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

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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.

 

 

Writers’ Round Table on Japan

 

A Taste of Clouds: New Zealand Writers Encounter Japan is a free ANZL bilingual sampler created in 2022 and available for download here.

The New Zealand writers sampled in this publication have all encountered Japan — in real life, on the news, through relatives and ancestors and friends, or in their imaginations. A Taste of Clouds features excerpts from creative work by Johanna Aitchison, John Tāne Christeller, Patricia Grace, Siobhan Harvey, Kirsten Le Harivel, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Ben Kemp, Colleen Maria Lenihan, Vivienne Plumb, Yeonghee Seo, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Carl Shuker and Yoshiko Teraoka.

This round table brings together Kirsten, author of the poetry collection Shelter (2021), who lives on the Kāpiti Coast; Colleen, author of the story collection Kōhine (2022), in Auckland; Carl, author of five novels, in Wellington; and Yuten Sawanishi, a fiction writer and lecturer in Japanese literature, in Kyoto. Paula Morris – project manager of A Taste of Clouds – asks questions and mentions Korea.

Yuten is on the board of the Kyoto Writers Residency, launched in October 2022: Paula took part in the inaugural residency, and the photos of Kyoto in this feature are from her time there. The other writers in the 2022 residency were Hubert Antoine, Ao Omae, Emily Balistieri, Alfian Bin Sa’at and Anna Cima.

Our conversation took place in February 2023, prior to Yuten’s first visit to New Zealand to explore possibilities of a reciprocal writers’ exchange.

 

 

Paula: Would each New Zealander talk about the time you spent in Japan and which of your works are set in Japan? You could also mention other places you’ve lived. Yuten, could you tell us a little about your own work, and also about the time you spent living in Germany?

Colleen: I first went to Tokyo in 1999 for a three-month stint. Upon my brief return to New Zealand, I accepted a marriage proposal from my Japanese boyfriend over the phone, and moved there in a matter of weeks.  At first I lived in Fuchu, a city in the Western Tokyo metropolis, then moved to central Tokyo: Shibuya, Daikanyama and Roppongi. On that initial trip to Japan I worked in the mizu shobai as a dancer in Kabukicho, Tokyo’s red light district. It was an incredibly stressful job and my first time overseas. I felt like a baby – everything was new and I didn’t understand anything.  It was all very overwhelming and I vowed never to return. 

But back in New Zealand, the pace of life was so glacial after the intense energy of Tokyo and I couldn’t stand it. I was in love and desperate to go back. Tokyo is so fascinating, thrilling, and addictive. I felt like I was in a movie. I hung out with strippers, models, money brokers, DJs, rock stars and yakuza. l stayed until 2014, and moved to New York for about 18 months. I much preferred Tokyo though and never really settled in New York. I came back to New Zealand in 2016 and started writing.

In my short story collection Kōhine , nine of the stories are set in Japan and draw on my experiences there. Losing my only child in Tokyo, working as a dancer and a hostess. The story ‘Directions’ is told from the point of view of crows living in Daikanyama. I was obsessed with the crows and often photographed them.  They are a constant, watchful presence and quite intimidating. They cause problems as they dig through trash, lay stones on train lines and sometimes attack people. I was intrigued to learn that in Japanese mythology they are divine messengers and a symbol of power. They are magnificent, clever birds. 

 

 

Yuten: Nice to meet you all online. I’m Yuten Sawanishi, a novelist. You can read one of my stories in English – ‘Filling up with Sugar’– on the Granta site. It is also included in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. I have not yet written a novel set in New Zealand, but I have written a novel set in a deserted island in Polynesia. The title is Rain and Crows. It’s a story about a World War II  soldier and an army nurse who survive on a deserted island and have children. It’s about their grandchildren as well. The story begins with the last survivor, Tadashi, found in a Harakiri state, and then their family story is told from Tadashi’s perspective. 

Colleen brought up the topic of crows: although crows are not supposed to be in Polynesia, they play a very important role in my novel as well. However, this is not based on a Japanese myth, but on an image of the raven as the god of creation.

Until I was six and a half, I lived in Germany because of my father’s job. When I played with my brother and friends, I spoke German and I used Japanese only when I was talking to my parents, so when I returned to Japan and entered elementary school, I was shocked to find that I could not understand what the people around me were saying. I could also hardly read or write, so Japanese appeared almost as a foreign language to me, not my mother tongue. I remember I was crying on the way home  on my first day of school. 

I picked up the Japanese language quickly, but even now, as a writer, I still find the Japanese language to be restrictive. On the other hand, Germany is not my home ground either. When I was a university student, I went to Germany for a short-term study abroad (I’d forgotten my German, so I studied it again from scratch). At that time, I realised that wherever I went, I was myself, and decided to do what I wanted to do. So I decided to become a writer.

