her third collection of poetry.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSHf0iIpRkYvBTCbrX9-3plz5wxgbqtTIyCwsFeG_dx89CXyv3YGHfOJUe9ndFD6Xdf54ekRYEkCynsvg_Cs4iKf-yVTiriJD2UMQlKZ2xnZoIwSa9S6mD0fx_jF6KhgxN2w69Dth-CnQ/s1600/RabbitRabbit+final+300dpi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSHf0iIpRkYvBTCbrX9-3plz5wxgbqtTIyCwsFeG_dx89CXyv3YGHfOJUe9ndFD6Xdf54ekRYEkCynsvg_Cs4iKf-yVTiriJD2UMQlKZ2xnZoIwSa9S6mD0fx_jF6KhgxN2w69Dth-CnQ/s400/RabbitRabbit+final+300dpi.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Your poems often seem to exist in what I think of as a
dream space and a time-travelling space; where your mother’s Astrakhan coat is
remembered as ‘the angels of stillborn lambs’, or in ‘the mary blanche in situ’
where she builds a ship in her stomach. The descriptions do seem to reach
beyond metaphor into a strange wonderland. Can you explain this?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Yes, I
suppose they do, though I don't think I have ever thought of it in that way! My
poems often seem to me to have a life of their own; I'm a bit like a midwife
coaxing and nurturing them into the world and then I'm a little surprised at
what has arrived!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">I generally
begin a poem with an initial idea or image that keeps recurring in my
imagination; often it's some memory or image from the past which grows on me or
alternatively it may be a story or news item that takes hold of my imagination
until I begin to feel I need to write about it. From then on I follow the rough
path the poem offers me into that 'dream space'.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">When I am
writing a poem I often ask myself, 'What is this poem telling me?' I allow the poem's
arms to lure me in until the poem suddenly jumps into something else. It is
almost as if a new life has emerged and it has become a different poem from the
one I first started out with.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">My mother
did have an Astrakhan coat during the war, and years later she replaced it with
a more up-market black one but she still loyally kept the brown Astrakhan one
stored away. When she died I remember looking at her old Astrakhan coat and
thinking sadly to myself that it had somehow lost the early significance it
once had for me, and it was out of those memories that my poem ‘when a crayfish
could feed 6 men’ was written. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Many of the poems seem to be different characters
speaking—is this how you think about voice in your poetry?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">That’s true
and I'm rather pleased that you picked that up from reading my poems. I like to
think of different characters speaking in my poems with different voices. I want
my poems to be faithful to themselves so their individual voices—their
characters, if you like—not only need to be authentic but they also need to
change, move and adapt as they interact with the main idea or theme of the
poem.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">For example
the woman in my poem ‘the mary blanche in situ’, who builds a ship in her
stomach, has a very different voice from the woman who describes her mother's
funeral in 'the morning of my mother's funeral her cup is sober-minded', and
they are both very different from the voice (or lack of one) of the redundant
blacksmith in 'why talk to the bellows' boy when you can speak to the
blacksmith', who no longer speaks at all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">The overall
theme in my latest collection of poems, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rabbit
rabbit</i>, is of poems telling stories, and I hope each poem speaks of the
power of language and translation. The poems rabbit on, if you like!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Images of the human body (especially the lungs) recur or
are used for metaphor in </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">rabbit
rabbit<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, which give the poems a sense of
being ‘earthed’ or at least contained. Can you explain your poetry’s
fascination with the body?</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">I'm very
interested in medicine; in fact my husband jokes about my taking a medical
health diagnosis book to bed with me for a little quiet reading before I go to
sleep! A bit weird, I suppose.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Yes the
lungs do often occur in my poems in rabbit rabbit. But when you think of it,
lungs are so important to us as human beings and of course we need our lungs
for the breath that enables us to talk. As you no doubt have already guessed, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rabbit rabbit</i> is a play on the term we
often use for someone who is a great talker, as in 'rabbiting on'. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">I had a good
friend who used to say something like, 'She went rabbit rabbit all day long,'
of a mutual acquaintance who she disapprovingly believed talked too much. The
phrase always used to make me laugh—I could just imagine these rabbits talking
their heads off. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Many of my
poems in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rabbit rabbit</i> share my
fascination with the body and how it works, and I think this is because they
too are thinking about and interested in how our bodies work</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">You’ve put out three collections since 2012—what is with
this sudden burst of creative energy?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">It was Bill
Manhire who originally inspired my love of poetry as a young student in the
1970s. He welcomed me into his creative writing class 'Original Composition' at
Victoria University and in doing so he lit a fire that flamed and has never
died. Over the following 35 years as I married, had children and focused my
life on bringing up my family, the creative writing flame continued to flicker,
but as I concentrated on other priorities the flame hibernated (to mix
metaphors) over that period.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Eight years
ago, with family leaving home and more time for writing, that original flame
has roared back into life, and I love my current life of writing and teaching
creative writing. I feel as if I am once again fully awake and alive, with lots
of memories, ideas and new experiences all clamouring for me to think and write
about. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">To complete
the circle: it was a chance meeting with Bill Manhire in 2011 at my daughter's
Victoria University graduation that led to the publication of my first book with
VUP. He told me it was time I put a manuscript together for submission, which I
did. Fergus Barrowman then accepted my first book and encouraged me to carry on—and
I haven't looked back since!</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: text1;">Kerrin P. Sharpe's third collection of poetry, <i>rabbit rabbit</i>, was launched last week in Christchurch. You can buy it at good bookshops or through our online bookstore <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/rabbit-rabbit/">here</a>.</span></span></div>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-1920692243584605772016-06-20T15:44:00.000+12:002016-06-20T15:44:36.608+12:00Elizabeth Knox's launch speech for Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWFETgl4LLY1vKuQIg0x2DbLvRub4-2-8jMeJCLt_SpH5SHCbuAYCP1yoWPp_cBy0ONSjceFOECXU85CTcd1fug33WH-c7kBbz9jtnIJKTIgb8Hyv7i86sMxZX4koVd0n3E_CcQetBXYE/s1600/Mysterious+Mysteries+of+the+Aro+Valley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWFETgl4LLY1vKuQIg0x2DbLvRub4-2-8jMeJCLt_SpH5SHCbuAYCP1yoWPp_cBy0ONSjceFOECXU85CTcd1fug33WH-c7kBbz9jtnIJKTIgb8Hyv7i86sMxZX4koVd0n3E_CcQetBXYE/s320/Mysterious+Mysteries+of+the+Aro+Valley.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></i><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> I
thought I'd start by reading a little list of some of the professions people
have in <i>The Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley</i>. Apart from the
practical, everyday photographer or novelist, there’s an illiterate Archival A</span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: FR;">ssistant</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">, a Sufi Soup Cook, and an Imaginary L</span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: FR;">anguages</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Poet. There are Cartographers — but
they’re cultists. Druids officiate at funerals. There’s a Sheriff of Te Aro, to
which I say 'Yee-Ha!'<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There's
differential topologist, which I think is like non-computational geometrist,
and has to be real since my niece is dating one. And there is my favourite
character, a dog. A very professional dog, who offers a comprehensive
description of the tasks and duties of a dog.</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
characters are busy in this book, they’re hellbent, but the book isn’t busy,
noisy, crowded, or antic — even in the midst of brilliant descriptions of antic
antics! It is lively and forceful, but also deftly plotted, strongly real in it’s
evocation of the world of the senses; it is thematically shapely, and
purposeful in its transmission of the author’s feeling for life. </span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">On a
cold winter night, Danyl, the perpetually pantsless hero of <i>Unspeakable
Secrets of the Aro Valley, </i>having fled a mental health institution, returns
to the valley on a bus. Danyl wants to find his girlfriend Verity. He wants
something to eat and a place to lay his head. But the Valley seems more
deserted and desolate than even midwinter rain could make it — and it’s not
just atmosphere, it’s plot, more plot than a cemetery, right from the start. Danyl
is the hero of the moment and, in Danyl speak, the moment has plans for him, no
matter what other plans his brain might be entertaining, and it should be noted
that Danyl’s brain is a distinct entity from Danyl himself — which I know is an
experience we all share. Danyl’s brain might zap him, prod him to pay attention
to things, but tends to fall ominously silent whenever he's having a good idea.
