Kevin Ireland, Gentleman Poet

A tribute by Johanna Emeney

 

The death of Kevin Ireland OBE on 19 May 2023, just two months short of his 90^th birthday, is a deep loss. Kevin was a talented and prolific author, whose legacy of poetry collections, memoirs, short stories and novels is testament to his great skill as a creative, and to his dedication to the writing life. That he was able, in his late eighties, to write and perform his poetry so energetically, and that he was visible in his much-loved Devonport community until the last few months, will have made his death a terrible shock for many.

It seems almost impossible that we will not hear from him again. Kevin Ireland will be greatly missed, both as one of Aotearoa’s literary icons, and as a person who took a genuine interest in helping and encouraging emerging authors. What follows is a personal tribute to Kevin, based on one grateful recipient’s experience of his kindness and mentorship.

 

 

Chris Cole Catley organised a meeting between me and Kevin Ireland one afternoon in 2009. She had been promising to introduce me to one of my poetry heroes for some time, but I hadn’t expected something quite so impromptu. Ten minutes earlier, she had rung to tell him she was bringing her ‘new young poet’ over for a cup of coffee. Chris used to do a lot of telling. There was never much advance warning.

When his front door opened, Chris gave Kevin a quick kiss on the cheek, and then she started walking back to her car. ‘I’m just going to pick up a few things. You two enjoy!’ she called. I burned with embarrassment, and I could see that Kevin, too, was feeling a tad uncomfortable with the situation; he stood at the open door, staring at Chris’s back.

We muddled through the first five minutes, stumbling around shyly for things to talk about while Kevin tried to locate milk and sugar (he took his coffee black), and then, thank goodness, we were off, England and animals filling half an hour before Chris returned with her shopping.

After this initial meeting, Kevin offered to go through the whole manuscript that I had submitted to Cape Catley; he worked with me on it for months. He gave the speech at my launch. I still have no idea why he did all this other than his innate generosity and kindness. Kevin blessed other fledgling writers in this way. In fact, when talking with his wife, Janet Wilson, the week after Kevin died, I remarked that there must be many people who felt as I did — so grateful to her late husband for his faith and mentorship. Janet replied, ‘Well, that’s what he did for me, too. He gave me confidence in myself’.

 

 

If you ever saw Kevin at a double-launch, where his book was being celebrated alongside that of another poet, you may have noticed how he was never one to steal the spotlight; he frequently made more of the other book, or praised and bantered with his colleague on stage, making the event a real two-hander. I used to love going to such events — not just to hear Kevin read, which he did consummately, but also to observe a master class in how to treat others. Every card I sent him over the years was addressed to Kevin Ireland, Gentleman Poet, because that was how I perceived him, equally the brilliant poet and the perfect gentleman.

Kevin made the people he liked feel seen and special, whether it was by sending a copy of his newest collection pre-launch or simply by writing something lovely in response to an email. However, the fact that Kevin was, at heart, a self-effacing person made anyone harbouring a large ego or an overweening ambition seem strange and amusing to him. Self-aggrandisement was anathema to Kevin, and he had some wonderful jokes and asides about the literary circle’s arroganti. That’s not to say he was mean; his comments were simply apt, witty, and, often, wonderfully well timed. He could also direct his sense of humour mercilessly on himself, particularly as age made for the odd infirmity. I recall once talking with him on the phone after he had fallen down outside New World in Devonport. I asked him if anyone had helped him up. ‘No,’ he said, ‘But a couple of schoolgirls stopped to have a good laugh. Silly old fool.’ I was so upset by this. One of our taonga poets on the ground, and kids laughing? No one helping him up? There was no indignation to Kevin’s response; he was simply annoyed at his body for starting to betray him.

From his mid-70s, Kevin used the body’s failings as fodder for his poetry. Alongside love, friendship, poetry, fishing and dogs, health and aging were right up there as key Ireland themes. What I think is so admirable in Kevin’s writing is possibly what was so admirable in Kevin the man: the poems are so unassuming and yet so deeply layered. With the exception of one or two intentionally hefty works like ‘A Fine Morning at Passchendaele’ written in 2017 for the 100th Anniversary of the eponymous battle, Kevin’s poems are often talky, confiding; they have the laid-back air of riffing on a theme at a dinner party. It is only when you stop to study the metre, the turn of the lines, the nuanced phrasing, that you can appreciate the care with which they have been crafted. There is also a beautiful spirit to the poems — most usually a golden optimism, and sometimes an insouciant rebelliousness.

In his first memoir Under the Bridge & Over the Moon (Vintage, 1998), Kevin sums up his attitude to non-conformity:

 

The truly valuable side to non-conformity is that it is as irresistible as the grass that has the power to crack a concrete pathway. It splits the dull appearance of our best efforts to crush and conceal the anarchic aspects of our humanity. Yet its reward is seldom more than the private satisfaction of knowing that it can be a privilege to fill your mind with free thought, even at the risk of being in the wrong yet again — though I suppose it’s always a consolation to believe you’re wrong for the right reasons.

 

Kevin’s views on things always appeared to me to be liberal, and for the underdog. He didn’t like unfairness, and he despised a bully. Poems about Kevin’s childhood are few, but they are among the most poignant of his oeuvre because they describe it as ‘an experience/to be endured then never talked about’ — never talked about that is except with his younger brother Anthony who predeceased him in 2013 (‘Family Types’, Shape of the Heart, Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2020). In ‘Family Types’ Kevin describes the two brothers sitting in Anthony’s shearing shed, having one of these conversations:

 

just the two of us, sharing a sad joke
or recollection of unkindness we’d carry
with us to the grave. The subjects
that we could mention only when alone

seemed slight, but each held poison
we had learnt to deal with safely.
You get to handle lethal instabilities
and deadly menaces in families.

 

His memoir gives many insights into the violence and unhappiness of Kevin’s youth, but what stands out is the resilience of the little boy. Kevin’s resilience was a constant until his 89th and last year. I phoned him on the way to a poetry reading in Devonport, in December 2022. I thought I might pick him up on the way and we could go together and watch. For once, I didn’t get an ebullient reply. Instead, Kevin was rather flat. He was recovering from a recent surgery, and he didn’t feel up to much of anything. He told me he was getting fed up with getting older and the toll it was taking on his body. Then, he rallied. ‘Don’t stop asking,’ he said. ‘Absolutely lovely of you to ask.’

 

 

 

 

‘The spaceship of our ancestors’ 

Gina Cole on writing Pasifikafuturism and discovering a ‘galaxy of islands’

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I have always been a science fiction nerd, largely due to the steady diet of Hollywood science fiction programmes I grew up watching on television in the 1970s: Star Trek, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, I Dream of Jeannie, Get Smart, Dr Who. Some of these productions have been rebooted or updated for new audiences, which speaks to the enduring appeal of the genre. I have loved science fiction ever since.

However, what those Hollywood productions had in common was a lack of representation of any people of colour – except for one show, Star Trek. Star Trek was influential for me because of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura. Lieutenant Uhura – a Swahili name – was a communications officer on the starship Enterprise, and she was in constant dialogue with Captain Kirk. It wasn’t unusual for me to see a black woman and a white man in conversation because my mother is Fijian and my father is Pākehā. But Lieutenant Uhura was the only black woman on television or anywhere else in cultural production in 1970s Aotearoa that I was aware of as a young person.

There were also very few science fiction novels written by Pacific writers. This remains the case today. I wanted that to change. So when I enrolled to do a PhD in creative writing at Massey University, I decided to write about science fiction and specifically science fiction set in space, featuring Pacific characters and Pacific culture, for a Pasifika readership and anyone else interested in science fiction written from a Pacific Ocean point of view. This is what I call Pasifikafuturism.

The Pacific Ocean is a vast body of water covering one-third of the Earth’s surface. Sometimes it’s called the blue continent, the biggest continent on Earth.

 

 

The colonial view of the Pacific was that of ‘islands in a far-flung sea’, a perspective which suggests smallness and isolation, helplessness and solitude. From an Indigenous perspective, as Tongan academic Epeli Hau’ofa wrote in an influential 1993 essay, it is ‘a sea of islands’. This suggests a vast expansive region and a sense of connection. Indigenous Pacific peoples share an interconnected web of relationships and cultures through our common geographic location in the Pacific. The title of Hau’ofa’s selected works, published in 2008, is We Are the Ocean. The sea is our highway, a fluid biotic mass that connects us.

 

 

Although Indigenous Pacific peoples do not have a pan-Pacific identity we do share many cultural practices, including an ancestral culture of waka building and a navigational culture of ‘wayfinding’ or celestial navigation. The waka is an Indigenous Pacific technology shaped by the Pacific Ocean environment, and a container of cultural knowledge, equalling any Western model of physics. Waka builder and master navigator Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr defines wayfinding as ‘the ability to travel across thousands of miles of ocean safely and efficiently, using nothing but the ancestral knowledge of the past and the clues provided by nature to find land far below the distant horizon’.1

Wayfinding requires a navigator to sit in the ‘eternal present’2, taking stock of the natural environment around them to navigate to their destination. Wayfinding techniques are cultural knowledge that come from connection and relationship with the environment that enabled my ancestors to navigate across huge Pacific Ocean expanses hundreds of years ago.

The waka is a symbol of the common origins and common ancestry of Pacific people. Writer Herb Kane calls the waka ‘the spaceship of our ancestors, because with it, they made explorations that were, in the context of their culture, just as staggering as our effort to go to the moon and other planets today.’ 3 The ancient knowledge of waka building and wayfinding navigation was nearly lost due to the incursions of the colonial project into Pacific culture.

But these cultural practices have endured. In 1976 Hokule’a, a double-hulled ocean-going waka, sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti and back following customary ocean pathways without the aid of modern instrumentation. Barclay-Kerr notes that Hokule’a’s inaugural voyage marked ‘the first step in the reawakening of a dying Pacific practise.’4

 

 

This brings me to the Pacific concept of the ‘vā’. Samoan writer Albert Wendt defines the vā as the ‘space between, the betweenness, not empty space that separates, but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.’5 Accordingly, vā can denote the space between two people or two islands or two planets. In Pasifika culture it is not empty space. It is a space of connection, and it needs to be nurtured and cared for.

The re-emergence of our ancestral practice of wayfinding navigation is a present-day expression of the persistence, strength and evolution of Indigenous Pacific culture.

Pasifika cultural practices like this and waka building, together with the Pasifika perspective of the vast Pacific Ocean as a ‘sea of islands’, and the concept of the vā or the space between, underpin my formulation of Pasifikafuturism.

In writing my novel Na Viro, a work I describe as Pasifikafuturist fiction, I take these cultural practices and principles up into space – into ‘a sky of islands’ or a ‘galaxy of islands’ or even a ‘universe of islands’. Interstellar space is a future setting for our Pacific cultural practice of wayfinding navigation, a way of travelling through space, and a model for leadership. I seek to subvert colonial conceptions of Indigenous Pacific culture in both form and content, to enact Indigenous knowledge and to re-enlist an Indigenous Pacific imagining of the future through story.

 

 

The writing and publication of Pasifikafuturism was a way for me to explore anti-colonial mindscapes which embody the spirit of struggle and survival for Indigenous peoples in the Pacific. The novel’s title, Na Viro, is Fijian for ‘whirlpool’. It’s a science fiction fantasy about a young Fijian Tongan Majuran woman named Tia Grom-Eddy who leaves her home on Namu Island in the Pacific to join a spaceship captained by her mother, Dani. Tia travels into space to rescue her sister from a whirlpool. A central narrative thread running through the novel is the metaphorical idea that there is an ocean in space and a galaxy in the ocean.  The Pasifika science of wayfinding navigation can be transferred from an oceanic setting to a cosmic one as a means of navigating both realms: both are connected in the vā.

The term Pasifikafuturism was inspired by my research into Afrofuturism, which includes science fiction written by African American writers, and Indigenous Futurism which includes science fiction written by First Nations peoples in North America. I say ‘includes’ because these are cultural movements that bridge all the arts – not just literature but also design, fashion, dance, fine art and music. The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms6 describes these as representations of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and ethnic histories that disrupt the ‘imperial gaze’.