Kirsten: I arrived in Tokyo in my mid-twenties with the intention of cycling from Japan to Europe with a friend. However, not long after I landed I was drawn into a spiritual eco-commune in the foothills of Mt Fuji, which turned the cycle tour upside down. Eventually I got back on my bike and we cycled around Hokkaido but that was where my tour ended! 

 

 

When my visa ran out, I sent the bike back to Aotearoa and went on to study meditation in Thailand. I continued west, to India, to visit a family I met in the Japanese commune, and worked in their hometown, Ahmedabad for three years. The city had a thriving network of social organisations (a world I was familiar with in New Zealand) and I was lucky to work for two local NGOs, the first supporting young Indian graduates to create social change and the second, an ethical travel guide in the style of Lonely Planet but developed by Gujaratis. 

Several poems in my first collection, Shelter, are set in Japan, some of which are included in A Taste of Clouds, and aspects of my time there continue to feature in my work. Japan was where I picked up a pen for the first time since my teens and when I returned to New Zealand, I was committed to being a writer, although it took me a while to call myself one.

I understand Yuten’s feeling of disconnection: I grew up in central Glasgow, moved to rural Palmerston North as a teenager and then lived for several years in Asia, before returning to New Zealand. For a long time, I felt like a real outsider here too. Migration, home, belonging are all themes that seem to come up in my work – how we connect (or disconnect) from the places and people we come from and how we find ourselves in the places we have come to. 

Carl: Wow, what an amazing set of stories: Japan really was and clearly is a locus for fascinating personalities. I overlapped with some of you in weird ways – I came to Tokyo in ‘99 too, Colleen! But age 24 with debts and needs for money and experience after finishing my first novel and wanting adventure. I returned to NZ to write up this experience in a book about gaijin decadence in Tokyo and Japanese history called The Method Actors, then 200,000 words wasn’t enough and I had to go back. 

The second trip I feel I may well have visited and stayed at that eco-commune near Mt Fuji, Kirsten! Couldn’t be the Earth Embassy/Solar Cafe place here could it? The place made a big impression on me. The floating forest of Aokigahara is one of those intense places with physical-spiritual loads like Jerusalem, Beirut, Nagasaki, Shimabara… I set part of Three Novellas for a Novel at the commune’s cafe/inn: I did a limited edition download ‘for free or more’ of the book for a while which you can still find on the wayback machine. Some cool photography from Japan courtesy of a friend and colleague there. The book imagines a future of concrete cancer where Japanese cement buildings can suddenly collapse, so an architecture of wood and plexiglass is growing.

Yuten, I’ve met many very interesting Japanese who find themselves caught somewhere between the world of other countries and never quite back inside traditional Japanese life and expectations. In my experience these people suffer somewhat for it, but become very interesting individuals. Japan’s closedness – 250 years of isolation, and intense immigration policies since – is a feature of the experience. Sometimes I never felt so free, others never so boxed in. I had to leave as I saw myself becoming shut in a gilded cage, but it has driven me to two books and a lifelong love-hate relationship with the place, not to mention the immensely important cuisine.

 

       

Carl in Shibuya, Tokyo, 2001                                   Mt Fuji. Photo credit: Anna Cima

 

Paula: Carl talks about a love-hate relationship with Japan. I wonder if we all have that with anywhere we live, as well as the place we come from.

Colleen: Great question! But first, Kia ora, Yuten – I enjoyed your short story on the Granta site and I’m intrigued by the premise of your novel, Rain and Crows. Sounds right in my wheelhouse! And ngā mihi to you all for sharing your experiences. I read them avidly and could empathise with a lot of things – as in Kirsten’s work, themes of the notion of home, and where is home anyway, emerge in my own writing. In my story ‘Mama’, the hostess protagonist is weaving through Ginza alleyways when it hits her: ‘How did she end up here? When she first arrived in Tokyo, everything was weird. Then it became normal. Now it was weird that it was normal.’

I absolutely love Japan and have a deep respect and admiration for the Japanese people and culture. Though as I mentioned, I struggled there, even hated it, at first. I recall catching packed trains all over Tokyo, commuting from various teaching jobs, and would be out in some suburb on the outskirts of the city in a sea of people and be the only foreigner. Everyone in my world for prolonged periods was Japanese, aside from my daughter. I was definitely an outsider. Gaijin literally means ‘outside person.’ 

It was hard on my daughter too. I was once summoned to her high school, to be confronted by the principal and all her teachers looking very serious. I didn’t know what had happened, Monique was clearly upset and I was alarmed. What kind of  trouble was she in? The principal said that my daughter’s hair was the wrong colour and unfair to the other students, who weren’t allowed to dye their hair.  She solemnly pushed a box of black hair dye across her desk and all the teachers agreed – this was the solution. I explained that dark brown was Monique’s natural hair colour, and pushed the box back. That wouldn’t do, and the box was presented to me again. We never did dye her hair black. 