That’s a bit of a theme, people having good ideas, congratulating themselves
about it, and heading off energetically into calamity.</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Mysterious
Mysteries of the Aro Valley </span></i><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">is a novel of ideas. All
arcane thrillers are novels of ideas in that this is the genre whose <i>engine</i>
is the deep, indelible pattern of beliefs on human history. Many of the ideas
in this novel are q</span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: FR;">uite respectable</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">, or
recognisable. Notions people have about, for instance, the mathematical nature
of the universe; or the best way to manage an archive, balancing the need to
preserve materials against the needs of researchers; or how to run a local body
election, and the proven strategy in our politics of a candidate presenting
himself as sensible and friendly. In every instance the author is interested in
the idea itself, and the process of the implementation of the idea. Then he
sees the satirical possibilities, and then he takes it all a step further,
beyond the boundaries of satire. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He uses
the idea, the pursuit of the idea in the world, the logical absurdities of the
pursuit, to generate a story. I am filled with admiration at Danyl’s ability to
to go beyond type, the type of book this is. Not just to use exotic or
complicated ideas as plot, or to use the absurdities generated by a situation
then taken to a logical extreme as plot, to not just move in one direction
evolving his story from esoteric idea to plot, but to be able to keep moving
back and forth, building energy in the narrative by laying observation upon
learning, upon satire, upon byzantine plotting and have the whole thing keep
moving not like a machine, but like a well turned</span><span lang="PT" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: PT;"> compost </span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">that’s fertile with</span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: FR;"> humour</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">, and mood, and drama, and character
byplay, and <i>warmth</i>. </span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Danyl
McLauchlan's</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> feeling for place and space is spot on. The novel's streets,
buildings, and weather are all recognisably Aro Street. But when the flooded
stormwater drains of the Aro Valley flow away into a culvert and old drain </span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: FR;">inspection </span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">hatch, the reader follows
them to an underground river, and of course the underground river has its own
secrets and dangers. And the flow of real to speculative feels as natural and
logical as water running downhill. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Mysterious
Mysteries of the Aro Valley</span></i><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> is an admirable advance on the <i>Unspeakable
S</i></span><i><span lang="DA" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: DA;">ecrets</span></i><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">,
which was a delightful, engaging, and charming book. But this book is a
mystery, a comedy, a work of speculative fiction; it is gripping and </span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: FR;">enchanting</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">, it has that definitive
quality of an arcane thriller (a genre that Danyl and I are both very
interested in) of making human life and history seem larger and more magical,
more full of portent and jeopardy, and more purposefully patterned. None of the
novel’s types and tones undermines the other. It’s all of a piece. It’s
simultaneously exotic, and close to home. It looks with proprietorial affection
upon the Aro Valley as a kind of a microcosm of Wellington, and of New Zealand,
and various New Zealand qualities like getting stuck in, and stuck, and keeping
your head down, and running into unseen obstacles.</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
novel achieves a</span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> tenderness for people, for ways of thinking
about things — enthusiasms, obsessions, wounds — a tenderness for a
neighbourhood, for human organisations, and human aspirations. Danyl said to me
yesterday was there one rule of comedy he’d absorbed, that something was
funnier if you remove most of the jokes. Just about every very funny bit in the
book could have been played for more laughs, but Danyl has other fish to fry,
he wants to tell a story, and he doesn't want to dilute what will matter in
that story to the characters or to the reader. </span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So,
in conclusion, <i>read this book</i>. Find out whether Danyl will be reconciled
with Verity and his brain. Meet Steve, the Aro Valley’s Jack Reacher, see the
election night bonfire, the orgy, the giant sponge. Touch the spiral. Test the
reality of your universe. Spurn your loved ones and your bedtime and laugh like
an Aro Valley drain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/mysterious-mysteries-of-the-aro-valley/"><i>Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley</i></a> is available for purchase at all excellent bookshops at through our online bookstore. p/b, $30 </span><span style="font-family: "Adobe Garamond Pro"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-37980121650759379542016-06-07T15:21:00.000+12:002016-06-07T15:21:04.674+12:00Interview with Danyl McLauchlan
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoZUtpxJehyLmnOyYieuJEGHVOS7HA6d8pp8D7CJqiDjFxY08vkxxhVX1BcJ4uez7Zima3Emx_mk3qRZOCw0gBEK8jiRI12s6LCyeauUTasALh-xpycQvc8bpIr77UNwWcVbWYb-Ric-4/s1600/30421_REC012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoZUtpxJehyLmnOyYieuJEGHVOS7HA6d8pp8D7CJqiDjFxY08vkxxhVX1BcJ4uez7Zima3Emx_mk3qRZOCw0gBEK8jiRI12s6LCyeauUTasALh-xpycQvc8bpIr77UNwWcVbWYb-Ric-4/s640/30421_REC012.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Danyl McLauchlan (Robert Cross, 2016)</i></td></tr>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Your new book, </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley</span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">, returns to the familiar
territory of your debut novel, </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unspeakable
Secret</span>s</span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> – a main character down on his luck called Danyl. How important is
it to you to base your fiction in the local environment? Why name a character
after yourself? And why return to Danyl and the Aro Valley?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">It’s not important to me to base my fiction in Aro Valley. It’s
just a great setting for comic novels and no one else is using it, so I might
as well take advantage of it. And I named the main character after myself
because he was originally just a fictional version of me and I think it feels
fake when obvious author surrogates are hidden behind fake names.
(Although sometimes it can be funny. Philip K. Dick called one of his surrogate
characters ‘Horselover Fat’ because Philip means ‘lover of horses’ and ‘Dick’
is German for ‘fat’.) Sometimes I feel like novelists make fools of themselves
when they have these very loosely disguised versions of themselves running
around inside their books. They make themselves brilliant and brave and witty
and attractive and, if the novelist is a man, irresistible to women. So giving
the character my own name keeps me honest but also hopefully stops me from
inadvertently embarrassing myself. I returned to the character and Te Aro
because I liked writing the last one and people liked reading it. But my next
book will be very different. New characters, new settings.</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Mysterious Mysteries</span></span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> like </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unspeakable Secrets</span></span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> deals with the occult, conspiracy theories, and
the people that get obsessed and drawn in by them. What is the attraction for
you in the occult?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">The first book had occultists in it and I find the subject
interesting because occult leaders are usually just writers who have convinced
a group of people that their stories are true. Many writers like to think that
stories are important and that they change people’s lives and mostly, I think,
they don’t. But with occult leaders they do change lives, but the change is
usually destructive. In this book the conspiracy is centred on several
mathematicians, which might seem like the opposite of occultists. Mathematics
is widely seen as a science; something very practical. But if you look closer
at it and learn a little about the philosophy, it is very mysterious. What are
mathematical objects? Are they real? Are they created or discovered? What is
their relation to reality? Are there problems that are unprovable or
incomputable? Cults of mathematicians can be just as sinister and mysterious as
cults of occultists.</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Are there books you’ve read or admire
that helped you set a tone or find a way of writing your two novels?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">My favourite writers are genre novelists who transcend their
genre. Patricia Highsmith and Philip K. Dick are well known. There’s a less
famous but, I think, just as brilliant novelist called Donald E. Westlake who
wrote a number of thrillers under the pseudonym Richard Stark. They’re
masterworks of minimalism and plot structure. Also a British medieval Arabic
scholar called Robert Irwin who wrote a novel called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Arabian Nightmare</i> set in 15<sup>th</sup> century Cairo against
a backdrop of warring cults and otherworldly conspiracies. That book had some
of the tone I was going for; this idea that the characters had stumbled upon
plots and counterplots to bring about outcomes that were almost incomprehensible.</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">What is the attraction of plots and counterplots?