Similarly, Pasifikafuturism recognises – in artistic form – a Pacific Ocean point of view on technology, creative ideas about the future, and science fiction. This viewpoint provides a tool kit to recover Indigenous histories that may have been lost in the colonial project and to create counter futures. It is anchored in our relationship with the Pacific Ocean and our cultural practices. Our ancestors used the sun the moon, the stars and signs in the Pacific Ocean environment – as well as waves, currents, clouds, winds and birds – to navigate across the sea. Wayfinding provides a methodology for envisioning the future in imaginative, transformative and positive expressions of Pacific peoples in science fiction.

 

 

 

Footnotes:

1 Barclay-Kerr, Hoturoa. ‘From Myth and Legend to Reality: Voyages of Rediscovery and Knowledge’. Global South Ethnographies, edited by Elke emerald et al., Sense, 2016.

2 P.24, Spiller, Chellie et al. Wayfinding Leadership: Ground-Breaking Wisdom for Developing Leaders. Huia, 2015.

3 Kane, Herb. ‘Wayfinders a Pacific Odyssey: Ask the Expert Herb Kane.’ www.pbs.org/wayfinders/ask_kane.html.

4 Ibid

5 Refiti, Albert. ‘Making Spaces: Polynesian Architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand’. The Pacific Dimension of Contemporary New Zealand Arts, edited by Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimano Pererira, Te Papa Press, 2002.

6 Edited By Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Routledge 2024

 

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Feature header image: Fijian drua SEMA MAKAWA, a double-hulled war canoe. Courtesy of the New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui Te Ananui a Tangaroa, 1993.367.1

Second-Best Sellers

Catherine Robertson on commercial fiction.

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The question I’m asked after, ‘What kind of books do you write?¹’ is ‘What is commercial fiction?’ If I reply that it’s pretty much everything that isn’t literary fiction, that only leaves people more confused. I can tell because the next question they ask is, ‘What is literary fiction?’ Or, more often, they start moving away towards the snacks.

Let’s imagine I’m not at a party losing the battle for attention to miniature sausage rolls. What is a useful definition of commercial fiction? How does it differ from literary fiction? Do these distinctions even matter?

The commercial fiction category is no help because it’s far too broad. It overlaps at one end with genre or mass-market fiction – crime, romance, sci-fi and fantasy – and at the other with literary fiction. In between, it contains women’s fiction, historical fiction and that imaginative catch-all for the rest, general fiction. Everything including the kitchen sink, in other words.

I could say that what all these books have in common is that they’re expected to sell well. But then I’m ignoring a truth summed up by a cartoon I once saw: it showed a publishing house team in a strategy meeting. One of the team is saying, ‘I’ve got it! From now on, let’s only publish bestsellers!’

The truth is there’s an alchemy around bestseller-dom that’s as unfathomable as the QI scoring system. Mediocre books become bestsellers. Truly terrible books become bestsellers. Books published years ago leap back into the charts thanks to Tiktok, Netflix and/or Elizabeth Gilbert. Weird experimental books win big literary prizes and become bestsellers that no one reads. And, of course, brilliantly written books, books by previously successful authors, and books that secure massive advances through fierce publisher bidding wars sink like stones. Just because we label a book commercial doesn’t mean it will be. Again, unhelpful.

I think we get warmer when we look at how the books are written. UK literary agent Ella Kahn, says, ‘Commercial fiction (whatever the genre) tends to be more driven by plot and character development, and literary fiction by stylistic or thematic concerns … A high quality of prose is important for both categories, and thematic explorations and plotting can be just as complex in either. But in commercial fiction that quality of writing might also be defined by a certain degree of “readability” or “accessibility” in the style that perhaps makes it more instantly engaging.’

I’d argue that all writers, unless they’re hobbyists or egomaniacs, want readers to be engaged. The most important distinction then, I believe, has to be about intent. What kind of experience does a writer intend their readers to have? How do they want their readers to engage?

 

   

 

John Updike’s first rule for constructive criticism is: ‘Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.’² I’ve seen people critique Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood for falling short as a thriller. Is it meant to be a thriller? Joanna Trollope was accused of pretending to be more literary than she is, when she’d probably agree with Terry Pratchett that his major service to literature was never to try to write any. The only fair way to judge a book is to first understand the author’s intent.

Back to my earlier question: do these distinctions even matter? They do to me and my fellow commercial fiction authors because New Zealand doesn’t value us. As a nation, we seem to be hung up on the binary of perceived quality: literary fiction is by and for intelligent people, while commercial fiction is by and for cabbages, or – as Lucy Ellmann said about Agatha Christie novels – people with bad head colds. Our major book awards have never, until this year, included commercial fiction. Writers of literary fiction are most likely to receive arts grants, and most likely to be invited to national and overseas literary festivals. I’ve been invited to festivals more often as a session chair than I have as an author.

Obviously, I have a bug up my arse about this. My bug is not that we’re missing out on all these opportunities, but that we’re missing out on readers. The impression given is that our commercial fiction books are Not Very Good, when the message we ought to be giving is that pleasure can be found in a variety of reading experiences.

Here’s an example: I read Danielle Hawkins’ When It All Went to Custard and lost myself for an afternoon in an entertaining story of a woman struggling with mid-life issues, and I read Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and focused keenly for three weeks on a 1000-page non-stop internal monologue of a woman struggling with mid-life issues. The two reading experiences were diametrically opposed. But both books were smart and funny, and I enjoyed them immensely. Five stars each.³

Unless we’re very rigid in our habits, we vary our other experiences all the time. Take food: we can admire the vision and artistry of a Michelin-starred chef, and we can also appreciate the perfect simplicity of a few great ingredients combined, as in a caprese salad. Or TV: sometimes we’re up for the entire back catalogue of Ingmar Bergman and other times, we want to binge old episodes of Vera. We don’t believe we’re downgrading by choosing the latter options; we’re tailoring our experience to our mood. Why can’t we view books the same way? Why can’t we read each book on its own terms, as Updike advises, with an understanding of the experience it aims to deliver?

It doesn’t help that commercial fiction is marketed in such an imitative way. Walk into any bookshop and note the strikingly similar covers. Same font, same colours, same woman walking away, same man in silhouette beside a single streetlight. This is a strategy to attract readers: if you liked that, then we hope you’ll like this other book with the bright bold Instagram-friendly pattern on it.

 

     

 

What is does is lump together authors with entirely different styles, blurring any sense of each author’s personality, and creating disappointment when a promise of a certain experience is not fulfilled. (Yes, this also happens with literary fiction, but a lot of New Zealand literary fiction is published by smaller presses who like to create more bespoke covers for their authors. Fight me.)

What will it take to get New Zealand readers to value New Zealand-penned commercial fiction? Reese Witherspoon optioning our screen rights? A commercial fiction awards? Creative NZ issuing an official announcement that we do not suck?

 

     

The different faces of the 2020 bestseller by NZ writer Rose Carlyle.

 

It helps that Michael Bennett’s crime novel, Better the Blood, was a finalist for the big Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards. It helps that Allen & Unwin have launched an annual prize for commercial fiction manuscripts, won last year by Josie Shapiro for her debut Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts. It helps that Hachette has launched a whole new commercial fiction imprint, Moa. It helps that some bookshops actively promote our work. It helps that, despite persistent rumours, our major creative writing schools do accept authors of commercial and genre fiction.

On my bedside table right now, I have Anne Tiernan’s The Last Days of Joy, a battered Terry Pratchett, and The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. Each of them will provide a distinctly different reading experience. What would help most is more readers willing to mix things up. I promise that your lives will be the richer for it.⁴

 

    

 

 

1. Before that, they ask, ‘Have I heard of you?’

2. We can forgive the ‘him’ because Updike was talking about himself; his rules were written out of personal exasperation.

3. Yes, I did read the whole of Ducks, and when I next have a spare three weeks, I’ll read it again.

4. I can’t promise you’ll enjoy every book. The 1-star Amazon review of James Joyce’s Ulysses was pretty fair when it said, ‘This is a tough book to read unless you understand several languages and are on LSD.’

 

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Catherine Robertson is a commercial fiction author and co-owner of Good Books, an independent bookshop in Te Aro, Wellington. In 2020, she was the CNZ/International Institute of Modern Letters Writer in Residence. Catherine is Chair of the Hawke’s Bay Readers & Writers Trust and on the board of Verb Wellington. Catherine’s latest novel is Spellbound (Penguin Random House, 2021).

Ockham NZ Book Awards 2023: Spreading the Wealth

Like the Auckland Writers Festival, the Ockham NZ Book Awards returned to the Aotea Centre this week, after last year’s excursion to the more intimate Q Theatre. Also back: musicians on the stage, Jack Tame at the MC podium, the big harakeke flower display, and some writers reading for longer than their allotted four minutes. Still, the awards show was pacy and the audience lively, and from the mihi by Tui Hawke and Blackie Tohiariki to a number of the shortlisted books and the majority of speeches ­– including from the Hon. Willow-Jean Prime, Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage – the use of te reo Māori reminded us of where these awards take place and the unique culture they celebrate. The evening’s final speaker, Ockham Residential’s Mark Todd, called for a change next year: we should be saying the Ockham Aotearoa NZ Book Awards, he said, and the enthusiastic crowd seemed to agree.

There are four genre categories in the book awards, and the biggest and broadest of them all is the General Non-Fiction category. It’s depressing that although high-quality local nonfiction books are thriving in New Zealand, this award has had no sponsor for its $12,000 prize since 2020, when the Royal Society Te Apārangi withdrew its support. There are annual calls for the category to split – there were six nonfiction categories in the Montana NZ Book Awards days – but none of these are backed by sponsors willing to put money on the table. The greatest clamour these days is not for a return to sub-categories like ‘Reference and Anthology’ but for a separate category for memoirs and collections of personal essays, even though these books form one of the smallest groupings of entries within the category.

This year’s longlist and shortlist will do nothing to appease memoir-and-essay fans, especially as books by Fiona Kidman, Gaylene Preston and Kate Camp didn’t survive the longlist cull, and writers like Mohamed Hassan and Jan Kemp didn’t even make it that far. In their place was one memoir, Noelle McCarthy’s bestselling Grand (Penguin); an investigation into a hidden history, Paul Diamond’s Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay (Massey University Press); a portrait of Northland tupuna, A Fire in the Belly of Hineāmaru by Melinda Webber and Te Kapua O’Connor (Auckland University Press); and the massive doorstop of landmark scholarship that is The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books).

 

 

The judges in this category were columnist Anna Rawhiti-Connell, scholar Alison Jones, who has won this prize for her own memoir, and historian Te Maire Tau. Both Fletcher and McCarthy are debut writers, and the judges broke with tradition by awarding each a prize: Fletcher the main award, and McCarthy the E.H. McCormick Prize for best first book. When his name was called, Fletcher looked stunned, but the judges’ comments suggest why his book won: it ‘sheds new light’ on the Treaty’s implications ‘and contributes fresh thinking to what remains a very live conversation’.

 

 

The decision to spread the wealth with the popular McCarthy suggests this year’s judges were skittish after the howls of outrage last year when Charlotte Grimshaw didn’t win this category with her memoir The Mirror Book. The winner then was Vincent O’Malley’s Voices from the New Zealand Wars / He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, which means this is the second year in a row that Bridget Williams Books has published the nonfiction winner.

Though controversies over the poetry list won’t excite most in the New Zealand media, this was an unusual year for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, judged by three poets – Diane Brown, Serie Barford and Gregory Kan. Five of the eight longlisted books were debut collections. Missing from the list entirely were Elizabeth Smither and Robert Sullivan, both of whom had new books in 2022, and when the four finalists were announced, the well-reviewed and more established longlisted names – Janet Charman, Chris Tse – were gone. Still standing were, essentially, four emerging poets.

Two are debut writers: Khadro Mohamed and Joanna Cho, the latter dressed for the event in a vivid blue hanbok and a pair of white gomusin shoes. Anahera Gildea’s shortlisted collection was her first full-length poetry collection; Alice Te Punga Somerville is the author of a scholarly book and a long-form essay, but her shortlisted collection was her first book of poetry. That book, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised (Auckland University Press), won the award, collected by her nephew Matiu on Te Punga Somerville’s behalf: she now lives in Canada. ‘Always Italicise shines for its finely crafted, poetically fluent and witty explorations of racism, colonisation, class, language and relationships,’ said the judges.

 

 

Khadro Mohamed, winner of the Jessie McKay Best First Book of Poetry award, was also out of the country last night, missing the awards. Her collection We’re All Made of Lightning was published by Tender Press, formerly known as We Are Babies Press. This is the second year in a row they’ve published the poetry debut of the year: last year’s winner was Nicole Titihuia Hawkins and her book Whai. (In other name-related news, Tender Press is distributed by the smartly named Expensive Hobby.)