My daughter made a lot of friends, and had many caring teachers over the years. Her first elementary school in Japan assigned Monique her own teacher to learn Japanese one-on-one, and she was fluent within six months. They were very kind to her and I, and did their best to make us feel welcome and included. 

I miss Japan but haven’t returned since I left nine years ago. I can’t wait to go back. Having spent most of my adult life there, it feels like my second home. Returning to New Zealand was rocky as I had reverse culture shock. For a while, I felt people here were quite rude because I was used to Japanese manners. It took me five years to settle. I love Aotearoa; this is my tūrangawaewae. But even now I still find some aspects of the culture challenging. I miss Japanese customs and ideas about the world. Sometimes, when people complain, I want to say ‘Shouganai’ [‘It can’t be helped.’]

Kirsten: It’s so really fascinating how many crossovers there are between us all, I love hearing everyone’s stories. I wonder if this feeling of ‘love-hate’ is almost an inevitable part of the experience of being a migrant and/or from a migrant family (or from a minority group in society), because we have this knowing that our familial way of life, isn’t the only way to be and that it can sometimes be antithetical to the values of the society we’re living in.

Like Colleen, I find there are aspects of each place I’ve lived that I cherish and ones that I am quite happy to have left behind. I also felt reverse culture shock when I moved back to New Zealand after living in India and if I’d had an equivalent of ‘Shouganai,’ I would have used it! I found the lack of information and awareness of the world outside of Aotearoa and—amongst middle-class-plus peeps particularly – the lack of awareness of privilege, inequality and the patriarchy really rattling. It took me several years to feel ‘at home’ here again as I didn’t feel that I fitted into the expected Pākehā, white, middle-class boxes, though I benefit from them, because of the way our society operates. 

I also experienced some of the isolation and loneliness that can come from being the only foreigner at work, home and in the community. Sometimes, I also found it kind of freeing – something I only realised when I came back to Aotearoa and all the ‘noise’ and expectations from media, government, socials and corporations was suddenly directed at me. I realise that being able to operate safely in any society is a situation of immense privilege. 

Had my background been different and my then in-laws and friends imposed more of the localised expectations on my behaviour, I would most likely have had a different experience. At that time, I was also really committed to assimilating. Now that I have kids, I know I would have been a lot less willing to take on values that didn’t align with my own.

Yuten: There are so many common topics and things I don’t know that it’s exciting for me too. Kirsten and Carl, I didn’t know there was such a spot on Mt.Fuji. I haven’t climbed Mt.Fuji yet, but now I have a place to stop before I reach the summit. Colleen, thank you for reading my work. Your story about your daughter’s school reminds me of my experience at swimming school when I was in elementary school.

I went to swimming school with my brother. When I was in Germany, I learned breaststroke first, in case I drowned in a river or the sea. For the same reason, I experienced swimming with clothes on. But in Japan, we learn crawl [freestyle] first. I don’t know why. The swimming school had a designated swimsuit made and sold by the school. One day my mother gave us each another swimsuit because the designated one hadn’t dried after the wash. When my brother and I were about to enter the pool wearing these swimsuits, the coach stopped us. We weren’t allowed in the pool because we weren’t wearing the school swimsuits.

Afterwards, the school called my mother and had her bring our school-specified swimsuit. Meanwhile we were standing at the edge of the pool. My mother was very angry. ‘Why can’t my children enter the pool just because their swimsuits are different?’ she asked. The coach said, ‘Your children are so embarrassed. It’s a pity.’ ‘It’s your fault,’ my mother retorted. My mother (especially after returning from Germany) is a person who speaks her own thoughts to everyone, as Carl said.

Now I know that my mother was right. But then I was really embarrassed. At the age of eight, I was trying very hard to fit in as quickly as possible. I was good at breaststroke and loved swimming, but in Japan I started as a beginner. At the same time, I was tired and hurt by the act of  worrying about my surroundings. In this country, fitting into a group was an important way of life. 

On the other hand, within the rules, if you show that you are excellent, you will be praised. The swimming cap has a place where a magic sticker is attached, and each time the swimming technique improves, the line increases one by one and the colour changes. Beginners have a white line up to three lines, then intermediate has a red line, advanced has a blue line, and masters have a black line. Aiming for each higher class, students master swimming. Such a kind of system tames children through rules. I think that there were a lot of small traps like that in Japan, and the mindset of ‘Shouganai’ was nurtured in this way. 

Kirsten’s words recall something Paula and the Belgian writer Hubert Antoine said at an event during last year’s Kyoto Literary Residency. Japanese people are very kind; if you ask for directions, they will show you the way; if you ask how to send an email, they will help you. However, there are few people who really care about the other person and follow through to the end in any situation. They check the rules, but if you’re not following the rulebook, they often won’t help you further. In the past, it was said that everyone was not kind in the way they are today in Japan. Instead, there were ‘really kind people’. Recently, I feel that the number of genuinely kind people has decreased.