Entertainment value?</span></i></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20160607T1214; mso-comment-reference: CG_1;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I think so. </span></a><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I started to
write my first book during the golden age of TV, when you had shows like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wire</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sopranos</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lost</i>
that were doing all of this complex innovative stuff in terms of storytelling.
They were the first time I really paid attention to plot structure on a
technical level. Like asking, ‘Why did this story work?’ ‘How did they achieve
this effect?’ There’s also this quote from, I think, the film critic Pauline
Kael who said, ‘A movie should be a machine built to surprise and delight the
audience.’ That’s very much my philosophy to plot. And, of course, delight
doesn’t mean a movie or a book has to be trivial. You can delight the reader
with ideas or emotions.</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">One of the joys of your writing is how
funny it is. I hoot with laughter as I read it! Is the humour a natural consequence
of writing about conspiracy theories? Their ridiculousness? What writers do you
admire for their humour?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Thanks! Umberto Eco died a few months ago and he wrote the
classic comic conspiracy theory novel, <i>Foucault’s Pendulum</i>, which
anticipated and satirised <i>The Da Vinci Code </i>fifteen years before Dan
Brown’s bestseller was published. I like the mid-century English comic writers
Evelyn Waugh and <i>Lucky Jim </i>by Kingsley Amis. Graham Greene wrote comic
novels – <i>Our Man in Havana, Travels with My Aunt - </i>that he didn’t even
refer to as novels; he called them ‘entertainments’, to distinguish them from
his very serious important work like <i>Heart of the Matter </i>or <i>Power and
the Glory. </i>I think the entertainments have dated a lot better than the
novels have. Stella Gibbon’s <i>Cold Comfort Farm</i> was a send-up of a lot of
serious literary books published in the 1920s that have mostly been forgotten,
but her satire abides. It is also, bizarrely, a science-fiction book set in the
remote future of the late 1940s in which people have television phones and
Mayfair has been reduced to a slum. Jeanette Winterson’s<i> Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit </i>is another favourite. I went for years without reading that
because the covers always made it look very serious and grim. </span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">What do you do in your day job at Victoria
University? How long have you been here? Is there ever any cross over between
your day job and your writing?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I’m a computational biologist. So I work in a lab and do some
research but mostly support other researchers and biologists. I’ve been here
for just over ten years. There’s some crossover, in that I like to have
characters who are scientists or who argue about scientific points. But mostly
my writing is something I do very early in the morning when it’s very quiet and
there’s nothing else around to distract me, and my day job is the opposite of
that.</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">What time do you get up? And do you like to
hit a word count? You seem like a writer who can produce work quite quickly.</span></i></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20160607T1216; mso-comment-reference: CG_1;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Usually I get </span></a><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><a class="msocomanchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2160069732656919323#_msocom_1" id="_anchor_1" name="_msoanchor_1"></a><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">up about five or
five-thirty. When I’m really deep into the book it is a bit earlier. I don’t
try and hit a word count because almost every word I write gets rewritten or
cut, so counting them would just depress me. I think I am a quick writer on an
hourly basis but the rewriting slows me down. I do write every day though and
you get so much done that way, even if a lot of it doesn’t end up in the final
book.</span><span lang="mi-NZ" style="mso-ansi-language: #0481;"></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Have you always wanted to write fiction?
Have you done any of the popular writing courses, and do you have an opinion on
these?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I have always wanted to be a writer, but it was only really when
I reached my late thirties that I acquired the ability to commit to a book and
rewrite and rewrite it, which is what you need to do to make it any good.
Before that I’d just write a short story and not even revise it, just give it
to friends or a girlfriend and expect them to lavish me with praise. They’d
have to clench their teeth and tell me how it had potential as an idea, maybe.
I’ve never done a popular writing course. I’d like to, it’d be nice to have all
that time just to write and to have someone very wise give me feedback but it’s
just not compatible with my job.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Calibri !msorm; font-size: 15.0pt !msorm; line-height: 150% !msorm;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-prop-change: "Microsoft Office User" 20160607T1434;">What
made you realise you need to revise? And what caused the shift from short
stories to novels? </span></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">I stopped writing short stories sometime in my twenties and I
didn’t do any creative writing for maybe ten years. Then I wrote a screenplay
with a friend of mine, Andrew Brettell, who used to lecture in Film at Victoria
University. The screenplay never got made. We came up with this great idea,
wrote the script and it wasn’t commercial so we just couldn’t get any interest
in it. Anyway, Andrew knew a lot more about the actual hard work of writing
than I did. Originally I went away and wrote all this comic dialogue, which I
thought was hilarious, and I showed it to him. He basically tore it all up and
said, ‘That isn’t how you write.’ So we went back to the beginning and
figured out the structure of the movie, what the function of each scene was
supposed to be, what was at risk for the characters, and all of that basic
storytelling stuff. And then I went away and wrote the actual dialogue. We
revised it and revised it, and the end product was just so superior in every
way to what I’d originally written. So much funnier. So much more interesting.