 

 

Twenty-five-year-old Mohamed is the first African New Zealander to ever win the Jessie McKay – a prize first awarded in 1945. Both Mohamed and Cho are diasporic writers; Mohamed was born in Somalia and Cho in South Korea. Gildea and Te Punga Somerville are both Māori writers and both attached to universities: Gildea is a PhD student at Te Waka Herenga (Victoria University of Wellington), and Te Punga Somerville is a professor at the University of British Columbia. Incredibly, she is the first Māori writer to win the main poetry award since Hone Tuwhare in 2002, and in the past two decades only four Māori poets have won the best first book award: Hawkins, Tayi Tibble, Marty Smith and Kay McKenzie Cooke..

The Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction is typically a hard category to call, with so many strong contenders. It was surprising that Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art edited by Nigel Borell (Penguin Random House New Zealand / Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) didn’t make the shortlist; surprising, too, perhaps, that Robin White: Something is Happening Here, edited by Sarah Farrar, Jill Trevelyan and Nina Tonga (Te Papa Press / Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), didn’t win the category.

 

 

The judging panel this year was historian Jared Davidson, curator Anna-Marie White, and TV producer Taualeo’o Stephen Stehlin, and both the awards they handed out leaned in a more populist direction. The appealing Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press) won the main prize. ‘The cover alone is one of the best of the year,’ said the judges’ citation, describing the book ‘a fantastic example of scholarship, creativity and craft’. In his speech Bollinger thanked some of photographers featured in the book, including John Miller, Max Oettli and Ans Westra. A very surprised by Christall Lowe, author of Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from my Family Table (Bateman Books) – the ‘Edmonds cookbook for our time’ – won the Judith Binney Prize for best first book.

 

 

The final award of the evening was fiction, with its massive $64,000 prize. The reason for the large sum is there in the name – the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Jann Medlicott MNZM was a retired radiologist, philanthropist and avid reader of New Zealand fiction, and the money she endowed was intended to support and promote fiction specifically. Last May, she was on stage at the Q Theatre to present the ‘acorn’ in person. She died three months later.

Every year there’s grumbling about lack of equity between the awards and their prize money, and suggestions that the Medlicott funds be spread across all four categories, but this is not possible: the donation had clear terms, and the money she left can’t be shared or re-directed. Our book awards need more generous donors like Medlicott, with a passion for books and writers.

This year’s judges were novelist and past winner Stephanie Johnson, editor John Huria and bookseller Gemma Morrison, and they drew up a longlist with some surprise inclusions – like the dystopian fantasy Chevalier & Gawayn: The Ballad of the Dreamer by the late Phillip Mann (Quentin Wilson Publishing) ­– and disappointing exclusions, like Colleen Maria Lenihan’s debut story collection Kōhine (Huia) and Ruth Bayley’s outstanding World War II novel Barefoot (Eden Street Press). The finalists’ list was even more controversial, with past winners Lloyd Jones and Vincent O’Sullivan out, and three ‘genre’ novels rubbing shoulders with another past winner, Catherine Chidgey.

Two of these outliers were historical novels: the bestselling Kāwai: For Such a Time as This (Bateman), a first venture into fiction by historian Monty Soutar; and Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant (Cuba Press) by Cristina Sanders, based on the true story of a nineteenth-century maritime disaster and the young woman who managed to survive. A crime novel by screenwriter Michael Bennett, Better the Blood (Simon & Schuster), was the most surprising inclusion of all: novels about detectives on the trail of a serial killer may shine at the Ngaio Marsh Awards but usually not at the Ockhams or its various past iterations. (All four writers discussed their novels in a round table published here earlier this month.)

 

 

Catherine Chidgey’s acclaimed The Axeman’s Carnival (Te Herenga Waka University Press) was the popular winner of this year’s prize: she previously won in 2017 for The Wish Child, so now has a second lurid acorn to add to her collection. Winner of the Hubert Church Award for best first book of fiction was Anthony Lapwood for his ‘unfailingly inventive’ debut story collection Home Theatre, also published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Like Soutar and Bennett, Lapwood is a Māori writer, the third in four years to win the Hubert Church – following Rebecca K. Reilly in 2022 and Becky Manawatu in 2020. He’s also the first male Māori writer to win any kind of fiction award since Alan Duff in 1997, for What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

 

 

That three Māori men were longlisted in the fiction category this year is a big deal, overlooked by most media. Is this just an unusual year or a hint of a new wave forming? What’s needed, still, is fiction for adults written in te reo, not simply translated. The Mūrau o te Tuhi / Māori Language Award awaits its first fiction recipient. It’ll happen, hopefully sooner rather than later. In 2014 every single winner at the Book Awards was a Pākehā writer apart from debut poet Marty Smith. Times change, and so do our publishers, our books and our awards.

 

 

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Tom Moody is an American writer and editor living in Auckland.

 

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards: Fiction Round Table 2023

This year’s finalists for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction are novelists Michael Bennett (Better the Blood); Catherine Chidgey (The Axeman’s Carnival); Cristina Sanders (Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant); and Monty Soutar (Kāwai: For Such a Time as This).

The writers talked via Google doc through the month of April 2023, with questions from Paula Morris.

The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards take place at the Aotea Centre in Auckland on Wednesday 17 May. 

 

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Paula: In New Zealand, readers buy more local nonfiction than fiction – and yet some of us keep writing novels. Why did you write your novel?

Cristina: I think most of the novelists I know will say they write because they don’t have any choice. It’s a compulsion, a hard-wired obsession born of the way we make sense of the world through story. I write novels because fiction is the way I explain truth. For me, understanding is not so much about empirical details but what they add up to. There are few historical facts known about Mrs Jewell, and yet we can recognise the hero she must have been by imagining a story around her.

But the fiction/non-fiction debate is an interesting one, and there is a lovely grey area between the two where most learning happens. Whether you prefer to learn about life from textbooks (written to an agenda with inevitable cultural bias and potentially dodgy source data) or a well-researched fiction (solidly based in time and place with invented dialogue) is personal preference. There is truth and invention in both. Mrs Jewell’s story could be written as nonfiction or a novel. I’ve tried to put her in that grey area between.

Catherine: Kia ora koutou – so lovely to be in your company. I wrote my novel because I had been carrying that title around since 2008 and desperately needed a book to attach it to! Also, as for Cristina, fiction is a compulsion for me…I don’t think I’m much good for anything else. When an idea hits me and I know this is the book I’ll write next, I feel driven to get that story out of me and onto the page; there’s an inner restlessness that is only resolved by writing and finishing the book. I love the thrill of slipping inside a character and living as someone else for the length of a novel…in the case of The Axeman’s Carnival, I got to live as a bird. Why would anyone NOT want that kind of experience?

Monty: Wow, I didn’t know that, Paula – that local non-fiction is more popular than New Zealand fiction in this country. One of the reasons I switched to fiction was to reach a greater audience. I hope I won’t be disappointed. As to why I wrote the novel, most people wouldn’t believe me if I was totally honest. One reason is: I just think we don’t know enough about our own New Zealand history. And that there aren’t enough varied perspectives on that history. Historians bring bias when they write on a topic, whether they are aware of it or not, by virtue of their gender, ethnicity, education, upbringing, how much access they have to written and oral sources and so on, so that no two people produce the same perspective of a past event/s. I wanted to give a Maori perspective (not ‘the’ Maori perspective) of a part of our country’s history and to reach as great an audience as I could. I felt that the novel would give me more freedom to do that.

I’m thoroughly enjoying the challenge and I suspect enjoyment is part of this idea of compulsion mentioned by Cristina and Catherine. Creating something out of what was first just an idea, and seeing it come to fruition is very rewarding.

Michael: I’m loving all your answers to why you write novels. I came to prose from my other world: filmmaking. I wrote a nonfiction book, In Dark Places, about my friend Teina Pora, alongside making a documentary and a feature film about his story. I wrote the book because in 90 minutes of screentime there was only so much I could say about the brutal obscenity of what the justice system did to Teina. Writing the book, I discovered a couple of things. With my other job, a screenplay is a dissolving suture; it holds everything together, then it completely disappears. I am passionate about how a sentence reads, but in two decades of screenwriting, no audience member had actually read a single sentence I wrote. I LOVE that with a book, people actually read the stuff I write!

I also discovered that nonfiction is a hellish tightrope. I was talking about actual human beings who hurt and cry and have been deeply damaged, and on the other hand I was exploring the questionable actions of cops and lawyers and judges who might get fiery and litigious if I represented them wrongly. The legal advice I received on one particular chapter for the nonfiction book was that while everything in the chapter was true, if I included it, I would almost certainly lose my house in the ensuing litigation. With fiction you explore the big truths by making up things that never happened; it’s way more free, and it’s way better on the blood pressure than forever fact-checking and living in fear of being sued!

 

     

 

Paula: Writing fiction offers tightropes of its own: what were the challenges for you all while conceiving and working on your novels?

Catherine: How fascinating, Michael…I think I’ll stick with fiction’s freedoms! Although I do become obsessed with my research, and the need to get my facts straight. One of the main challenges for me was writing convincingly as a magpie (and yes, I know how absurd that sounds, even as I type it). Obviously, Tama’s experience of the world – and of the human world in particular – is very limited, so at the start of the book I wanted him to use expressions drawn from that limited experience. For instance, he describes the house where farmers Marnie and Rob live as ‘yolk-yellow’; he says Rob has ‘riverstone eyes’. Later, as he learns more, his vocabulary broadens – so when he is back in the wild and is learning to fly, having encountered windows in the farmhouse as well as Marnie’s hands, he says that ‘hands of glass’ seem to hold him aloft.

I was also very conscious of needing to get the details of high-country farming life correct. To that end, I was lucky enough to be able to talk to several high-country farmers from Central Otago, and I also picked the brains of my husband, Alan, who grew up on a high-country sheep station. Some of Rob’s childhood reminiscences are lifted from Alan’s childhood (picking mint for pocket money; shooting at the superphosphate man with a toy gun; etc). I was also able to read his late mother’s diaries from that time, which were a huge help in terms of the rhythms of the farming year and the small daily details that bring it to life.

Finally, I spoke to a long-time woodchopping commentator in order to get the scene at the Axeman’s Carnival right.

Cristina: Michael, you say ‘With fiction you explore the big truths by making up things that never happened’. As a historical fiction writer I had to laugh. I’m not going to get sued or lose my house for getting things wrong, but the descendants will come knocking. (Some already have – Jewell, Sanguily and Teer descendants – so far it’s all good.) Also with any fiction writing, and you’ll all know this, there is that obsession to get details right so your readers trust you. Catherine left me believing she probably was a magpie in a previous life and I’ll be watching for the falling feathers when we meet.

So, yes, research was the biggest challenge for me. There were two parts to it. Firstly, the evidential: which of the shipwrecked men had shoes? Dysentery or scurvy giving them the runs? How would they have made soap? How slowly does one die of copper poisoning? Seals or sea lions? Cathead or catshead? Plus (and it’s a biggie) where’s the damn wreck? And secondly, the psychological: what did ‘truth’ mean in the 1860s? How did class, sex, feminism, religion, maritime culture look in 1866? Group dynamics, PTSD, survivors, guilt: what would a woman have to do to survive in that environment for eighteen months?

Monty: Sorry folks, been missing in action for a while. Mo taku he. It feels like I left the dinner table just as the appetisers were being  served. My father (90 this year) was admitted to hospital a couple of weeks back and the whānau have been taking turns in a bedside vigil. Now he has contracted Covid. I’ve been observing how much pressure our hospitals are under. I had heard all the talk in the media about our broken health system, but when you witness it firsthand it really is concerning.

But back to dinner. It feels like we’ve been served the entree with this second question. A couple of tightropes for me. Given Kawai is loosely based on a true story, I was always conscious of how my tipuna, from whom I created my characters (I’ve coded their names so only those familiar with the story will know who is actually being referred to), might react to what I have said about them.

Although the book wasn’t non-fiction, I was still writing about real people. So Micheal’s point about the tightrope being ‘hellish’ resonates with me and I imagine Cristina in building out the Jewells and her other characters found this too. I personally felt a sense of duty to represent my ancestors accurately, in so far as what I know about them from the oral tradition or what’s been recorded about them, but at the same time I did not want to demean their mana. I found I was always checking myself about whether I had gone too far when creating tension between my characters.