 

 

Carl: I worked with a team of Japanese guys and one was a real loner, a bad boy, who raised hell, was always funny, individualistic and genuinely kind and really a free-thinker. I saw how his company treated him – the nail who stands up will be knocked down. He was sent out of his hometown, moved out to the sticks in Saitama. That really stung, watching the ‘wa’ assert itself over this unique individual. Literature to me is the assertion of individuality and it was a salutary lesson in the freedom I at least took for granted. 

 

Paula: What are your literary influences, from Japan and elsewhere?

Carl: I read a lot of – and about – [Yukio] Mishima before I wrote The Method Actors, to try to better understand the postwar shift in psyche, Mishima being a very complex reaction to this. The tension between the martial spirit and failure, loss, and how a culture transforms to accommodate this. I also loved Murakami Ryu’s Almost Transparent Blue (1976), set among a group of  teenagers on the fringes of a US army base: I loved the decadence and lostness set alongside complex political realities. I was interested in the space between decadence (mostly among gaijin in my book) and the past not being past in Japan. 

Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking had been recently published [in 1997], about the Japanese atrocity in China in 1937 and I found in Yaskuni Shrine – the controversial shrine to the war dead, including WWII – a strange little hardback called A rebuttal to the rape of Nanking where convoluted historiography and tortured data (and English) were used to assert that these events hadn’t happened. I was also influenced by shoujo manga, primary coloured emotions, deeply romantic and personal forms meeting with grinding bloody histories. It was almost an assertion of the purpose and rationale of what I thought literature should be in the face of histories documenting the deaths of hundreds of thousands – something to do with minutely observed human moments otherwise lost in the numbers of casualties. 

This was where I was at in Tokyo at the time – squaring this life of pleasure, decadence and (relative) riches with the epic scale of the loss and warfare just decades ago. Trying somehow to make the hundreds of volumes of the Tokyo War Trials transcripts sit alongside a nomihodai [all you can drink] menu in a karaoke booth in Shibuya after the trains shut down. 

Yuten: As Carl said, I think literature is something that liberates the individual. I recovered from my loneliness in ‘wa’ by reading Hermann Hesse’s novels and poetry. I rediscovered my lost homeland in literature.

As for Japanese literature, I was strongly influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon. I was fascinated by the structure of the film, the camera angles, the music, and the movements of the actors. I especially like the composition, which requires the audience to mentally reconstruct the content of the film after viewing it, like most good literary works. 

The film is based on the 1922 short story ‘In a Grove’ [or ‘In a Bamboo Grove’] by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose work I research in an academic field, and of course I am greatly influenced by Akutagawa’s works. [Note: Akutagawa also published a story called ‘Rashomon’ when he was a student, but Kurosawa only used a few details from this in the film.] 

My debut work, Village of Flamingos, is set in Belgium. One day, the protagonist’s wife suddenly transforms into a flamingo. The villagers try to hide the bizarre fact, but other people find out. It turns out that most of the women in the village have turned into flamingos. In my work, I depict the disturbance of the villagers. One of the works that inspired me to write this is Akutagawa’s ‘Horse Legs.’ Akutagawa’s story is about a man who dies suddenly; is found – in the afterlife – to have died by mistake; and is brought back to life. However, the legs of his corpse are rotten, so his body is revived with the legs of a horse. The man is shy about the horse’s legs, and doesn’t tell his wife or colleagues, but gradually the horse’s legs take over his body. 

Kobo Abe’s 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes [or Sand Woman] is also a work that I really like and was influenced by. In addition, I am fascinated by Yoko Ogawa’s narrative style, the sense of distance from the characters, and the allegorical nature of her works.

Kirsten: I’m currently exploring similar literary territory to your work, Yuten (and I enjoyed your piece in Granta too). I don’t know if you would – or would want to – call it magical realism, but I enjoy the possibilities that exist when elements of the fantastical become embedded in what is otherwise an everyday world. I’m in the midst of writing my first novel and I’m finding magical realism to be a really useful genre in which to imagine alternative realities, particularly when it comes to trying to break open traditional relationships and responses to trauma. 

Colleen: My story ‘Directions’, featuring multiple crow narrators, was directly influenced by the ghost voices in the novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) by George Saunders.  I attended a masterclass of his, and have seen him speak twice. He’s an incredible teacher and writer, and I wish I’d read his analysis of Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), before completing my collection. I find his takes on the practice of writing comforting and inspiring, and enjoy his Story Club on Substack. He’s a practising Buddhist, which informs his writing. I have an enduring, deep interest in Buddhist philosophy sparked during my time in Japan, and these teachings helped me survive the loss of my daughter there. 