So I learned a lot about writing from that experience, but also that film
wasn’t for me. You could put all that work into a screenplay and produce
something really good and nothing would happen to it. At least when you write a
novel you have a finished product you can take to publishers.</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">You have a popular following for </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dim-Post</span></span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">, your political commentary
blog. Does that come out a desire to write also? Is writing partly a desire to
have your voice heard (politically and fictionally)? Is it hard to get your
voice heard, both your political and fictional voice?</span></i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">For me, the desire to write is more of a compulsion. I get ideas
or dialogues or arguments or scenes in my head that won’t go away unless I
write them down. It’s very similar to the experience of rehearsing an argument
with someone, or reiterating a debate in which you think of really great points
you wish you’d made, except it can be directed. I can say, ‘Hey brain, figure
out a way to make the opening scene in my book more interesting,’ and off it
goes. And if I’m writing it down, I might as well try and publish it. With the
blogging about politics, I see it as more of a hobby. It’s what I do instead of
watching sport, or trainspotting, or whatever. And I try to be accurate and
insightful but I don’t take it too seriously. With the novel writing I feel
more of an obligation. People are going to pay for the book and invest their
time in reading it, so I invest a lot more energy and work into it. Ironically,
the political commentary is far more widely read and discussed. That’s fine. I
should be grateful any of it is read. But hopefully the books will have a
longer shelf-life.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz-mwA3Ul3jEl-7J51x1rk_X_DKsXKNXUcpTxAkqOB6d1cuPaVRAbB6FNwLovIcSLumm35ZUlJzjISYzgtt0ycewg5UI6TkrfgmBxSjONlZd0xxEfctKQvZr3opmX6TPrxxOiYtg0Dn7s/s1600/Mysteriousmysteries_finalcover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz-mwA3Ul3jEl-7J51x1rk_X_DKsXKNXUcpTxAkqOB6d1cuPaVRAbB6FNwLovIcSLumm35ZUlJzjISYzgtt0ycewg5UI6TkrfgmBxSjONlZd0xxEfctKQvZr3opmX6TPrxxOiYtg0Dn7s/s400/Mysteriousmysteries_finalcover.jpg" width="273" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Danyl McLauchlan's second novel, <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/mysterious-mysteries-of-the-aro-valley/"><i>Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley</i></a>, is published on Thursday, and his launch will be held at Unity Books next Tuesday 14 June, 2016.</span><i><span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> </span></i></span></div>
<span lang="EN-NZ" style="color: #18376a; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"></span><span lang="mi-NZ" style="mso-ansi-language: #0481;"></span><style><!--
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</style>Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-63345023648494708832016-05-23T10:54:00.002+12:002016-05-23T10:54:59.872+12:00Interview with Tracey Slaughter
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Tracey
Slaughter's <i>Deleted Scenes for Lovers</i> is already gathering rave reviews
at <a href="http://thespinoff.co.nz/books/19-05-2016/book-of-the-week-the-fuck-ups-and-bogans-in-short-stories-by-thames-writer-tracey-slaughter/"><span style="color: blue;">The Spinoff</span></a>, 'note-perfect, plentiful', and in <i>NZ
Listener</i>, 'self-assured, forceful'. <i>Deleted Scenes for Lovers</i> will
be launched at Art Fusion Gallery, Waikato University on Thursday 26 May,
5.30pm.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA8ag0DWAT8q2HEtaKVpKHplJtfuoRYw3RH4JIU16PKseZFqbnDgou5K-fEhesQnWw9HBLStStRqcWQF1mBUYW35qsed30ZV2doX4aCXuyEc8uMcAyR_rMsoFloCaBVkPOCirvUwvEG7g/s1600/Tracey+Slaughter+photo+by+Catherine+Chidgey+300dpi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA8ag0DWAT8q2HEtaKVpKHplJtfuoRYw3RH4JIU16PKseZFqbnDgou5K-fEhesQnWw9HBLStStRqcWQF1mBUYW35qsed30ZV2doX4aCXuyEc8uMcAyR_rMsoFloCaBVkPOCirvUwvEG7g/s400/Tracey+Slaughter+photo+by+Catherine+Chidgey+300dpi.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tracey Slaughter (photo: Catherine Chidgey)</td></tr>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">Tracey, you’ve been publishing short fiction and winning prizes for
many years – but you're only just publishing your book of short stories now – what
took so long?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">‘Tell me what ever happened to Tracey’? That’s the archetypal tough
question. There’s the obvious struggle to reach book-length form in a market
which dislikes the intense fix of short fiction, which craves the chunkier comforts
of the novel. But the real answer is: I lost some years. In between writing these
short stories life was teaching me how to live through long ones – a slow
recovery from illness, a car crash, further damage, a harder walk back to
health. What that meant was that every story I did manage to finish was oxygen
– and when my work did win prizes it was a lifeline, adrenaline, hope. I don’t
like looking back on the years I missed, when there </span><span lang="EN-NZ">should<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> have been more output – but I was forced to
spend time turning more human…which has got to help any writer in the long run.
</span></span></div>
<i><span lang="EN-NZ"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">The style that you’ve developed through these stories is very lyrical, sensual –
sense-based. I think that your prize-winning </span></i><span lang="EN-NZ">Landfall<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> essay last year, ‘Ashdown Place’ is an
excellent example of how you explore experience and bring the past back
through sensory detail. Can you talk about how you’ve developed this style?</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I started as a poet, and poetry is still in my bloodstream, narrative
can’t wash it out. So the challenge in moving to prose was always to find a
style which could unfold a story but still let language be musical, be animal –
those are the books I love to read, where the sentences are rhythmic, the sound
atmospheric, the language not just delivering story but absorbing the senses,
making skin contact. I like writers who use sound and image to make us taste
the scene with our bodies. But I’m very aware that the fiction writer can’t
afford to let their sentences just swim around after lush sound effects – they
have to push ahead, into the concrete action, the forward momentum of the story.
The dog has to run after the stick, as the writer Sarah Hall says, describing
what she calls the ‘cat-dog’ hybrid of poetic prose. But the cat…well, the cat is
a sensual creature, that does whatever feels good to its wayward fur...</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">Many of your characters are what we sometimes call ‘bogans’ in this country.
Where do they come from?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Was I born in a black tee? I guess I grew up in coastal, smalltown New
Zealand with its blend of bogan and surfie culture; my first jobs were in
takeaways, service stations and pubs watching that waxhead/petrolhead world go
by; I play in a covers band now which works the smalltown circuit (sometimes
even the same old pubs!), so I still get to see the stories of that world spinning
out, hear its voices. But the term bogan brings with it the taint of
stereotype, a beer-chugging Holden-revving comedy which limits responses – it’s
too easy to cartoon a group, stamp them ‘bogans’ and write their stories off. I
think it’s the writer’s job to see past labels and hunt the pulse of the human
story dwelling beneath, whatever social group a character might seem to fall
into. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I don’t set out to write self-consciously ‘bogan’ stories – it just happens
that the drama of lower decile life often stands out in the sharpest relief to
me, and I never turn those stories away because they’re not decent,
representative or seemly. Short stories also, have always been a home for the
‘lonely voice’ – it’s a form with its roots in the underbelly, haunted by
outsiders. As a writer you don’t chase the poor from your doorstep, I remember
Flannery O’Connor saying, because the poor have nothing left to shield them
from raw life – and that’s what should interest any compassionate writer.<i> </i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-NZ">Your stories often deal with sensitive topics such as domestic
violence or sexual abuse; ones that we often struggle to talk about.