The other thing that concerned me was what people were going to say when they learnt that I had made very public a story which up until now had been reserved for the marae or hapu or iwi wananga. In time I realised the people that I was really worried about were my pakeke (elders), most of whom have passed on. One day I came to this realisation: what good is this story if it goes to the grave with you? They didn’t share it with you so that you could bury it. That was a turning point for me and it’s partly what’s driven me in writing Kawai.

Cristina: I wish you a peaceful vigil, Monty. Having someone pass is a strong reminder of how history forms. They are no longer directing their story, and must pass it on. When we write tipuna, or other real character’s lives, we do have that responsibility to look beyond the cautious sepia-coloured images of people displayed in history books and to catch their vibrancy.  The questions are always there: do I have a right to tell this story, can I do this person justice, how will the descendants receive my telling of this life, what have I missed, is this authentic?

From what I’ve seen Kawai has been universally well received; I hope that’s so. Coding names helps, but, as you say, people who know, know. I debated changing the names of my characters, but decided, in the end, that I wanted Mrs Jewell to be remembered in a ‘retelling’ of a true tale of survival. Women are so often lost from history. I wanted to bring her back.

Michael: Monty, aroha and light to you and your whānau from all of us. Monty and I were on a panel together in Wairarapa recently and we both said that with the development and writing and release of our books we were cats on a hot tin roof. Anxiety might be a word. Terror is another one (for me at least). Maybe that’s the biggest challenge and weird underlying job requirement of being a writer – being the cat that willingly walks out onto the hot tin roof.

Feels like all our answers echo in some way around authenticity, a sense of duty to get important stuff right. I want to mihi my strongest rock of support and advice, the pou matua of my book, Ngamaru Raerino (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Rangiwewehi), who passed away recently. For decades Ngamaru has been a tireless advisor and supporter for Māori storytellers and Māori storytelling, someone who quietly and insistently demanded and ensured responsibility and authenticity in representing te ao Māori, te reo Māori and tikanga. E kore te puna aroha e mimiti ki a koe matua.

My lead character, Hana, is based on a number of strong amazing women in my life, but I’m not in my late 30s, nor female, nor a senior cop, nor a single parent. With prose I’ve imported a process from my other world of film – the story table. Which is pretty much what it sounds: for two or three days you gather a bunch of people round a table whose insights and world experiences are wildly different to your own, and let them loose on your manuscript; inviting them to pull apart what you’ve written, your characters, your narrative. Our story tables had a number of brilliant late-30s Māori women I deeply admire, as well as senior female cops, a just-graduated detective, an ex-Treaty lawyer, firebrand academics, activist performers (Hana’s rapper daughter is pretty much my youngest daughter, down to the same tattoos). Story tables are scary as hell, confronting, thrilling, provoking – and a really great litmus test.

 

 

 

Paula: This collaborative approach is quite different from the idea many people have of writing, that it’s a profoundly singular and isolated experience. (The writer in the garret is still a prevailing myth.) Of course, however much we get from research and discussion, we have to write the words on the page, and novels are a lot of words. As Catherine notes, you have to consider idiom, diction, dialogue. Two of you are writing historical novels: how do you avoid both pastiche and anachronisms? How does language for all of you ground you in time and place?

Catherine: Thinking of you and your family, Monty. It was a precious and overwhelming thing to sit at my 90-year-old mother’s bedside last year.

With my two historical novels – both set in Nazi Germany – I was very aware of the power of language to evoke a particular era and place. It was a formidable tool to wield; I was particularly interested in the manipulation and corruption of language at that time, and what that said about the people using/abusing it. With The Axeman’s Carnival, language is still very much centre stage for me, as it forms the bridge between the domestic and the wild – Tama the magpie’s world and the human world. There’s something uncanny about an animal who can communicate using our language – but what kind of consciousness lurks behind that ability? Is it just mimicking? Performing a cute trick on command? This is a question I wanted to explore…how aware is Tama of what he is saying? Different characters hold different beliefs about this, and that colours the way they engage with him. (I know what I think!)

Cristina: I really love a garret. Occasionally supplemented with 40 opinionated teenagers and a pinch of salty sailors, and with a fierce editor when I get smug and think I’ve finished.

For the question of language in historical fiction, the difficulty is that you’re trying to be authentic in contradictory ways – true both to the language of the past and to the essence of the (perhaps real) characters. The words we use and our language intensity has changed over the centuries, damn your eyes and f**k you. I’m not sure if there are any rules. When it works the book sings; when you get it wrong, it grates.

You can find authentic language by reading contemporaneous novels, diaries, letters, papers etc. and use this as a base for era immersion. However, Victorians were boringly verbose in their writing; even the heroes sound petty to modern ears. Where your modern reader accepts Mr Darcy’s pomposity in the classic P&P, an updated story needs a hero ‘translated’ with more vital language – so avoiding pastiche – but with no anachronisms to lob an immersed reader back to the future.  The balance is to use enough, appropriate, specific vocabulary to get the era feel while staying readable in modern storytelling style, ie. remaining authentic to historic characters while not making the heroes sound like dorks.

Michael: Hehe, damn your eyes and f**k you, that’s so funny Cristina! I’m a writer in a garret, don’t get me wrong; my garret right now is our crazy mobile home, converted from a delivery van, and I’ve got it parked up on a hill overlooking Fitzroy surf beach, at my standing desk (we got it cos it’s a two-metre stud), adapting the book. I defer to your considerable expertise, Catherine, and I know research says we’ve given magpies a bad name, but in my head they observe and choose and gather and pick and curate, then from the several million ways that big pile of stuff could go together; the magpie dreams, and constructs their idiosyncratic entirely individual creation, in the way only that particular bird with that particular beak can. Ornithologically I think I just got a D- but I like the metaphor.

Idiom, diction, dialogue – the words spoken by my characters are what I tend to sweat least blood over. They’ve got to sound lived-in and real, of course, and interesting and surprising, I hope. But what they do, their internal processing, how that turns into behaviour that is abhorrent or admirable or just alarming and unexpected; for me all that stuff reveals who they truly are, more than what comes out their mouths. When I’m directing, the biggest thrill possible is in the rehearsal room is when a bold actor gets a good scene, and they say the exact opposite of the dialogue I’d written, or they say nothing at all, and the scene suddenly goes into orbit. I feel like the dialogue I like best in my novels is when the actor on the little screen in my head is doing something really unexpected and fearless.

Monty: Thank you all for your concern about my father. He passed away last week and after the tangihanga there was his kawe mate to attend, as Māori protocol requires. That was followed by my media commitments to the ANZAC coverage. I’ve only just been able to turn my attention to this latest question. Before I answer it, can I say two things: your comments above have much resonance with me, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading all our novels. I am humbled to be in your company – three very different narratives, but each one a riveting read!

As a historian I had the advantage of drawing on years of research when I got the idea for Kawai. My greatest challenge was not the investigation or discussion required but learning how good novels are constructed.

The garret does appeal to me because in my case the solitude it offers is ideal for getting the creative juices going. Each time I drafted a few chapters, however, I had to talk to people knowledgeable about my subject (e.g. an archaeologist, tribal historians) to avoid anachronisms, especially. My editors were helpful in spotting these too.

One of the greatest challenges for me was dialogue. Kawai is set in the eighteenth century when everyone spoke Māori and iwi had their own dialects, more so than today. I was fortunate to find a tribal reo expert to assist me. Ohorere (Jossie) Kaa has had a long career editing Maori language texts and she told me that the challenge Kawai presented was just the distraction she needed in her retirement. We debated how our ancestors might have expressed something in te reo and my editors helped me find the right balance in how much te reo to use in the novel.

Kawai would not read the way it does without the various input by these experts.  ‘Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, he toa takitini.’ Success is not the work of an individual, but the work of many.

 

Paula: Thank you all very much for this kōrero, and to Monty in particular for taking part during his father’s tangi. One final question: is there another book – aside from your own, and those by your fellow finalists – that you would like more people to read? Just one book, one recommendation. (For me it’s usually The Dog of the South, a novel by the late Charles Portis). Fiction, nonfiction, poetry: what is the one thing you’d like someone else to read?

Cristina: I nearly always recommend a choice of New Zealand books to people who ask, but if I’m only allowed one then it has to be the best book ever, which for me is This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson. It’s the story of our second governor, Robert Fitzroy, as a young commander of the Beagle with Charles Darwin aboard. It helped me judge historic people in context, more than that really, helped me see how all people derive from their culture and to understand (and almost forgive) how good people can do dreadful things.

 

 

Thanks for instigating this korero, Paula, and for Catherine, Michael, Monty for the chat. Can’t wait to meet you all, in person, soon. And we’re all together again for the HBAF! I’m so pleased to be included in the team.

Monty: I’ll plug a book by a local author: The Girl in the Mirror (2020) by Rose Carlyle, a first-time novelist living in Takapuna. For sheer suspense and whodunnit it’s a book I couldn’t put down. I read it during the second lockdown when I was learning the novel-writing craft. It traverses family dynamics and secrets, deception, resentment, jealousy and lies. There’s lots of other realism too!  You appreciate that you are in the hands of a person who knows yachts, sailing  and has spent time on the ocean. And while there were one or two times I questioned the likelihood of a dynamic playing out the way it was portrayed in the narrative, these instances were not enough to kill the suspense in this excellent read.

 

Catherine: I’m so sorry about your father, Monty. I’m glad you could be with him in his final days. Sending you my deep condolences.

Michael, I love the magpie metaphor too! That’s definitely the way I think most writers work. I have many cardboard boxes labelled IDEAS that I rarely sift through, but feel compelled to keep adding to – shiny bits and pieces of stories I stumble across.

Cristina, you can’t go wrong with a good garret…unless of course someone decides to build a new subdivision opposite it, which is happening as I type in mine. (The magpies are none too impressed either.)

 

 

As for a book recommendation: Burial Rites by Australian author Hannah Kent has stayed with me for years. Set in Iceland in 1829, it’s the based-on-fact story of Agnes, a young woman awaiting execution for the murder of her master. Kent evokes setting and character in rich detail, and the writing is achingly beautiful – but the other reason for my choice is that we still don’t read enough Australian fiction here, and our books still struggle to find an audience across the ditch. It’s time that changed.

Michael: Deepest sympathies, Monty. All our thoughts and aroha are with you.

I am in total awe of being in such luminous and brilliant company at this table. I pinch myself daily, and hope that it’s as hard to get Mrs Jewell, Axeman and Kāwai right now as it is to get avocados.

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I read In Cold Blood at the age of ten. I still have no idea why anyone let a kid read it. Capote’s incredible control of prose grabs the reader, drags them into that farmhouse basement, flinching at the sight of blood and hair on the walls, walking alongside the killers, hearing the squeaking of their cheap leather jackets, smelling the metallic fear in the sweat of the victims. The book makes the awfulness of violence real and lived-in, not observational. For me it completely changed what writing could be and what writing could do.

See you all on the 17th! Should we coordinate wardrobes, so we don’t clash? Ngā mihi, thank you all and thank you Paula, this has been such an honour to be a part of.

Catherine: Looking forward to seeing you all on The Big Night!

 

C.K. Stead on the attempted murder of D’Arcy Cresswell

The suppressed history explored in Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay by Paul Diamond, shortlisted for the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards.

Charles Mackay was a prominent and successful lawyer and Mayor of the city of Whanganui, known as a devotee of the arts and, among other things, for the establishment of the Sarjeant Gallery there. In May 1920 he had dinner at a hotel with Walter D’Arcy Cresswell, an unusually handsome returned soldier visiting Whanganui from his home in Canterbury. In the two or three days that followed some kind of homosexual exchange occurred between the two men.

‘I purposely encouraged him to display qualities in his nature which I expected,’ Cresswell said in a police statement, which Mackay acknowledged as truthful.  ‘On making that discovery I told him that I had led him on, on purpose to make sure of his dirty intentions, and told him […] that he must resign the mayoralty at once.’

Mackay attempted to excuse his behaviour as a medical condition for which he had sought a cure. Cresswell insisted on the resignation but agreed to the suggestion that they meet again in Mackay’s office to discuss it further. There the pleading by Mackay continued, saying his wife and two daughters would be unbearably affected and his own career utterly ruined if Cresswell should expose his homosexuality. When Cresswell remained adamant, Mackay took a revolver from his desk and shot him.