 

 

I have every book by W. Somerset Maugham. He grew up in France but moved to England as a child after his parents died. He was never accepted by the world of letters despite being one of the most successful writers of his time. I like his clear, plainly written storytelling. ‘Rain’ is a brilliant short story set in Samoa [which Maugham visited in 1916]. He wrote many short stories set in Asia, and was a wanderer, like me. 

I also love The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagan, in particular her lists: Elegants Things, Hateful Things, Things that Make One’s Heart Beat Faster. I listen to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, where authors select and read a short story from the magazine archives and analyse it afterwards. ‘Barn Burning’ [from The Elephant Vanishes] by Haruki Murakami and ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever are faves. I love writing in the second person, so Bright Lights, Big City (1984) by Jay McInerney made an impact on me – I was impressed the author could maintain that voice so well over a whole novel. 

I just registered that you went to Japan in ‘99 too, Carl! We might have crossed paths without even realising. It was such an interesting time to be in Tokyo. 

Carl: Colleen! That’s crazy. There’s really such a small amount of foreigners in Tokyo at any one time. We may have even met eyes in Shinjuku – that assessing glance foreigners give each other. I’m psyched to read Kōhine now I’ve discovered you. I loved your self-portrait in Reading Room: ‘Who are you angry at?’  Many of us might benefit from being asked that as a young person.

 

Paula: ‘Barn Burning’ was a re-working of the William Faulkner story of the same name, published in 1939. Both were source material for the fantastic 2018 Korean film Burning, directed by Lee Chang-dong, who also directed Peppermint Candy (2000). Sorry: I have to insert something about Korea into every conversation.

And my final question: if you could transport yourselves right now to a particular place in Japan, where would it be? What would you be doing there? Yuten, this question is for you as well.

Carl: If I were back in TKO I would probably be eating, and probably at my favourite kaiten zushi in Ikebukuro, ordering o-toro, the fattiest of tuna cuts, made for me by hand by the stern old sushi chefs. But afterwards, I’d like to cross this bridge over the Shakujii river in heavy rain in blossom season as I did once when the river rose to fill this canyon up to the road, an endless violent cataract of seething brown blanketed in twitching white petals.

Hanami, or blossom viewing, is about as sad a Japanese cliche as there is but this was a profound moment in a profound place at a profound time for me. There are hundreds more places I’d go again: Nara; the high rail bridge over the river at Akabane at night and the endless ocean of peopled night; the viewing platform over the floating forest of Aokigahara; Nagasaki; Shimabara and the tokens I found there still placed today by the hidden Christians to commemorate a 17th-century massacre of 16,000 – places that gave me migraines and brought me to tears for their beauty.

 

 

Colleen: It’s too hard to choose one place. Like Carl, one of the first things I would do is eat ōtoro – it melts in your mouth and is my absolute all-time favourite kai. Tino reka! My favourite sushi place is in Nakameguro by the Meguro River (more of a canal really), and the chefs are notoriously surly. I went there so often they grudgingly accepted me and would serve up my regular order of amaebi (sweet shrimp) without me asking for it. Nakameguro is also a beautiful spot for Hanami. 

I would also go to Ukai Toriyama. It’s nestled in dense forest near Mount Takao and you dine in teahouse-style private tatami rooms surrounded by koi ponds and gardens where they grow a lot of their own produce, and make their own wasabi. The food is exquisite and the  atmosphere is sublime.

Finally, I would go to Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto for a Zen meditation retreat. I stayed here before leaving Japan. The temple is within a large complex of 50 temples, Myōshinji. Some of the temples are over 400 years old. The two oldest ones emanate a powerful mauri that is difficult to describe. They are so imposing; it’s a little spooky. I recall asking a taxi driver to take me there, but he insisted it would be closed to the public as it was after five. He was astounded that I was actually staying there. The priest at Shunkoin had opened his small temple for guests, in an effort to raise funds. When I arrived, I couldn’t believe I was staying there too. That’s one of my best memories:  entering the gates of Myōshinji at dusk, a chill down my spine as I passed by the Butsuden Hall, alone in Kyoto.

 

 

Kirsten: I am torn between wanting to be around the energy and vitality of Tokyo and the peaceful vibe of cycle touring through Hokkaido.

If I was in Tokyo, I’d want to go back to Shibuya and ride my bike through the little side streets and busy thoroughfares on the way to an izakaya, noodle house, coffee bar or stationery store.

I would also love to circumnavigate Hokkaido again by bike, but if I had to choose one area specifically, I would choose the coast near Wakkanai. The slow, de-habited feel of the many fishing villages, with their shrines, knots of fishing nets and elderly inhabitants, really reminded me of my childhood, visiting many of the Scottish Isles. As someone who is not particularly ‘practical’ in what they do for a living, I am always in awe of anyone who literally sustains themselves, their whānau and community.