What’s your approach towards the ethics and angles of writing trauma?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">Does anyone still
agree with Brasch that Frame’s ‘Gorse is not People’ was ‘too painful to
print’? A writer’s job is to say the unsayable – it’s a travesty to call
yourself a writer and then refuse to face the full range of human experience. Outcries
that subjects are too dark, extreme, personal, risky make zero sense to me –
those hard realities of life are what writing is for. And every writer knows
their own ‘black block,’ that dark mass under your chest wall that holds your
deep material, the stories you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">must</i>
speak of. If you don’t listen to that, your stories might stay clean, but the
page will, in effect, be empty. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3OtK-esPMCkV5NcOSeLBC_tQE_cdHrEP2rLZkLjTu0ecjTvq1w8KgyI7sVNqdPVi8ewK6iXvZh7o-nHQ_nlDBaaPnIQuk9N9a9Re2Z_IJCdMoNotzjEJQDWjIKWpv7RCDCUnwo1zTYlE/s1600/Deleted+Scenes+for+Lovers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3OtK-esPMCkV5NcOSeLBC_tQE_cdHrEP2rLZkLjTu0ecjTvq1w8KgyI7sVNqdPVi8ewK6iXvZh7o-nHQ_nlDBaaPnIQuk9N9a9Re2Z_IJCdMoNotzjEJQDWjIKWpv7RCDCUnwo1zTYlE/s400/Deleted+Scenes+for+Lovers.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
<br />
<i>Deleted Scenes for Lovers</i> is available in good bookshops and through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/deleted-scenes-for-lovers/">online bookstore</a> now.<br />
$30, p/bVictoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-51913009068806007662016-05-09T12:17:00.003+12:002016-05-09T12:19:53.133+12:00Interview with Tusiata Avia<style>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">Tusiata Avia's new poetry collection</span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Fale Aitu | Spirit House </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">will be launched during the Auckland Writers Festival on Wednesday this week. </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">Tusiata is taking part in a number of sessions at AWF, see their <a href="http://www.writersfestival.co.nz/programmes/main-programme/">programme</a> for details.</span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVLi-y2zRBkLP8bMglCJwyl33uKw17xsaRqNJ9T2xVEXXUYxVDPqpnN7DGZ1cJ3uKzuE5eLXHq6EByoGKU1xfDTwdjMgzykmvU2LK9-371zJ05Xb986y-HgnyoGeVRPW8PNtxHaxU6o0M/s1600/Tusiata+web+2016+photo+by+Phantom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVLi-y2zRBkLP8bMglCJwyl33uKw17xsaRqNJ9T2xVEXXUYxVDPqpnN7DGZ1cJ3uKzuE5eLXHq6EByoGKU1xfDTwdjMgzykmvU2LK9-371zJ05Xb986y-HgnyoGeVRPW8PNtxHaxU6o0M/s640/Tusiata+web+2016+photo+by+Phantom.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Tusiata Avia </b>((2016, Hayley Theyers Photography)</td></tr>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;"> You travel the
world in your latest poems – Samoa, Christchurch, Gaza, New York – and your
poems are not romanticised, ‘travel’ poems, they’re political and tough. Do you
find your work getting drawn into the politics of wherever you travel?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">For me the personal and the political are intertwined: the politics of
the places I’ve lived in or visited effect me on a personal level in some fundamental
way. For instance, the friends I had/have on both sides of the Israel/Gaza
wall; I have an emotional connection to them, even the ones I strongly disagree
with. I still love them.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">One of the things I’ve learned from all the years of travelling: for me,
it is all fairly meaningless unless I am making real connections, heart-connections,
with people. Some people expect me to be like my poems in that way – political
and tough – I’m not. I often don’t and/or can’t express things (particularly
things that upset me) immediately. I’m not quick on the uptake. But I feel
things – emotionally and intuitively –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>immediately.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I often feel much
more than is comfortable to feel, I have a very ‘porous’ skin. Writing is one
of the ways I have to process and express
how I feel about things and then send that out into the world.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">Some of the
poems in this book make for confrontational reading. I’m thinking of
‘Demonstration’, which I heard you perform in Dunedin. It was hard to listen
to, but I also couldn’t help but be filled with joy at how commited you are to
not flinching from difficult topics, in this case, rape. Can you talk about the
process of writing such a poem and then deciding to perform and publish it?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve only performed that poem twice. It requires the right audience,
people who kind of know what they might be getting themselves into. And I have
to do some preparation to perform a poem like that. That poem in particular is
very confrontational but in an unexpected way – it sneaks its way in and then
really slams you. Some times you have to break the wounds open.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">I wrote that poem after attending an anti-rape protest rally, it made me
think about my own experience of rape as a young woman, and what I’d done with
it, how I’d buried it. I was questioning myself during the rally: was it REALLY
rape. Then I went home and I had to write the poem pretty much straight away. Most
importantly, I had to reclaim a position of strength. I had to find that strength
for myself. I guess the invitation in that poem is to consider how we might be
with our traumatic, buried experiences. They don’t have to stay that way. </span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve always the need to bring the skeletons out of the closet (my own
and ours collectively, as a society) and bring them in to the light so we can
all examine them. As I see it, that’s part of my job as a writer.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">There’s a voice
in your poems that’s been there from day one – this Samoan/Palangi voice – for
which you are rightly celebrated. Is this a voice from your family and
neighbourhood growing up? How has this voice developed over your three
collections?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">I think it’s really hard to pin down your own voice. I think it’s like
identity: not static, always fluid, sometimes has its feet on one side of the
border, sometimes on the other, sometimes straddling both camps, sometimes in
neither, in another place altogether.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">I wrote much of my first book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wild
Dogs Under My Skirt</i>, in a number of Samoan voices. Sometimes they came from
particular members of my extended family and sometimes they came from the
voices in my head that (even though they expressed themselves using Samoan
vernacular and accents) are universal to the kaliedescope of the human
condition: bouncing from love to cruelty to rebellion to humour etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">I don’t use that specific ‘Samoan voice’ so much now, I don’t really
know why. I’m not trying to consciously use any particular voice. I think I
just write whatever is there inside me – it finds its own mode of transport out.
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">The new
collection is called </span></i><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">Fale Aitu | Spirit House<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> – and there are aitu all over the pages of
the book. Can you talk about the role of aitu in your poems, are they a
character, guiding principles?</i></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">Aitu are spirits. And I guess spirits can inhabit all kinds of things
and take the form of all kinds of things. Sometime I feel them physically as
actual presences. In modern Samoan culture aitu tend to be thought of as scary,
dangerous things (like ghosts or demons) and best avoided, but they played an
important and less negative role in our misty pre-Christian past. Whether we
believe they’re there or not, whether we feel their presence, whether we’ve
buried them, they still walk along just behind us.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">Fale Aitu |
Spirit House</span></i><span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;"> is a selection from a much larger number of poems written in bits and
pieces over the last 6-8 years. I didn’t sit down with a project or a narrative
(like my earlier books) and write a body of work. These are a distillation from
poems I wrote when I had no time to write; I had become a single mother and
then a full-time-working single mother. Believe me, there is no time to write,
let alone write anything cohesive! That worried me when I finally put together
a manuscript, it just seemed like a disparate bunch of stuff to me, until I
gave it to Bernadette Hall ( a friend and mentor). She handed a bunch of the
poems back to me, and said, “Look, there it is.” And then I could see that the
book had been there all along. I think my subconscious knew what it was doing
all those years; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the aitu knew what they
were doing all along. Now I read it and am surprised to see how it works, the
shapes it makes and the echos Some shapes are a bit clunky, but then I think I
probably am too.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj0jLT7_R5eVwxHpRGsOk5Jwg0XNlM-sBtXFSqhrCvgq2izllWkjff7EgEqIZ5OUZSQnxqhrO_7ZEQBsmI5eXMqwRsT18TI0ZIE3gb8e2Uj5W9NkZrEpeAcCEP5_N915k432S8DlQbyLs/s1600/Fale+Aitu+Spirit+House+-+RGB+front+cover+new.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj0jLT7_R5eVwxHpRGsOk5Jwg0XNlM-sBtXFSqhrCvgq2izllWkjff7EgEqIZ5OUZSQnxqhrO_7ZEQBsmI5eXMqwRsT18TI0ZIE3gb8e2Uj5W9NkZrEpeAcCEP5_N915k432S8DlQbyLs/s320/Fale+Aitu+Spirit+House+-+RGB+front+cover+new.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;"><i>Fale Aitu |Spirit House</i> by Tusiata Avia.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">Released Thursday 14 May, in quality bookshops and at <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/fale-aitu-spirit-house/">VUP's online bookshop</a></span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">p/b, $25.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt;">A launch for <i>Fale Aitu</i> will be held at Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, Level 1, 300 K-Rd, Auckland on Wednesday 11 May, 5.30pm–7pm. All welcome. </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 10.5pt;"></span></div>
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Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-42207938821746948692016-04-19T09:32:00.000+12:002016-04-19T09:32:20.987+12:00Kate Camp's launch speech for Bill Nelson's Memorandum of Understanding