The shot missed the heart and passed through the lung. Cresswell fainted, and Mackay, thinking him dead, forced the revolver into his hand to suggest suicide. But Cresswell regained consciousness, struggled up, hurled a chair through a window and called down to the street below for help.  Mackay tried at first to say it had been an accident, but soon gave that up and, when Cresswell survived, pleaded guilty to attempted murder.  For this he was sentenced to 15 years jail.

 

 

The newspapers hailed Cresswell as a clean-living young returned soldier-upholder of virtue, and deplored Mackay now exposed as a ‘pervert’ (the present day meaning of ‘gay’ was not yet in use) and a would-be killer.

Several puzzles go with this story. Why had Cresswell ‘expected’ to encounter these qualities in Mackay whom he had not previously known; and why should he so vindictively insist on the resignation when Whanganui’s civic affairs were none of his business? This suggests he might have been engaged by some of Mackay’s public enemies to help them be rid of him. It is also possible that Cresswell was trying to prove to himself (and the world) that he was heterosexual. Though he did subsequently marry and father a child, he was very soon divorced and propounding the virtues of ‘the Greek way of love’. He was indeed to make a name for himself (though a wobbly one) as a gay New Zealand poet.  It must be assumed therefore that he could read the signals from Mackay and respond to them in a way which made the entrapment relatively easy. This is a fact which makes Cresswell’s homosexual disloyalty (not to mention his brutality and lack of human sympathy) even more culpable.  Mackay was also culpable, but he was to pay a price for that.

 

 

Questions of this kind are considered in Paul Diamond’s excellent book. Another no one appears to have asked is why Mackay did not face his accuser down and, if Creswell went ahead with the exposure, simply deny it. He could even have reversed the threat, that he would say it was D’Arcy who had tried to seduce him. Some of the mud would have stuck, but there was no real evidence either way, and the extremes of the outcome for Mackay would have been avoided. I suppose it is a measure of how disreputable homosexuality was at the time considered to be that it should have produced in Mackay such panic and desperation.

I heard a lot about this story from Frank Sargeson, who knew Cresswell as D’Arcy and admired him for his prose writing (much less for his florid poetry) but mostly for his commitment to the role of ‘Poet’, which is how he always described himself publicly. I have on my shelves Cresswell’s two autobiographical prose works, The Poet’s Progress, published by Faber in 1930, and Present Without Leave, 1939. Diamond records that Faber’s acceptance of The Poet’s Progress was against the wishes of T.S. Eliot, unsurprising in that in it Cresswell declares ‘no poetry [apart from his own] was written in England now’. To offer a book carrying such an opinion to Faber, where Eliot ruled, was audacious; to have it accepted there, remarkable.

I have also his Poems (1921-27) in which he introduces himself as a ‘Colonial’ offering his work to ‘an older country’ and hoping for its approval.  On the title page of this collection he affixes the quotation

 

But I, no shame

Can ever touch.  I am Fortune’s child,

Not man’s.

 

So far as I know these three are the only of Cresswell’s works published in the UK, where he lived after his Whanganui adventure. I bought the third of them in Bristol in 1958, marked down from 7/6, to 5/-, to 1/6, to 1/-. The poems I bought for 5/- in London in 1960; and the Faber publication in 1965 – all from second-hand bookshops. There had been no reprints and clearly the ‘Colonial’ was having no great literary success; but he did gain some access to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Bloomsbury set, and an exchange of letters with her, edited by Helen Shaw, was published in New Zealand in a beautiful little hardcover as Dear Lady Ginger in 1983, twenty-three years after his death. He also claimed to have had a friendship with Edward Marsh, famously editor of the Georgian Poetry anthologies, and to have given John Gielgud the benefit of his wisdom on how Shakespeare’s blank verse should be delivered.

His other books – a collection of letters, one of sonnets, and a book-length ballad, The Voyage of the Hurunui – were all published in New Zealand. The Foreword to the ballad, a fine Caxton Press publication (1956), declares that its author is, as always and proudly, ‘tone deaf’ to the ‘loose slangy uproar’ of ‘fashionable verse making’. In the Notes he records that the New Zealanders to whom he sent a copy of the ballad ‘would have none of it […] having their eyes fixed on the far Horizon’ [the fashionable London literary quarterly] ‘and their ears wholly inclined to Great Turnstile’ [the editorial address of The New Statesman].

Tucked into my copy, given me by Sargeson, there is also the programme for a play of Cresswell’s, The Forest, produced by ‘The New Independent Theatre’ in the Auckland Art Gallery some time in the 1960s. This was the group that also put on two of Frank’s plays, The Cradle and the Egg, and A Time for Sowing, with sets painted by Colin McCahon. The Forest, Cresswell once told a friend, contains ‘a tremendous defence of homosexuality.’  Geoffrey de Montalk (see below) describes that part of it as ‘homosexual rant’.

Sargeson aroused Janet Frame’s interest in the Creswell-Mackay story, and I have a number of copies she made of newspaper reports and police records, no doubt with the idea of writing a novel about it. I have also one of several accounts of the matter written by Frank’s friend Bill Mitchell who tried to make a book of it but seemed unable to organise the large amount of material he had collected. Diamond’s book reminds me that I too once intended to make a novel of it, but gave this up when Maurice Gee published his novel The Scornful Moon which reinvents a version of the story in a Wellington setting.

 

 

Although Mackay’s 15-year sentence was brutal and the jail experience very hard on him, he was released in 1926 after only 6 and a half years, and went at once to London, leaving New Zealand behind. In the meantime his wife had divorced him and changed her own and their daughters’ name from Mackay to Duncan, and Whanganui had gone to great lengths to erase his name from public records. Mackay’s mother and siblings, however, remained loyal to him, and his sister accompanied him to London where, Diamond assumes, he took up the life of an active homosexual, cruising the well-known parks, pubs, theatres and urinals for gay assignations. Areas close to military or naval barracks were also popular sites; but it was risky, and a great deal of London police time and energy in the 1920s was spent watching for and arresting gays for their unlawful practices. There is not a lot of real evidence for Mackay’s involvement in these activities. Diamond is probably right in his guesswork here but, only recently released from jail, Mackay would have had to be cautious.

After a year or two Mackay’s friend Hector Bolitho, another New Zealand expatriate, and also gay, wrote of him, ‘England had given his life a benison, soothing him for all he had suffered. […] His pride and laughter came back to him.’

 

 

In London Mackay, ever resourceful, found work as a journalist and in advertising. In November 1928 he moved to Berlin where he was to work as a correspondent for a London paper, and as a teacher of English. It was an exciting city, as Diamond points out, alive with new art (Klee), music (Brecht and Weil), movie-making (Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder), and of political conflict (Nazis versus Communists, Communists versus Social Democrats); of extraordinary police brutality, but a seeming haven for homosexual awareness and action.  It was a city especially attractive to gay British writers like Auden, Isherwood and Spender, and Harold Nicholson.

From Berlin Mackay began to send despatches to his paper in London, but also to New Zealand, and even Whanganui, using a pseudonym.  In one he summarised what he considered to be German aspirations:
.

The incorporation into the [German] Republic of all the surrounding territory that can be considered Germanic, including Austria. The overlordship of the countries further east, such as Poland. The re-establishment of German influence in Russia, and the development of her riches by German capital and skill. After that a final settlement of accounts with France and the incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine – and more – of Lombardy.  In fact the Empire of Charlemagne once more.
.

A decade before the start of World War II, this is superior well-informed reporting. Had he been reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf? He must at least have been listening to what the Nazis were shouting about how they wanted (in effect) to ‘Make Germany great again’.

When riots and demonstrations broke out in May 1929, Isherwood had recently been welcomed to Berlin by his friend Auden who wrote a long poem, ‘1929’ (‘It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens’), addressed to him: it was full of their sense of the violence that was occurring around them, and of its historical significance.  Towards the end come these lines:

 

You whom I gladly walk with, touch

Or wait for as one certain of good,

We know it, know that love

Needs more than the admiring excitement of union

[…]

Needs death, death of the grain, our death,

Death of the old gang.

 

On May 3 Mackay was covering the riots and demonstrations with his Australian-born British colleague Sefton Delmer who would write many years later ‘Berlin in 1928 had everything the editor of a popular paper yearns for – sex, murder, political intrigue, money, mystery and bloodshed.  Particularly bloodshed.’ Through that day the violence continued. The two journalists filed their reports and then dined together at Delmer’s flat.

Around 9 p.m. Mackay returned to the scene of the fighting which the police had cordoned off. Whether he consciously broke the cordon or strayed there by accident doesn’t seem clear, but he was standing watching the action when a police sniper shot him from a rooftop. He was hit in the stomach and bled to death.

Next day Sefton Delmer saw him on a slab in the morgue, ‘his shoes pointing stiffly skyward showing the holes in their soles.’ The German police had made a meticulous list of the contents of his pockets which included ‘1 talisman’.  This was a tiki given him by Whanganui Māori.

A surprising number of people, representatives of Government and police, foreign press association and teachers of foreign languages, journalists and embassy people, attended Mackay’s funeral at St Matthaus Church. There was one New Zealander, the oarsman Tom Sullivan, about whom Mackay had written a column.

The death was widely reported in Germany and Britain, but also in New Zealand where the ‘unsavoury’ circumstances of his departure from the Whanganui mayoralty were skidded around. A headstone was provided for the grave, inscribed only

 

CHARLES EVAN MACKAY

MAY 3^RD 1929.

 

The grave has since vanished, but Paul Diamond has found a photograph of the stone.

 

.

Diamond’s carefully researched and well-told account, especially remarkable for the quality of its photo record – including high quality full-page and sometimes double page shots of street scenes in New Zealand and Germany – is primarily focussed on Mackay; but it is also Cresswell’s story. Although D’Arcy achieved some small (and now dwindling) literary recognition in New Zealand there was none, apart from the Bloomsbury association, where he wanted it most, in England. Sargeson’s admiration was limited, and probably of the kind he offered to another expatriate gay writer, James Courage, when he said one of his novels deserved ‘heavily scented brick-bats’. Allen Curnow included Cresswell in both his anthologies of New Zealand poetry, but struggled in the introduction to the first to place him critically, and in the second largely avoided the problem.

In the introduction to his UK-published collection of poems Cresswell’s tone is self-abasing, almost pleading. But in his two autobiographies it is very different and tends to be grand and admonitory. New Zealand is ‘my homeland’ and ‘my country’, but its inhabitants are ‘they’, not ‘we’. There is a sense in which the personality revealed in those two books is insufferably self-regarding, self-advertising and long-winded – but there is also sometimes a wink in the prose, a sparkle, a kind of wit, a faint suggestion of tongue-in-cheek. It’s the prose of a man who is not looking over his shoulder asking himself, ‘What will they think if I say this?’

I notice that I carefully annotated my one-shilling copy of Present Without Leave when preparing for one of Auckland University’s Winter Lecture series in 1961; and when I look at that book again now, I feel I should not write a word about it, or about its author, until I have read it again, and carefully.

Count Geoffrey Wladislav Potocki de Montalk, a poet who was born and grew up in New Zealand but despised democracy as a system of government and claimed to be heir to the Polish throne, said in his Recollections of my Fellow Poets (1983):
.

I would say [Cresswell] was a good poet of a very restricted scope. Some of his pronouncements, however pontifical, are decidedly entitled to consideration. All in all he was more gifted and more interesting than the English-born big wigs of poetry, who were battening on the prestige of past generations. Few or none of them were Cresswell’s equals, either as writers or as individuals. […] There is material for a Cresswell legend. […]

There was, of course, the business about the Mayor of Wanganui! In a way, through his Sir Galahad goings-on, Cresswell was responsible for his death. […] Certain of the literati in New Zealand know all about it, and would perform a service to New Zealand literature and history, by putting it on record.
.

This Paul Diamond has now done. It would be strange if an effect of Diamond’s book should be to arouse more interest in Cresswell than in Mackay.  D’Arcy is, after all, the one who has left a written record. In the meantime he is at least a marker of a point of terrible uncertainty in our intellectual and literary history; and no one who writes about him is likely to look past what he did to Mackay, a man whose plight he should have understood and sympathised with.