 

 

Yuten: Wow, what a fun question! If I can go anywhere, not just in Japan, I will answer next to a sea turtle swimming in the sea. For me, sea turtles are sacred creatures. It moves very fast when it enters the sea, even though it moves very slowly on land. Its shape is completely different from that of a fish and I think the sea turtle is a symbol of diversity in the sea. The sea turtle swimming gracefully, seen in Hawaii, taught me the beauty of living. So I always want to jump in next to the sea turtle. (I like land tortoises too.)

When asked where I want to go in Japan now, I want to go to the Iruka Kissa-Bar in Kyoto. It was a spacious coffee shop and bar with very good music. There were only four tables near the handmade windows. The food was also good. The katsu-don and tomato sandwich were exquisite (and cheap) and could not be eaten elsewhere. The original cocktails included ‘Frozen Best Score (165000)’ – yes, the owner was a fan of Haruki Murakami. If you asked for a cocktail, the manager would change the music – for example, if you asked for the ‘Norwegian Wood,’ they’d play ‘Norwegian Wood’. It was just a few minutes from my house, and it was my favourite relaxing spot. Unfortunately, it suddenly closed at the end of last year. That’s why I want to go there now.

If I choose a place I can really go, I want to go to Beppu in Kyushu. Beppu is famous for its many hot springs. There are 27,000 sources of hot springs in Japan, of which 2,200 are in Beppu. I lived in Beppu for three and a half years, and I went to a hot spring almost every day. It’s a pity that the hot springs in Beppu are really very-very hot, so I can’t be in there for more than three minutes. There are so many sources of hot springs: in Beppu water from the hot springs flows in the groove of the road, and steam rises everywhere in the city. (If you search ‘Beppu’, you will see images of steam as if it were receiving a bombing.)  It was a very fun wonderland with a lot of energy.

I heard that the New Zealand that I will visit soon is a wonderful land too. While reading Taste of Clouds, I saw many of the sentences focusing on and describing nature in order to understand Japan. I am very interested in the land of New Zealand, which has nurtured such writers’ eyes. 

 

 

Taste of Clouds: New Zealand Writers Encounter Japan is a free e-sampler created by the Academy of NZ Literature. The design and translation team were Takako and Milton Bell. Please download and share.

Print copies are available in Japan from the Kyoto Writers Residency.

 

Best First Books

The Interview: Fiona Farrell

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Fiona Farrell was born in 1947 in Oamaru and her upbringing there has featured in a number of her books, most notably in the 2011 novel Book, Book.

She is one of few New Zealand writers who have been nominated for the NZ Book Awards in all three categories—fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1993 and four of her later novels were shortlisted for those awards. The Villa at the Edge of the Empire was shortlisted in the general non-fiction category in 2016, and her collection of poems written in Ireland, The Pop-up Book of Invasions, was a poetry finalist in 2008.

Farrell has also won awards for her short fiction and for her playwriting, and held many prestigious fellowships and residencies both here and overseas. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction in 2007 and the ONZM for Services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Diamond Jubilee Honours list in 2012. Her 2018 public lecture, at the Auckland Writers Festival, on the political novel in New Zealand can be read in full here.

After many years living at Otanerito on Banks Peninsula, Fiona now lives with her husband in Dunedin. A new novel, The Deck, will be published in 2023.

 

This interview with Morrin Rout took place in November 2022.

 

 

You grew up in Oamaru in a home that valued books. Book Book gave us a real insight, albeit fictional, into the books that first intrigued and enticed you.

Yes, born and raised in North Otago. It was a lovely place to grow up: small, hilly, fantastic atmospheric old buildings — none of them specially cared for or labelled ‘heritage’ buildings. They were just there. The country round there was lovely too: lots of little winding white gravel roads, limestone outcrops, rivers and long sandy beaches where we could take our ponies swimming. Me and my sister and other kids just roamed about unsupervised. It was wonderfully free.

 

It was an interesting concept, using your life as inspiration for a novel. I’m not saying you were unusual in doing that, but I think it was the reason so many readers resonated with the book. 

I’ve never written a memoir — I don’t know if I ever would. I’ve always felt a bit reluctant to write about my family. It would feel intrusive I think and I know I’d get things wrong and it wouldn’t be true or fair.  Plus my sister would kill me. I changed things in Book Book — for instance, the funeral of the mother in that book is nothing like my mother’s funeral. My dad was a devout Catholic but my mother was an equally devout Presbyterian, very proud of her descent from Wee Frees who came out to Dunedin in the 1850s, helped build Knox Church and ran its Sunday School for years and years. So her funeral was at Knox, with ‘The Lord’s my shepherd’ (‘Crimond’) — very traditional, not like the funeral in the book where the mother makes a video and plays the piano for the hymns. That was someone else’s mother. I heard about her years later and thought it was funny. Book Book is based on my life but it’s fiction. I changed details and invented dialogue. But the books that Kate, the main character, reads – they are all 100% the books I’ve loved and been influenced by. They’re definitely ‘real’.