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Kate Camp gave this speech at Bill Nelson's launch last week. Thanks Kate for letting us reproduce it here. </span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0GKZZSHW5jTP8NCWfbPBOqkmjHzDm1TslvGUag279-4RaS9jHEtXdzjzloo0pd-YtKfds_tDcYUl43G0Qm5BMV3de37Pz5jIofWiujsBsHWqzow34F7udNNNaEKFx4DPKynSUQqYjLiY/s1600/IMG_0496.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0GKZZSHW5jTP8NCWfbPBOqkmjHzDm1TslvGUag279-4RaS9jHEtXdzjzloo0pd-YtKfds_tDcYUl43G0Qm5BMV3de37Pz5jIofWiujsBsHWqzow34F7udNNNaEKFx4DPKynSUQqYjLiY/s400/IMG_0496.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kate Camp giving her launch speech</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I used to
like annoying Bill by referring to him as my ‘mentee’ – because I was his
mentor on a poetry course. I guess<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
still like annoying him by saying that. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Of course
it’s because I want to take whatever credit I can for him and his great poems. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">(It’s also
because ‘mentee’ sounds a bit like ‘manatee’ and manatees are just really
weird.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Even
though now we have moved on from our mentor/manatee relationship, and I
really can’t take any credit for Bill’s poems whatsoever, it’s still a real
pleasure to be able to launch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorandum
of Understanding</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To me, as a
poet, there are two tests of a really great image or phrase: </span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It suddenly makes me see something
that was under my nose in a completely new way, but which seems obvious and
inevitable as soon as I hear it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I wish I came up with it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The title of
Bill’s book meets both criteria. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It’s clever,
it’s surprising, it feels good to say aloud, it’s both technical and tender. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I think it’s
a great title for the collection that really captures some of the book’s
themes: memory, understanding the world and each other, and how both of these
things are problematic when we attempt to codify them in language. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I also really
like the poem, and maybe Bill’s going to read it tonight so I’ll just quote
from it:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Understand, that this is a bridging agreement / just a
placeholder / until the full programme of individual projects that need to
occur to realise the full potential of the programme which addresses all the
individual and specific concerns and develops a full and proper understanding
of all the aforementioned concerns, is in place. / Understand, / that there are
no placeholders.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now this is
a bit of a weird thing to say, but I find this a very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">masculine </i>book. It’s manly. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I guess what
I mean is that its subject matter covers a lot of traditional male territory:
one day cricket, John Coltrane, big screen televisions, “I first touched your
breast / accidentally”, “How to change the oil in a 1979 Ford Escort”....</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And of
course there is fantastic sequence of poems about the grandfather ‘How to do
just about anything’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But these
masculine tropes always appear in new guises, in a new tone. If I was an
academic<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d be talking about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">contemporary masculinities</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But the way
it feels to me as a reader and as a woman is just really great, like yay I’m so
glad we’re past the John Mulgan / Barry Crump kiwi bloke, and can just enjoy
being in the company of an intelligent New Zealand man who is comfortable in
his own skin, even if it’s the skin of John Coltrane. </span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWl5L-H9wWjhBwoXofzVt2KtWyIvQdgsIdM43GTsuEJrNtKLdy2kWDD6CdWz9PoEujaDhTvvBV39A9AmuWnSpwqDEfJ8sxcqo6zm6OU1QchVNj62r_YbpFCkodaxIQjf76W4GL5eHTcGw/s1600/IMG_0500.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWl5L-H9wWjhBwoXofzVt2KtWyIvQdgsIdM43GTsuEJrNtKLdy2kWDD6CdWz9PoEujaDhTvvBV39A9AmuWnSpwqDEfJ8sxcqo6zm6OU1QchVNj62r_YbpFCkodaxIQjf76W4GL5eHTcGw/s400/IMG_0500.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill Nelson reads from Memorandum of Understanding</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I once gave
a Masters tutorial presentation titled ‘My favourite bits of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby Dick </i>and why they are so great’ and
I just want to finish off tonight by doing the same for Bill’s book. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I absolutely
love the final sequence of poems in the book, about the poet and his
grandfather. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As one of
the poems says: “Sometimes it seems you’re the only two people / in an
absorbing, character-based mystery.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I love the
way the poems in this sequence are like tiny short stories, even like miniature
novels – when I re-read the sequence I’m surprised how short they are, because
they seem to contain so much. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">How’s this
for an opening of a poem:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One-day cricket</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Like origami, oyster soup<br />
and obscene phone calls</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">this is something your grandfather<br />
was never into.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Origami,
oyster soup and obscene phone calls! God that’s good! </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And even
more clever in context of the sequence, which has a guiding principle which I
won’t reveal – because the book has a fantastic ending which I don’t want to
give away. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There are
just so many wonderful lines in these poems:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“listening
in the dark like icebergs”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">or </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Listened to
the clock <br />
click its thin metal parts<br />
into place, each second<br />
finding its home<br />
and then leaving it.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">or</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“trying to
read the road signs<br />
all you see is a diamond<br />
stuffed with impurities”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I think that
last one sums up the particular magic of these poems. It’s only once you hear
“impurities” that you go back and re-cast the diamond shape of the road sign as
the other kind of diamond. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So the
moment you recognise the flaws is also the moment you recognise the value. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I know Bill
finished this manuscript a year ago and it probably feels like ages since he
really inhabited these poems. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But
hopefully now that everyone will be reading it, and finding those lines that
make them think – I wish I’d written that – Bill, you’ll get a chance to
appreciate what a great body of work it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Congratulations
to a very talented manatee. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">* </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><i>Memorandum of Understanding</i> can be purchased in quality bookshops or through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/memorandum-of-understanding/">online bookstore</a>. $25, p/b.</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHDjKeqJxwnVimcv_fzvIXZZrA1SCQvnDiwv1kbXSXQ2Ttzkqge4FR7RXXOmugCGFxMKQ3aTGAwMmRH9rVG9hx5M3gzDHb0rS0dryxFT_W_we1-jO27YFZ88C3kre4Su-UIpel7kpt9hc/s1600/IMG_0545.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHDjKeqJxwnVimcv_fzvIXZZrA1SCQvnDiwv1kbXSXQ2Ttzkqge4FR7RXXOmugCGFxMKQ3aTGAwMmRH9rVG9hx5M3gzDHb0rS0dryxFT_W_we1-jO27YFZ88C3kre4Su-UIpel7kpt9hc/s400/IMG_0545.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sarah Jane Barnett, Nick Ascroft and Bill Nelson</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-28342658294854599272016-04-14T08:52:00.000+12:002016-04-14T10:21:59.698+12:00Four questions for Bill Nelson<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Bill Nelson's debut poetry collection, <i>Memorandum of Understanding</i>, is launched tonight at The Southern Cross (all welcome!). We asked him four questions about his new book.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn0othJPUDlgW30BOplB88EFkDXXqTMcCW_UVXHEQEKX-sOey9eUQCOxCHBeZT943cHkTjFDNwwGJBnUlT8uBrOnHusKiHoJTLBH39XRB02RXyahbavLTX06PGbuffOiO3qPYr5F6R2ug/s1600/Bill_Nelson30.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn0othJPUDlgW30BOplB88EFkDXXqTMcCW_UVXHEQEKX-sOey9eUQCOxCHBeZT943cHkTjFDNwwGJBnUlT8uBrOnHusKiHoJTLBH39XRB02RXyahbavLTX06PGbuffOiO3qPYr5F6R2ug/s400/Bill_Nelson30.JPG" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill Nelson 2016 (Grant Maiden Photography)</td></tr>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">In ‘Vocal’ the
speaker is getting singing lessons. Is this an autobiographical poem? And if
so, has learning how to sing influenced your writing – or your poetry readings?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">I did do singing lessons for a couple of years. It was a real struggle,
like trying to unlearn and then relearn how to walk. I was taught by a man
named Charles who was fantastic at coming up with strange new exercises to
shock my voice into forgetting itself. It was slow going but I did learn early
on that singing is a physical act and if you place your body in the right
position it all just flows from there. That struck me as something to say about
poetry as well. His favourite saying was 'sing into your boots.' I'm still
trying to figure out exactly what that means.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">I'm sure learning to sing has influenced how I write. In the dedication
to practice and training if nothing else. Writing is a craft that takes muscle
memory and patience. It's easy to forget that when reading a finished poem.