A Postscript on Maurice Gee’s The Scornful Moon: This novel builds on the Mackay-Cresswell story but changes characters’ names and moves it to Wellington and to national rather than local-body politics. It fills in what is unexplained in its subject – was D’Arcy engaged by Mackay’s enemies to entrap and ruin him, and if so by whom? This makes the story more complicated, and perhaps slightly less plausible. It also leaves out entirely what became of the Mackay character after his jail term was served.  It’s a good novel of the kind I used to call ‘conventional fiction’ and spent many years trying, not altogether successfully, to avoid writing. This mode is not in itself either good or bad, and like any other can be done well or badly. Gee does it very well. He is so inside his dialogue, so relaxed and cool and competent in the mode.

I had reviewed in Landfall his previous novel, Ellie and the Shadow Men*, and had concluded that Gee as novelist was essentially ‘a moralist’. I cited Stendhal’s idea that a novel should be a mirror walking down a road, and went on…

When Gee’s writing falls a notch or two below its best it is usually because moralism has got the upper hand. […] Better that the novelist should not think too much about justice and virtue, should put aside moral indignation and get on with making the picture as true to life, the language as generous and exact, as talent and the story will permit.  Say how it looks, report what they do, and get the words right.  The realist’s mirror is safer, and ultimately more charitable, than the moralist’s lamp.
.

As if in answer to this, Gee gives The Scornful Moon the sub-title A Moralist’s Tale. His narrator, Sam Holloway, is indeed a moralist – a Puritan, a moraliser who can’t quite face the realities of the present.  In that sense he is distinct from Gee, who may be (and is) inclined to ‘point a moral’ in his fiction, but is more liberal, less shockable, more worldly than his character.

 

---

 

C.K. Stead is a poet, novelist, scholar and critic. His most recent book is Say I Do This: Poems 2018–22 and and the memoir What You Made of It.

 

* See my Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers, 320-329

 

The dark art of reviewing books: new voices and a new site.

.

Paula Morris asks the writing mentors of the new Aotearoa NZ Review of Books what they really, really want.

 

A new long-form book review site launches today, Wednesday 22 March: the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books, in the same space as the Sydney Review of Books and the LA Review of Books, but dedicated entirely to books by New Zealand writers across all genres – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children and teenagers. I’m the editor, and plan to publish up to ten reviews a month, on Wednesdays and Fridays.

For some time I’ve wanted a site like this to exist – well-designed and easy to navigate, with intelligent long reviews of brand new books written for a general audience. In 2019 the print quarterly The NZ Review of Books / Pukapuka Aotearoa was turned down for a Creative New Zealand grant and decided – a year shy of its 30^th anniversary – to close. (Its archive of print issues is available to read online here.)

Newspapers make less and less space for book reviews. In December 2022, Canvas magazine – published every Saturday with the New Zealand Herald – ended its commitment to regular book pages (and to books editor Eleanor Black). According to Nielsen figures published in August 2022, the Herald’s print readership on Saturdays was 740,000, so the blow was a heavy one.

Not all the news is grim. The fate of the Listener, as well as the magazines North & South and Metro, seemed uncertain during Covid-era, but all were able to continue, and to continue publishing book reviews. The print issue of Landfall, our oldest literary journal, is published twice a year and includes some book reviews, with more long-form reviews on Landfall Review Online each month – albeit some for books published more than a year earlier.

During our Covid lockdowns, the Coalition for Books launched the Kete Books site, which includes reviews of a wide range of new releases. The ANZL ran book reviews for two years, focused on new books from our Members and Fellows. Other sites – like Newsroom and the Spinoff – also publish book reviews. But almost all of the above compete for support from CNZ, tough in a time of reduced funding and increased demand. Books editors – usually part-time and underpaid, if they are paid at all – have to stretch budgets, reducing the number of reviews and/or the number of reviewers. (I joked that every time you saw me review a book for the ANZL, it meant I couldn’t afford to pay someone else.)

The Listener, a weekly magazine, is the leading publisher of book reviews in New Zealand, publishing around 600 last year, but the majority of these were for overseas authors. In 2022, New Zealand books accounted for about 120 of the Listener’s book reviews – a number that’s either impressive or inadequate, depending on your point of view. Book pages in newspapers are similarly international in scope. The Spinoff publishes more features than book reviews, and in a recent review of five ‘great crime novels’, only two were by New Zealand writers. ReadingRoom generally publishes one book review a week, and because it’s funded by Creative New Zealand its kaupapa is New Zealand books and/or subjects. But in February it drew the ire of many writers when it devoted four reviews to just one novel, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood. Book reviews pages become contested spaces when local writers and publishers believe there is not enough space for reviews of New Zealand books, nor enough money to pay local reviewers.

In 2022 when I discussed the notion of the ANZRB with other people in the local lit-biz, the first reaction was usually alarm. Would I be joining the long queue of literary beggars outside Creative New Zealand, and possibly siphoning funding away from everyone else? Actually, the ANZRB has been established with funding from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Auckland. I work there: I’m an Associate Professor in English, and director of the Masters in Creative Writing programme. Some of that generous funding was spent creating a smart, functional website, built by Brence Coghill of Monstrous: he also built Wharerangi, the Māori literature online hub.

Part of the funding was designated for mentoring new reviewers. Our first target group was PhD students in the Faculty of Arts and MCW alums. I started book reviewing myself as a university student back in the 80s, first for Craccum and then the NZ Herald. My first-ever payment for writing was for a Herald book review, and my parents were so excited that they made a photocopy of the cheque, to be kept as a strange family souvenir: I still have it. It reminds me that the pay for reviews has gone up very little in forty years.

For our Faculty-funded webinars on long-form book reviewing, more than sixty students and alums signed up, and then a dozen from that group applied for mentorships with me and four other experienced editors: Eleanor Black, who’s been books editor at Next magazine as well as Canvas; Steve Braunias, ex Listener and now editor of ReadingRoom at the Newsroom site; Mark Broatch, the current books editor at the Listener; and Guy Somerset, former books editor at the Dominion Post and the Listener. The mentorships, says Steve Braunias, were ‘a really good step in the direction of providing informed, critical commentary on New Zealand books’.

The webinars attracted both aspiring reviewers and people already writing but keen on professional development. I commissioned one of Steve Braunias’ mentees, Pamela Morrow, to review a novel for the launch of the ANZRB. A number of the others have received commissions from a variety of media outlets, using their mentored review as a calling card. I’m hoping to secure more funding to repeat these webinars nationally, and to pay the mentors for another round with emerging reviewers.

‘I reminded my mentees that reviews should be enjoyable to read,’ Mark Broatch says. Ideally, the reviews should be ‘entertainments in their own right, with a clear point of view and provocation if necessary.’

One of Guy Somerset’s mentees wrote about ‘a widely well-reviewed book that fell far short of the book reviewers described.’ Because the mentee was not ‘in the narrow compromised circles of New Zealand literary (and in this case journalistic) life’, he ‘felt no compunction about pointing these failings out. Although he did admit he might have been more circumspect if the review were actually going to be published.’ Steve Braunias declares himself ‘really impressed’ with his three mentees. ‘They threw themselves into it as a writing assignment – as an opportunity to write well, to think well, to produce something worth reading. I think the programme is going to make a very, very useful contribution to reviewing in New Zealand.’

Guy Somerset suggests that book reviews should be ‘a piece of craft in their own right: incisive, informative and entertaining’. I asked the mentors to dissuade their writers from gushing, dithering or offering opinions without supporting evidence. Just before the mentorships began, I was interviewed for a newspaper and asked my opinion on the state of book reviewing in New Zealand. I said:

It is dire. Too many reviews are a) plot summaries; b) mealy-mouthed; c) chatty and inane; or d) poorly written … If I read another review where the writer talks about a book being ‘relatable’, I may need to move to another planet.

Although I stand by my blanket ban on the R word, I know there are some excellent book reviewers in New Zealand. Steve Braunias cites Charlotte Grimshaw, David Eggleton, Philip Matthews and Rachael King as ‘among our best’, and adds:

Vincent O’Sullivan‘s recent review in ReadingRoom of a Katherine Mansfield study was like a masterclass in reviewing – I’ve read it three times, trying to see where he has gone and what lessons I can pick up for my own reviewing. There was another outstanding review of that Mansfield book last week; it was in the Times Literary Supplement, of London, and it was world-class, written with fantastic energy and detail – by New Zealand author, Kirsty Gunn. Both those reviews could serve as models for reviewers from New Zealand or anywhere in the English-speaking world.

In 2001, in The New York Times Book Review, Walter Kirn complained that ‘the sound of much reviewing nowadays is the sound of one hand clapping – of literature gently patting its own back, sometimes in praise and sometimes in reproach, for fear of breaking something.’ This can be an issue for us in New Zealand for various reasons. The first is this: we have a fragile book eco-system, and as book lovers we want other New Zealanders to read the books by our own writers and publishers, and support our local book culture. We don’t want to destroy people’s careers.

‘A lot of reviews seem less like “reviews” and more like appreciations,’ says Guy Somerset. ‘The meaningful review is being killed by kindness. The opposite of kindness in a review is not gratuitous cruelty but, rather, stringent attention to critical and intellectual standards, and honesty in applying them.’

The second issue for book reviewers in New Zealand is less altruistic. We don’t want to destroy our own careers. This is a very small country. If we write a negative review of Author X, what are the ramifications? Will Author X be a Creative NZ assessor, or selecting writers for a residency or festival, or on the judging panel for a contest or award? Will we run into Author X at some event and be confronted or embarrassed in some way? Will Author X be all over social media denouncing us for our ignorance or bias or stupidity? Or, as witnessed on a recent slap-down on Twitter, will Author X’s loyal friends label a books editor ‘elderly’ and deride the reviewer as an ‘incel’?

‘We all want usefully critical reviews,’ says Mark Broatch, ‘and we all know the reasons that – let’s say – less guarded reviews aren’t common in New Zealand. And if you disagree with a review, by all means critique it. But ad hominem attacks on reviewers are not acceptable.’

In Eleanor Black’s experience of working with reviewers, ‘they are genuinely nervous about offending local writers. The reprisal for a negative review is swift and often nasty. I have had reviewers decline to review books they suspected they would not like, to avoid criticising a book written by someone they knew and would undoubtedly see in the future. I have also had reviewers pull out after getting partway through a book and realising they didn’t have a lot nice to say about it. The paltry payment for reviewing a book was not, to them, nearly worth the grief.’

My own feeling is: if you want everyone to like you, then you will have an unhappy life, especially if you are a writer – of books or of book reviews. Still, I have written reviews where I toned down criticism; I have also told editors that I wanted to abandon a review because I could find nothing good to say and either dreaded the consequences or felt it was a waste of the limited review space available to New Zealand books.

‘There has always been a strange tension about reviewing in New Zealand,’ says Steve Braunias, noting ‘on one hand a constant complaint that reviews are too nice and that it’s friends reviewing other friends, but then a huge outcry whenever something particularly critical does appear. I don’t know if any of that matters so long as the reviewing is intelligent and at some length, and is the product of close reading.’

‘Ideally,’ says Black, ‘book reviews would be seen for what they are: one person’s opinion. But because the platforms for book reviews in Aotearoa are so few (and dwindling) and because it can be so difficult for local writers to get any attention for their work, each review takes on this heavy significance. It’s tough on both sides, for writers and reviewers.’

Guy Somerset agrees. A reviewer ‘is not a fan boy/girl and isn’t there to make friends. In some cases, they must be prepared to lose them. I don’t trust reviewers who only praise. By the same token, writers and publishers need to toughen up and take bad reviews on the chin, recognising the mostly good faith in which they’re written. They need to respond to them in the same good faith. Such is the cut and thrust of healthy intellectual life.’

The ANZRB is the new home of the entire review archive of the Academy of New Zealand Literature, each review tagged and categorised for easy searching – including reviews by David Eggleton, Rachael King and Philip Matthews. ANZRB reviewers in March and April include Charlotte Grimshaw, Robert Sullivan and Sally Blundell (another Listener alum), as well as historians from the University of Auckland, a number of mentees, and everyone’s favourite poetry reviewer, Sophie van Waardenberg, a New Zealand writer who recently graduated from the MFA programme at Syracuse University in New York.

Information on the next round of reviewing webinars will be announced here in the News column of the ANZL site, and on Twitter: @ANZRevBooks.

 

‘The courage to say it out loud’: Pasifika in the spotlight

 

This weekend, after a four-year hiatus, the Pasifika Festival ­– the largest Pasifika cultural celebration in the world – returns to Auckland. The festival has taken various forms over the past thirty years, but 2023 is a return to popular form: seven ‘villages’ set around the lake at Western Springs, celebrating the food, crafts, music and art forms of Aotearoa, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Niue, Samoa, Tonga and Tuvalu. The Fale Pasifika hosts Kiribati, Tokelau and Tahiti on Sunday 18 March, and Tahiti returns, joined by Hawai’I, on Sunday 19 March.