 

You often refer to the great opportunities offered by the welfare state, quoting the vast difference between the life of your great grandmother and yours. There’s a huge underlying sense of social justice or injustice in all your work.

I didn’t have a deprived childhood. Not at all. When I was small my dad had a job reading meters for the Power Board. My mum had given up nursing  to stay home and care for us. There wasn’t a lot of money but we had a big garden so there was lots of soup, lots of bottled fruit. We didn’t own many books: I got Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopedia for Christmas one year — ten volumes in their own little wooden bookshelf. Amazing. I loved it, read it over and over, cover to cover. Hundreds of pages of  British empire stuff, all those poems and tiny little black-and-white images of Great Art. And Enid Blyton, of course — hard core Famous Five, not wussy Secret Seven. But we borrowed heaps of books every Friday night from the public library so I never missed owning my own.

At mealtimes we sat round the table with our library books propped up against the teapot or the sugar bowl. It was how we avoided fights and arguments. My mum sat out in the kitchen with her feet (in Dad’s old socks) in the open door of the coal range oven, reading her religious books and pamphlets. My dad was injured at Alamein and got sick when I was about ten, a terrible painful arthritic paralysis that was a result of his war wounds. He’d sit up all night in bed, smoking and reading.

We weren’t deprived, but we weren’t well off either. We saved up for things like shoes or a winter coat. We didn’t get a car till I was ten, we lived in an old villa, and we voted Labour. Because of the first Labour Government —Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser — my sister and I had been given this thing: ‘The Opportunity’. It was always said like that, as if it had capital letters. My dad had come out from Scotland in 1920 when he was eight, from the slums around the jute mills in Dundee.  His dad had been killed in France only a few weeks before the end of the First World War, but his mum somehow managed to bring her children out here to New Zealand — six of them, the youngest only five. She didn’t know anyone here, and she had TB or emphysema from working in the mills. But she got them here, and survived another eight years, working as a cleaning lady in Oamaru to give them The Opportunity.

My mum’s family had had a farm at Merton, near Dunedin. Her younger brother, Rob, went to university and would have become a lawyer — the first in the family — but he got TB in his first year. It spread to his brain and he ended up in the hospital at Cherry Farm, a gentle shambling wreck of a man. My mum adored him. She had trained as a nurse and went up to Waipiata to care for him when he got sick.  We used to visit Rob on Sunday afternoons. I hated going there, to Cherry Farm. The sunroom smelled of pee and the men were scary and unpredictable and it was all appallingly sad.

Neither Mum nor Dad got to go to the university. But there was absolutely no question that my sister and I would. And we would study arts, because that was what my dad would have studied if he’d had the chance: classics, literature, history. He said they were the only true education. There were studentships if you agreed to teach for three years on graduation. No student fees. No massive debt to repay. Fantastic. It still makes me mad seeing what was done to education in this country in the 90s. It should be free, funded by the state and staffed by professionals, all the way from early childhood to post-grad.

 

 

I suspect you were a clever girl at school. When did you first get the sense that you were or could be a writer?

I wasn’t particularly clever — good at English, that was about it. The local high school, Waitaki, had a great English teacher whose idea of teaching senior English was to have us read all of Jane Austen, which I think was pretty close to perfect. At primary school I had a teacher who let me read a chapter book I was writing to the other kids, week by week. It was an adventure story set on an island with a castle and I had no idea each week what was going to happen, but it was great to read it out.

At Waitaki I wrote poems for the school magazine, and an essay for a competition for North Otago schools commemorating Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. I think the news of his death had been telegraphed round the world from Oamaru or something like that — so they had this annual competition with a prizegiving and speeches in the Opera House. I wrote this total fabrication about My Visit to Antarctica, all very enthusiastic, when the idea of going to Antarctica, living in some container surrounded by snow and ice, actually made me feel nauseous. I still don’t think humans should be there. Just leave it pristine, to the animals who have evolved to survive without artificial assistance. But anyway, I won the competition for this total lie, which probably wasn’t the ideal encouragement.

 

It must have been a real lesson in the power of good writing and a testament to your skills of persuasion. I imagine it must have been a boost to your confidence when you went to university.

I went to Otago and did three years of English honours, a new course they were trialling with a small group studying English and American literature intensively, medieval to modern, with a little nod at the end to Janet Frame and a couple of New Zealand poets. I got married in my final year to another student who had a scholarship to Oxford to study medieval Icelandic literature. So we went there, and after three years, on to Toronto where I enrolled to do an MA then an M.Phil at the Drama Centre.