It's the same with singing, people get discouraged when they hear a great
singer but they had to practice too!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">As for readings, I do try and slow down as much as possible. And the
rhythm is important thing to concentrate on. Actually singing in a reading
though? I'll leave that for others to do. Although I should try and figure out
how to read a poem into my boots.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">There are quite a
few love poems in the book (‘All the love poems’, ‘Pins and needles’, the title
poem, and, ‘In geological time') where you seem aware that you're writing a
love poem, but you’re careful to avoid making any outright declarations. It’s
almost a discomfort with the whole idea of the love poem. What is that
discomfort about? </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">I would describe 'In geological time' as more of a rocky sex poem than a
love poem. And 'Pins and needles' is about the discomfort of a failed love more
than anything else. I guess love can be a complicated beast and the poems
reflect that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Hinemoana Baker said to me once, when talking about one of my poems, 'Where
is the love?' By which I think she meant that the intention of the poem should
be celebration. I like that idea and I think that's true of the poems in this
book. They are all in love with something and all declaring that love one way
or another. Even if the L word doesn't appear directly, it's in there
somewhere. I think that's how love works in real life too; it slips in when
you're not looking for it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">'All the love poems' started out as a deliberate attempt at mockery. But
then a reference to one of my favourite love poems, 'Strawberries' by Edwin
Morgan, derailed the whole thing. So I guess that poem fell in love with me
despite me doing my best to give it the cold shoulder. I feel redeemed by that
one.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">There are lots of
characters in the poems (John Coltrane, Chalky George, Russell, the goats,
Charlie in ‘Charlie’s shed’, the grandfather), and some poems in which you take
on someone else’s character (e.g. ‘Giant steps’, 'Starbuck Island’). Do
you consciously borrow from fiction or drama? </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">A lot of those poems are like little biographies. I'm interested in
biography because the speaker often gives away more about themselves than the
subject. In the John Coltrane poem that happened quite literally. I became him,
or he became me. My Mum keeps asking me why it had to be so dark though. It's a
good question and I think John Coltrane should answer it.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Russell is a place, Chalky George is a tortoise, and they both have
great sounding names. Poems often start with nothing more than a phrase or a
name that hooks me in. When I started the Coltrane poem, based on it being the
coolest name I'd ever heard, I made the deliberate choice to do absolutely no
research on him. I later found that I'd scribbled something years earlier that
also had John Coltrane in it. I'm obviously obsessed with John Coltrane.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">‘Starbuck Island’ borrows from a memoir that my
great-great-great-grandfather wrote about being left on that island for a year.
He was there to collect bird shit which was used as a fertiliser at the time. I
later learnt that the man who named the island (after himself) came from
Nantucket where Moby-Dick was set. So I had to throw some Moby-Dick style drama
in there. My great-great-great-grandfather was an old man when he wrote it too
and I like to think he added a bit of fiction and drama himself.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">‘The pigeon
history of New Zealand’, sets out an alternative, but kind of baffling version
of NZ history, told in a variety of voices (e.g. there’s one where Jesus gets
shot between the eyes). How did you go about writing it? Do any of the poems in
that sequence have a source text, i.e. are found poems? Where did the voices
come from?</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">That one definitely went to places that I wasn't planning on which is
always a good thing.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The section titles came from <i>The</i> <i>Penguin History of New
Zealand</i> by Michael King; 'Prehistory', 'Settlement', 'Consolidation',
'Unsettlement' and 'Posthistory'. I used those as launching points for little
language experiments, some of which were modelled on the tone of King's prose
and others I tried to take in a completely different direction. It was the
language and the novelistic prose that drew me in. In the end I think it's a
little shrine of language in dedication to that book.</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHLHKcXgabp8giU5LDMARMWctYpA94nucs1kiplnRgy2Ue1Ir5JveiyfcezQNO0NyavozynHoWGKe7oKfWhTTCn7toSZvaBkHbbX612psNxADAzHwdEvp0gNGPN6GKnb0UySZzA2n9cPE/s1600/Memorandum+front+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHLHKcXgabp8giU5LDMARMWctYpA94nucs1kiplnRgy2Ue1Ir5JveiyfcezQNO0NyavozynHoWGKe7oKfWhTTCn7toSZvaBkHbbX612psNxADAzHwdEvp0gNGPN6GKnb0UySZzA2n9cPE/s400/Memorandum+front+cover.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Memorandum of Understanding</i> is released today! April 14, 2016. Available at quality bookshops and through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/memorandum-of-understanding/">online store</a>. $25, p/b.<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></div>
Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-39563488101220029592016-03-24T09:38:00.000+13:002016-03-24T09:38:17.617+13:00Rachel Bush
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0LZWZVgvnehyJQG2Z8ZieEW42rzBPE-POjk7MgddpdKbVWz6hLrHWccC9jbdzEFcdlxhXbNLIzCULDpmWE6rR3yIchazhwo4WoEdZIIG3j9II57LW9wGtgs0q4FUnMQs0NVwhZK3hnms/s1600/rachel+bush.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0LZWZVgvnehyJQG2Z8ZieEW42rzBPE-POjk7MgddpdKbVWz6hLrHWccC9jbdzEFcdlxhXbNLIzCULDpmWE6rR3yIchazhwo4WoEdZIIG3j9II57LW9wGtgs0q4FUnMQs0NVwhZK3hnms/s320/rachel+bush.jpg" width="221" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="horsetitle">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is with great sadness we learned that our good friend Rachel Bush died yesterday. Rachel was a wonderful poet, an astute reader and a warm supporter of other writers. She will be greatly missed. Our thoughts are with her family and close friends.</span></div>
<div class="horsetitle">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Thought Horses</i>, Rachel's newest collection of poetry, will be published in April. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We are so pleased that Rachel was well enough to work on her book with editor Ashleigh Young, and that she also got to see and hold her book. </span></div>
<div class="horsetitle">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We will be holding a reading and celebration of Rachel at Vic Books on Tuesday 19 April. </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4GwLiS3eo8PVsatiBjm6U2P-41KdiM0RXqE8yvgitzhgPrXsr_OoTNvcP-7OA45V8UPfJmnHaY_In5r8GzaQnFlq9tpJXD7DouKkItua1Z2ehWHdtj0in1eEXn-uwrd1phReZRLUKCts/s1600/Thought+Horses+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4GwLiS3eo8PVsatiBjm6U2P-41KdiM0RXqE8yvgitzhgPrXsr_OoTNvcP-7OA45V8UPfJmnHaY_In5r8GzaQnFlq9tpJXD7DouKkItua1Z2ehWHdtj0in1eEXn-uwrd1phReZRLUKCts/s320/Thought+Horses+cover.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="horsetitle">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sing Them
</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">i</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Because I need to sew me </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a composer and knit me </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a singer who will wrap me</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in the sounds of the words. </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ii</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Because in this house I hear</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">sparrows in the fan palm and tui that</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">hang out in pink camellia flowers but</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">these voices have no words.</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">iii</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Because we lived with their
questions </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">when our mothers sang to us.</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Who is Sylvia, what
is she?</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">When our mothers sang,</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the words became us</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and the songs became us.</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Where have you been</span></i></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">all the day, Billie