Each village has a performance stage for traditional and contemporary entertainers: space for dancers, singers, drum groups and kapa haka. Schedules for these stages are available on the Pasifika Festival site. Tens of thousands are expected to attend the free festival, including a slew of local and national politicians. In 2014, Hamilton composer Lin Manuel Miranda attended Pasifika – along with fellow composer Mark Mancina and Opetiaia Foa’i, founder of Te Vaka – as an essential first-stop before they began work on the score of Disney movie Moana.

 

     

Scenes from Pasifika, 2017. Photo credit: Tom Moody.

 

Pasifika follows an extraordinary sold-out run at the Auckland Arts Festival of The Savage Coloniser Show, a stage adaptation of Tusiata Avia’s award-winning poetry collection The Savage Coloniser Book, published in 2020. At the 2021 Ockham NZ Book Awards, Avia became the first Pasifika woman to win the main poetry prize. The theatrical production now moves to the Wānaka Festival of Colour.

 

 

The show was created by playwright Victor Rodger and his company F.C.C. (Flow, Create, Connect). ‘We started in 2015,’ he says, ‘with the express aim of putting Pasifika narratives front and centre and giving Pasifika practitioners a chance to be at the heart of the narrative.’ Their first production was a six-woman theatrical version of Avia’s Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, which debuted in 2016 at Mangere Arts Centre, then played in festivals around New Zealand. In 2020 it had a two-week run at Soho Playhouse in New York, winning the Fringe Encore Series prize for outstanding production.

Avia’s work is visceral, provocative and clear-sighted, interrogating the past and present – from the arrival of James Cook to Jacinda Ardern at the Pacific Forum in Tuvalu. In poems like ‘Unity (ii)’ and ‘How to be in a room full of white people’, she addresses the racism Pasifika people continue to experience, as recent profoundly racist and misogynist social-media attacks on her attest. (Among other things, Avia, born in Christchurch, was accused of being an ‘overstayer’.)

‘She speaks the truth, plainly and unapologetically,’ says Rodger. ‘Not everyone likes to hear the truth, but it’s undeniable and for many of us POC she is saying things that we have only thought (and bitten our tongues and refrained from saying out loud) or said to family/friends in the privacy of our own homes or in bars. Tusiata has the courage to say it out loud.’

Poetry can be dangerous, Avia told Radio New Zealand, ‘because it pushes hard against the status quo’. Her refusal to engage with personal attacks was supported by many other Māori and Pasifika writers. ‘We have to remember Toni Morrison’s admonition,’ says novelist Tina Makereti, ‘that the function of racism is distraction, to stop us from being and doing all the things we can be and do.’

 

 

Wild Dogs was a natural fit for theatrical adaptation. For six years, Avia toured the world performing her work as a solo show, as well as publishing the poems in a 2005 collection. Director Anapela Polata’ivao – who also worked on Wild Dogs – and the cast of seven more than met the challenge with The Savage Coloniser. Former Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh took a group of students to see the production, marvelling in its ‘sublimely theatrical storytelling’, including the score by David Long and choreography by Mario Faumui and Tupua Tigafua. The show, she says, cannot be ‘ghettoised as just another angry brown woman’s diatribe against white colonial culture. It’s a sophisticated engagement with global culture’s imperialist centre, creatively subverting power hierarchies with intellectual and historical vigour while re-centring brown voices, bodies and hearts.’

At Pasifika this weekend, books by Avia and Marsh will be on sale at a stand run by the Coalition for Books. The Coalition – a collaborative body representing local writers, publishers, booksellers and festivals – initially planned to have a book stand at Pasifika in 2020, with performances on various village stages by poets David Eggleton, Daren Kamali and Tayi Tibble, until Covid forced the festival’s cancellation. Now, with Pasifika back on the calendar, the Coalition plans to repeat its successful five-day run at kapa haka festival Te Matatini, held at Auckland’s Eden Park in February.

‘We reached lots of interested readers at Te Matatini,’ says Melanie Laville-Moore, Publishing Director of Allen & Unwin NZ and Coalition chair. The best-selling title at that festival, she notes, was the landmark essay collection Imagining Decolonisation (BWB 2020); its authors include the late Moana Jackson. ‘At Pasifika, the widest variety of Pasifika and Māori writers will be front and centre. We’re confident that these books will be met with the same enthusiasm.’

The stand will be situated near the Aotearoa village, the largest of Pasifika’s compounds of stalls and cultural stages. The Coalition’s eight-page catalogue showcasing recent Māori and Pasifika books – from novels to children’s books to Ruby Tui’s memoir Straight Up – can be downloaded here.

The catalogue features some of the Māori and Pasifika books longlisted for this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Pasifika titles include Coco Solid’s debut novel, How to Loiter in a Turf War; Paradise Camp by Yuki Kihara, the first fa’afafine and Pasifika artist to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale; and Sadat Muaiava’s Lāuga: Understanding Samoan Oratory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 2023 Ockhams Finalists

…                                                      

 

 

.General Non-Fiction Award                                                 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry

..                                                      

 

 

International Women’s Day:

Writers Celebrate Writers

 

Nine New Zealand women writers talk about the other women – and their books – that influenced and impressed them. The writers canvassed here are: Lynley Edmeades, Charlotte Grimshaw, Karyn Hay, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Paula Morris, Catherine Robertson, Elizabeth Smither, Alison Wong and Briar Wood.

 

 

Lynley Edmeades

Perhaps the lesser-known younger sibling to Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Everybody’s Autobiography was written several years later, in 1937, and is said to be a continuation of the earlier ‘memoir.’ I use scare quotes here as even now, in the rather genre-fluid literary world we live in, it is hard to categorise this book. Stein – in her writing and her life – shirked many frameworks of expectation: her memoir isn’t a memoir as much as it a series of ‘rhythmic essays’ (what a genre!), which are, equally, stream-of-consciousness literary experiments. Across her life’s work, she attempted to capture something of the ‘excitingness of pure being,’ or, what she called the ‘continuous presence.’

 

 

In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein pursues this ontological experiment via memoiristic observations. It is perhaps a precursor to Annie Ernaux’s brilliant ‘collective autobiography,’ The Years, which also slips and slides between genres, mixing the first person with the collective ‘other’ with such aplomb that it has perhaps driven the personal essay to hide under a large rock for the foreseeable future. It is also where Stein famously wrote, ‘there is no there there,’ which, like much of Stein’s work, sends language spinning into glorious webs of malfunction and misfire, always casting light on the absurdity of our attempts to fix reality within it. An autobiography is an autobiography, is maybe an autobiography, is probably not an autobiography. Which is why I love it.

 

 

I was given Fifty Poems: A Celebration by Lauris Edmond (1999) by a dear friend when I left New Zealand for India in 2004. I didn’t then know of Lauris Edmond and had just started dipping my toes into New Zealand poetry (just as I was to leave for what ended up being four years abroad, in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and then London). I still have this same copy on my bookshelf that I reach for now: it travelled with me over those solitary years and was subsequently lugged from flat to flat, city to city, to finally wind up in the bookshelf of the house I hope I won’t have to move from any time soon. Opening it conjures up all those days and nights spent in foreign lands, homesick, nostalgic, lonely, building that peculiar interest in one’s own country that can only be ignited by distance (and a good dose of naivety)

Edmond so accurately conjured up the Wellington I’d just left behind, with the specificity of her ‘Outside the Public Library,’ or ‘Driving from the Airport,’ and lines like ‘the drowsy gorse on Varsity Hill.’ But it’s less her evocation of place than her irreverence that stood out to me then, and still strikes many chords for me today. Lines like ‘I saw a woman singing in a car/opening her mouth as wide as the sky, cigarette burning in her hand…’ and ‘yes yes of course I am hard to please –/yet I can see this quiet sky/with the evening in it…’ somehow gave me permission to notice and for the noticing to be enough. As if her poems were saying: just do the looking, the listening, and the interesting parts will follow. Reflecting on that now, I realise how much of my own writing has been tightly tethered to that core philosophy.

 

Charlotte Grimshaw

When I was starting to write fiction, I returned many times to The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. I was excited by the brilliance of Mansfield’s prose, and I loved the wit, style, beauty and originality of her sentences. I was living in London when I wrote my first novel, and stories like ‘At the Bay’ intensified the nostalgia for New Zealand that was the driving force of my writing.

 

 

I thought no one could match Mansfield until I discovered Alice Munro’s collections, Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage and The Progress of Love. I was fascinated by Munro’s skill at finding the extraordinary in the mundane. She conveys so much by suggestion, and there’s wonderful precision in her prose. I read and return to her collections for lessons in structure and economy. The writing appears effortless, yet she builds intensity until simple prose begins to carry layers of extra implication, in the same way that the best poetry manages, mysteriously, to radiate meaning somehow beyond itself, beyond the words. There’s always a dry wit operating, and a benign view of human craziness, but when she wants to, she can shock with cold, hard force. Stories like ‘Family Furnishings’ and ‘Fits’ are great examples of layering, precision and control, and the ability to deliver a real punch.

 

 

Karyn Hay

I’m going to do this by feel. By shining a torch down the murky lane of memory. No Google, no Wikipedia; those well-oiled tools of the writer. No inflated and entirely untrue recollections of exactly how much certain passages, certain women, influenced me, because, actually, I can only remember how these books made me feel.  I’ll just have to use words for the words I don’t have. These are adjectives, nouns, phrases, a jumble. Like my memory.

 

 

Enid Blyton The Famous Five and The Secret Seven

They’re not kidding when they say, ‘Turn off the light! No reading!’ And when they’ve gone you’re dead still, listening intently in the dark, and then slowly, you slowly reach under the pillow and slide out the torch and the book.

Fear

Stealth

Getting Caught

Obsessed

Transported

Adventure

 

 

 

Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex

Older now. I can read when I want. Kafka, Hesse, Baudelaire, Sartre, men’s words …

Intrigue

Disbelief

Sophistication

A bun!

Fuck

 

 

 

Keri Hulme The Bone People

 

Insight

Surprise

Truth

Myth

Here

 

Selina Tusitala Marsh

 

 

I am captured, neh, enraptured by Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book, her fourth collection of poetry (and winner at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards). It deals with savage topics savagely, courageously, and she’s unabashedly brutal in her approach to the aftermath, and ongoing nature, of colonialism. We both have anti-homage poems to James Cook, the icon of European discovery of our savage selves in the ‘Pacific’. Mine’s called ‘Breaking Up With Captain Cook’. I first performed it in 2018 at the British Library, in response the exhibition of Indigenous and oceanic artwork created to mark the 250th anniversary of the first of James Cook’s voyages.  Paula Green published it on Poetry Shelf. My first lines are:

Dear Jimmy,

It’s not you, it’s me.

Well,
maybe it is you.

We’ve both changed.

When I first met you
you were my change.

Well, your ride
the Endeavour
was anyway
on my 50-cent coin.

 

I’m playfully acerbic in my account of falling in love, then out of love, with Cook.

Avia’s version is titled ‘250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand’ and her first lines are:

 

Hey James,

yeah, you

in the white wig

in that big Endeavour

sailing the blue, blue water

like a big arsehole

F… YOU, BITCH.

 

She’s out for blood. Her way, in her voice. I love our similarities and differences. My mate Phil plugged into GPTchatbot: write a poem in the style of Selina Tusitala Marsh. It produced a lukewarm version of my voice. Then he asked it to write a poem mixing my style with Quentin Tarantino’s. It wouldn’t:

‘Marsh’s poetry style is known for its Pacific Islander culture and heritage, while Tarantino’s style is known for its violent and gritty themes. Combining these two styles in a poem would be incongruous and disrespectful to both the poet and the filmmaker.’

GPTchatbot obviously hasn’t read Avia yet.

 

 

Most people know of Clarissa Pinkola Estes by her 1992 classic Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Fewer, though, know about her 2011 publication The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths & Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype. As I enter into the Western medically defined period known as ‘perimenopause’ and what indigenous cultures elsewhere call all sorts of different kinds of rebirth, this book is a taonga. Full of story, ritual, ribald re-tellings of women and their relationship with their bodies, Estes’ global insights render one truth particularly vivid for me: western societies/patriarchal hegemonies/the whole shebang of capitalism teaches us to separate ourselves from the actual bodies we have. Estes showed me how to reconnect to the body Consort, our forever faithful companion until we die.