Boy, Billie Boy?</span></i></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">iv</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Because this was a congealed</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">day at the cold leftover end </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of the rind of winter but when </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">you said you’d sing the poems,</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">they put on their warm clothes</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and went out walking. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">v</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<br /></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Because every day the poems </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">stay folded and pressed flat in </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a suitcase of their pages </span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">till the composer unfolds</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">them in sound lines and when</span></div>
<div class="horsepoem">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">you sing them, they float. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">From <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/thought-horses/"><i>Thought Horses </i>by Rachel Bush</a> (VUP, April 2016)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rachel is also the author of <i>The Hungry Woman</i> (1997), <i>The Unfortunate Singer</i> (2002) and <i>Nice Pretty Things</i> (2011). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"></span></span></span> </span></div>
Victoria University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09508904850110049945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2160069732656919323.post-73060789441448462732016-03-14T15:33:00.004+13:002016-03-14T15:33:46.071+13:00Fits and Starts – an interview with Andrew Johnston<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_kAB6WoLzznFV9c5BoMb-FZpCaDn-rohqUf21OA911jFMwt2EqnOtxHw7vWNDb2HTs2OF-qkDmyDB077lV7BSjV4i-EQElnqm078WqxhUqeUtrw3QfDXcsEXmkoreKARhkB4CJtDwCuY/s1600/Andrew+Johnston+bw+photo+supplied+2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_kAB6WoLzznFV9c5BoMb-FZpCaDn-rohqUf21OA911jFMwt2EqnOtxHw7vWNDb2HTs2OF-qkDmyDB077lV7BSjV4i-EQElnqm078WqxhUqeUtrw3QfDXcsEXmkoreKARhkB4CJtDwCuY/s400/Andrew+Johnston+bw+photo+supplied+2015.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrew Johnston (photo supplied)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;"></span><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;"></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">In
your day job you work both as an editor and as a teacher of ‘plain English’.
Poetry is the opposite of plain English isn’t it – thinking here of the way you
play with words and their sound, with language’s slippery meanings?</span></i>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">It’s all about language, that’s for
sure. I guess you could say that the day job, unlike poetry, is about making
things happen – I teach people in the United Nations and in aid organisations
how to write policy that is more likely to get results with decision-makers.
Plain English is part of it, because they have to learn to ditch the jargon.
But I take them up close to language, too – we talk about Shakespeare! We talk
about noticing the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin inside English, about saying
things as simply as possible. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">When it comes to poetry, I’ve
always been more interested in language as substance, as sound and form, rather
than any idea of language as a transparent, purely utilitarian medium. I like listening
to the way language pushes back when we want it to say something. It says less
than we want it to, and it says more than we want it to. I’m interested in the “more”.
Like many poets, I love what Wallace Stevens said: “There is a sense in sounds
beyond their meaning”. Language is incredibly musical. It’s a whole orchestra. Some
poetry sticks to just one instrument – the speaking voice, the narrator. I like
poetry that tries out lots of instruments. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">In
‘The Otorhinolaryngologist’, a light in the speaker’s mouth gives them a
god-like perspective, before they’re pushed into the ‘hollow places’ of the
street – does poetry give you a scope to move between the sublime and the
mundane to a certain extent?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">The light-in-the-mouth thing
actually happened, in the sense that I went to this old-fashioned specialist
who stuck a light bulb in my mouth that apparently illuminated my sinuses. It
was a bizarre experience, because the light was coming out of my head. It felt
like knowledge, and it felt like delusion, so I put the two together in the
poem (Perhaps knowledge is always a kind of delusion.) It’s partly a poem about
imagination. Imagination has to cope with the mundane, too – I think that shuttling
between imagination and reality is one of the engines of poetry.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">Echo,
the Greek nymph, is a recurring character in the book – walking through poems
named after Old Testament characters. What made you want to write these
characters from ancient literature into your new poems?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">It’s all a bit accidental and
obsessive so I think the only true explanation is in the poems themselves. But
this is how it happened: I started a sequence based on the radio alphabet
(Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc) because I like the words. When I got to the E word,
Echo, I started reading about the Echo myth. Echo is condemned to repeat the
last words of what others say. And then she falls in love with Narcissus, who
as we all know was in love with himself, so that wasn’t going anywhere. She
wastes away till all that is left is her bones and then just her voice. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">What was it that drew me to the
Echo myth? Perhaps I thought I could use Echo to evoke the sense that something
extremely important is missing from your life but you don’t quite know what it
is (I tend to have this feeling most of the time, in spades). As a poet, it’s
easy, too, to have a sense that you’re condemned to repeat what others have
said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">Then I started another sequence,
based on the books of the Old Testament. Echo wanted to be part of that, too. I’m
not a believer, but I’m intrigued by the ancient weirdness of the Old Testament
stories, so full of loss and exile. Perhaps I’m interested in how missingness
is part of being human. Also, the Old Testament is at the root of both Judaism
and Christianity – and living in Europe, you can’t get away from that. The
Holocaust never went away. But that’s another story.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">You’ve
lived in Paris for a number of years now. Has becoming fluent in another
language affected the way you write in your native English? And has French
poetry had any influence on your own poetry?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">France has a strong myth of
integration – the idea that if you do things right, you too can become French.
(“How’s your integration coming along?” my wife’s great-grandmother used to ask
me.) Whereas the experience of migration is more often one of realising how
much you have been formed by the place you came from – and the language you
came from. So being in France has pushed me deeper into English, paradoxically.
</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">As for the influence of French
poetry, I just don’t know. I like poets such as Jacques Roubaud and Jacques
Jouet who can shift from being playful to being serious (and back again). But much
French poetry is just deadly serious, even fatally so. It’s terribly abstract and
philosophical – whereas the great precursor for much New Zealand poetry is
William Carlos Williams, who wrote “No ideas but in things.” I love the
thinginess of New Zealand poetry.</span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">I like John Ashbery’s response to
the same question (he lived in Paris for 10 years – and the scene he describes
hasn’t changed): </span></div>
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<span lang="mi-NZ" style="font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro"; mso-ansi-language: #0481;">“I
found my poetry being more influenced by the sight of clear water flowing in
the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags
moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was learning to read
at the time.”</span></div>
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<br />
<i>Fits and Starts</i> by Andrew Johnston is available from good bookshops and through our <a href="http://vup.victoria.ac.nz/">online bookstore now</a>.<br />
p/b, $25.<br />
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