 

 

I discovered Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened (2013) at the top of a pile of books in a corner of Auckland’s Hard To Find Book Shop. Actually, it found me. I’m working on my third graphic memoir in the Mophead series and Allie’s fresh, funny, vulnerable, truth-telling lines had me laughing and tearing up all day. Taken from her blog, these quirky tales of her life, often with her dysfunctional dogs, just warmed me and inspired me to be as true to the telling of my life as I can. Allie inspired me to muck around with a new series of cartoons that had me laughing out loud (see photo). Led by her line, I’m creating my own.

 

 

Paula Morris

When I was a student at the University of York in England, I studied fiction by American women writers for the first time – Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison. I started buying short story collections, and two writers became long-time obsessions: Deborah Eisenberg and Ellen Gilchrist. My introduction to Eisenberg was her first collection, Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), and Gilchrist’s second, Victory Over Japan (1984).

 

 

Decades later, when I was living in New Orleans and teaching at Tulane, I got to meet both of them: I gushed to Eisenberg about her story ‘Window’ (from the collection Twilight of the Superheroes) and made her cry. Gilchrist visited one of my classes and we were all terrified of her. She invited me up to Fayetteville, to talk to her students at the University of Arkansas, and insist that I drink soup and Fiji water: I remained in awe. I wonder if my interest in New Orleans was a result of reading so much Gilchrist. Her story ‘Rich’, from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), remains one of her most famous, and might be the reason some people in the city shunned her work. It was a little too close to the truth.

 

 

I came to Patricia Grace’s work relatively late – all her books read this century, I’m ashamed to say. Tu (2004) is an outstanding novel about the visceral experience of World War II and its consequences. Tu’s violent father is a destroyed veteran of the first war – ‘Just because he come home from war don’t mean he never died there,’ says Tu’s mother – but Tu can’t resist what he thinks will be ‘the biggest adventure’ of his life. This is an intense novel, exciting and moving, subversive in Grace’s particular way, and reminds us, on the 60th anniversary of Monte Cassino, how the fabled 28 (Māori) Battalion upended history, overseas and here.

 

 

More recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Korean and Japanese fiction in translation – anything I can get my hands on. The opening sentence of Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, published in English in 2020, reads: ‘If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.’ After that, I couldn’t stop reading. Its subject is the perception and control of women’s bodies, and the novel is frank and unsentimental in its exploration of female relationships, motherhood and the constraints of class and social expectations in contemporary Japan.

 

 

I will always love Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, published in 1925. The novel is written as a misspelled diary, recounting the misadventures in of avaricious ditz Lorelei Lee and her cynical friend Dorothy Shaw. On a trip to Europe, Lorelei is trying to ensnare the wealthy and pious Henry Spoffard, convincing him she is there to ‘improve’ her own mind and ‘reform’ Dorothy. In Munich, the girls suffer through a night of German theatre, then make separate plans for the day, as Lorelei notes:

Well today Mr Spoffard is going to take me around to all of the museums in Munchen, which are full of kunst, that I really ought to look at, but Dorothy said she had been punished for all of her sins last night, so now she is going to begin life all over again by going out with her German gentleman friend, who is going to take her to a house called the Half Brow house which is the worlds largest size of a Beer Hall. So Dorothy said I could be a high brow and get full of kunst, but she is satisfide to be a Half brow and get full of beer. But Dorothy will really never be full of anything else but unrefinement.

 

 

Catherine Robertson

Last year, I found a four-volume collection of Mary Stewart novels in Book Hound in Newtown. The only title I recognised was Touch Not The Cat, which came out towards the end of her writing career in 1976. I had a feeling I’d loved it when young but could recall not one thing about the plot. Soon as I read the opening, where the heroine receives a psychic warning from her mystery lover, it all came back to me. Mary Stewart was my bridge from childhood fantasy novels to adult fiction that retained elements of the supernatural but added in romance that seemed quite raunchy to me in my early teens. Her books are action packed, the lead female characters capable, courageous and resourceful, as well as being excellent drivers who acquit themselves brilliantly in car chases. Stewart helped shaped my sense of what a novel should be, and I regret it’s taken me forty-plus years to reconnect with her.

 

 

I worship a long list of funny women writers but if I had to choose who’s had the most influence over how I view characters and language, it’d be Stella Gibbons. Her comic classic, Cold Comfort Farm was published in 1932 and has not been out of print since. It was meant to be a spoof of the earnest rustic novels popular at the time, but it’s much too rich and satisfying to be classified only as satire. The most famous character is, of course, Great Aunt Ada, who saw something nasty in the woodshed. But Gibbons gives everyone enough depth for us to care what happens to them. Even Great Aunt Ada, who is a tyrannical old bat. Gibbons’ dialect is comedy gold and her timing perfect. Witness this between farmer Reuben and lead character, Flora: ‘”I ha’ scranleted two hundred furrows come five o’clock down i’ the bute.” It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply.’ Genius.

 

 

It wasn’t until I read her recent memoir, From the Centre, that I fully appreciated how much Patricia Grace has meant to my reading and writing life. Her work has always been with me. Short stories in The Listener. The Kuia and the Spider/ Te Kuia me te Pungawerewere, a children’s book I loved even though I was in my mid-teens. Her novel Potiki that came out when I was 20 and caused a stir for its use of te reo with no glossary. (Thirty years later, my son would inform me that he felt no need to read another novel as nothing could ever be as great.) More short stories, Tu, Chappy. Her presence at writer’s festivals. Her wisdom, persistence and quiet steel. Her generosity and extraordinary legacy. Thank you, Patricia, for everything.

 

 

Elizabeth Smither

Recently my daughter returned to me the Colettes I had given her as a teenager so they could be passed onto my granddaughter. They make a lovely line in the bookcase in their brightly covered Secker & Warburg translations. I open The Last of Chéri (1926) and locate the pages where Chéri discovers the courtesan, Lea, who had initiated him into the mysteries of sex has become ‘not monstrous but huge, and loaded with buttresses of fat in every part of her body. Her arms like rounded thighs, stood out from her hips on plump cushions of flesh just below her armpits. The plain skirt and the nondescript long jacket, opening on a linen blouse with a jabot, proclaimed that the wearer had abdicated, was no longer concerned to be a woman, and had acquired a kind of sexless dignity’. The Claudine novels – first published between 1900 and 1903 – will be where to begin, and the eternally loveable and precociously astute Gigi (1944).

 

 

Anne Kennedy’s The Last Days of the National Costume (2013) has always been a favourite. My sewing abilities are minimal – I remember cutting up one of my efforts from a dressmaking class and throwing it in the trash or labouring to the point of obsession on a quilt made from squares of evening dress. The garment in this case, around which the plot spins and flickers like a disco ball, is an Irish dancing dress which will require all the skills of Gogo the seamstress. Set in a period very similar to today – the Auckland blackout of 1998 – when the same inventiveness is required, as businesses operate by candlelight, valleys sink into shadows and GoGo restores more than a costume. How wonderful are all those Hi Vis wearers who can put things back together.

 

 

The latest novel by Australian writer Gail Jones, Salonika Burning (2022), takes four famous figures – two Brits, two Aussies – who served in Salonika/Thessaloniki during the First World War and imagines how their stories might have overlapped. Salonika burns to the ground through mishap and the whole book feels like ashes and smoke. Miles Franklin, Olive King, Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer – identified as Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley – are volunteers behind the front lines. Olive buys and equips her own ambulance, Stella is a nurse assistant, Grace is a surgeon and Stanley organises the donkey teams that act as stretcher carriers. The writing is episodic and impressionist – imagine a Seurat painting exploding and the pieces settling down, forever changed but utterly unforgettable.

 

 

Alison Wong

I think I was fourteen. In my hometown, now devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle, my English teacher Mr Exeter (Peter) lent me Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry (1957). This was the first book to ‘explode its atoms’ of astonishment into my heart. I hadn’t known prose  – a story – could be so poetic, that it could leap from possibility to possibility and be utterly, imaginatively transformative.

 

 

Even so, as I scribbled my thoughts, my scraps of poems and stories, sometimes getting up in the night to write them down, I’d never met a writer, never even heard of a Chinese writer. I didn’t know I could be a writer.

Years later, on the footpath outside the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, I saw Patricia Grace. I knew she lived at the end of the road not far from where at dusk I’d walk along the beach bewitched by the wide orange-pink-gold sky, the dark silhouette of Mana Island. I‘d come to hear her speak. I was very shy, but she was alone, waiting, which made it a little easier to approach her. She did not know me, did not know if I had potential, yet this pioneer of Māori literature – author of Waiariki (1975), Potiki (1986), From the Centre: A Writer’s Life (2021), too many books to mention, literary mother to so many of us – told me in her quiet, steady voice, ‘You need to write about your people.’ Thank you, Patricia.

 

 

Later still, someone gave me The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston. This was the first book by a Chinese writer that thrilled me with its poetic landscape of dream, memory, myth. A generation older than me, she is American with immigrant parents, her experience and stories are very different from mine, more fantastical, more ‘Chinese’. Yet here at last was a Chinese writer who opened the windows of my imagination. Now I read again the first sentence on the yellowed first page: ‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’ I laugh. I am writing my own memoir. I wonder if I am an obedient daughter.

 

 

After so long almost alone in the desert of Asian literature of Aotearoa, just the odd precious book/author springing up here, there, now I witness a burgeoning of voices. Now one of the books that speaks of my astonishment, my joy, is A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (2021). The writers and works within this anthology are only an indication of the vibrancy and diversity of not just Asian voices, but of all New Zealanders and our complex, evolving, multiple identities, languages and cultures.

 

Briar Wood

Books by women writers have inspired me since before a time I can remember consciously. My early reading was filled with popular texts by widely respected authors. Sadly, books by writers from Aotearoa New Zealand were not so accessible then as they are now. I liked school journals a lot, and at some point early on, read a memorable story by Arapera Blank, although I didn’t know it was by her until rereading it many years later.

 

 

The first classics I read, or tried to, aged around nine or ten, were Wuthering Heights, which I got drawn into immediately, and Jane Eyre. The latter was a puzzle until later, although the chapter with the death of Jane’s friend Helen Burns at boarding school made a big impact because my Mum had been to girls’ boarding school and was a nurse.

Dorothy Parker’s pithy wit had an impact on me as a teen reader. Romance between women and narratives of female friendship (Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple) made strong impressions, as did the work of poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Denise Levertov. American poetry was influential at the time I was studying at university, often foregrounding open form and colloquial language. I grew up trying to practice ecologically aware economy, and poetry seemed the form that most fitted that worldview. Sci-fi by women also fascinated me at that time; I reread Octavia Butler’s Parable books not long ago and still can’t put them down.

 

 

Fleur Adcock wrote poetry that briskly moved relationships between Britain and Aotearoa into modern times. My mother died recently and recalling Adcock’s poem ‘The Chiffonier’ with its cry of middle-class angst ‘I want my Mother, not her chiffonier’ was strangely comforting.  Yes, however we might surround ourselves with home comforts, relationships with loved ones are primal. She refers to her mother as ‘Dear little Mother’ like a character from a play written in Soviet realist style, and it’s that sense of the mother as a person who is both individual and like someone from a folk tale or pakiwaitara that I find so deeply tender and affecting.  A woman friend confirmed that she too remembered the poem from the 1980s when it was first published in The Listener.

 

 

Interesting then, that the two books I think about the most in contemporary times are novels: Patricia Grace’s Pōtiki and Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman. The integral connections of people to whenua and moana in Pōtiki and how whānau pull together to hold onto their marae are a life-lesson. Grace’s use of multiple narration gives the novel so many facets that it’s an iridescent ao, hurihanga. My students in London got it, loved it. It’s as relevant now as it was when it was published in 1986. I’ve truly read it dozens of times and always learn something new. The book shows the benefits of marae existence, so that all readers can appreciate the necessity of maintaining connections to customary ways of life.

Erdrich’s The Night Watchman is a classic page turner. The characters are utterly spellbinding, the young women finding jobs in the 1950s, dating, sharing their lives with each other and meaningful exchanges in the car on the way to work, confused and focused young men, fathers, mothers, grandparents, whānau. Perhaps because it celebrates the history, humour, ways of life and survival of Chippewa people I would know little about without it, if I had to take one book with me for a long journey anywhere, this is the one.