 

 

Theatre was your real passion then, wasn’t it?

Yes, that’s what I really loved at the time. I still wrote the occasional poem, but the main things I wrote were a couple of theses: one on a woman who was pretty much forgotten then, Aphra Behn, the first woman to make her living as a professional writer on Grub Street in London in the 17^th century; and the other on a pencil manuscript for a poetic drama by T S Eliot. I loved doing the research — but the Drama Centre was also a highly practical place, with heaps of productions in the student theatre, lots of opportunities to act and direct. I really loved directing. Had we stayed on in Canada, that’s probably where I would have headed. But we didn’t stay. We had our first baby, and we wanted to come home. I wanted her to run around barefoot and go to big empty beaches and be fussed over by her grandparents and go to A&P shows and eat hotdogs on sticks with tomato sauce.

 

 

Those years in Palmerston North with young children and busy jobs were a really productive writing time. I think you started off with getting a poem published and writing plays and then suddenly it seemed you had a book of poems, a collection of short stories and then your first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, the winner of the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for fiction, all published in a matter of a few years. And it wasn’t just getting published: you were winning prizes and awards in just about every competition, and for every genre that you were writing in – a pretty extraordinary achievement.

So yes, we came back. My husband had a job at Massey and I had another baby,  and when she was about five months old, I got a part-time job at the local Teachers’ College, teaching a new course for students learning how to use drama in the classroom. I knew next to nothing about teaching, but I had lovely colleagues and the best part was that I found myself writing little plays. The students were supposed to do some practical work, and there simply weren’t any scripts available for groups of 20 (17 women and three men) and certainly not with a New Zealand setting or content. So I began writing them myself. Adaptations of myths, a musical about the Waihi Strike of 1912 based on a book one of my colleagues, [Yvonne] Stanley Roche had written based on documents and interviews with old people who remembered the events well. I was writing plays, too, for children in an after-school drama class I was running in town.

I’d stopped writing poems at Otago when I showed a boy who had had a poem in Landfall one of my sonnets. I thought it was rather good: it was about being misunderstood and it was based on a poem we’d been studying: Thomas Wyatt, ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’. The boy laughed, probably rightly. It was a bit pompous, but it meant I pretty much stopped writing poems. Just concentrated on the academic stuff.

Then fourteen years later when we were living in Palmy, my dad died and I wrote a poem, the way people do when they are really sad. I was fiddling with it one afternoon in the tiny office I shared with Stanley. She glanced over as she was scrambling round my desk to get to hers and read my poem. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘You should publish that.’

It’s weird isn’t it, how little it takes.

 

And it was published?

Yes it was, I think in the Listener, but maybe Landfall, and I then began writing more until I had enough for a collection, Cutting Out, which AUP accepted and published in 1987.

 

When did you start writing short stories – at the same time?

I was pretty busy — two children, a job, producing plays and so on — but I could manage to finish a short story. I sent one in to a competition in the Manawatu Evening Standard and it won. Then there were all these other competitions: there were a lot at that time and they were a big deal, with good prize money and overseas judges and award ceremonies and formal dinners. The BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, the Mobil Dominion Short Story Award, the American Express Short Story Award. I kept writing stories and sending them off and I won them all and I know it sounds clichéd, but it was the most fantastic encouragement.

 

This was a time when women writers were starting to become visible, wasn’t it?

I’d been made redundant from my job at the Teachers’ College — all the part timers were laid off in a single cost-cutting sweep. Mostly women, trying to juggle jobs with family commitments. Only six women were left on the staff at Palmerston, and it was one of those ‘clicks’ that feminists were talking about at the time, when you realise that systems make things difficult for women. There were lots of clicks that year. Looking through Landfall, for example, for some poems to teach the students and noticing there wasn’t a single woman writer.  Why not? Where were they? So writing the stories, writing female characters, seeing the stories published was a terrific buzz. It felt like a way that would cut through all this. I could write and be independent of any system. I could just write away on my own and no one could decide to make me redundant.

 

I understand it was Melvyn Bragg that supported your foray into novel writing?  

I was writing short stories — they came out eventually in a collection, The Rock Garden, in 1989 — and entering these competitions and at one of the award ceremonies the judge, Melvyn Bragg, said to me, ‘Why are you wasting your time on short stories? You should try a novel.’ So I had a go. I took the story that had won that competition and another story, unpublished, set in the future when New Zealand is turning into a desert and people are battling over water, and I wrote my way from one story to the other. It became my first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, which won the fiction prize at the New Zealand Book Awards in 1993. That was how I began writing novels.

 

And then came your move to Christchurch. I wonder if you knew how significant that would be?

In 1992 I had moved down to Christchurch for a writer’s residency at the university. My husband and I were in the process of separating and at the end of that year, I met the man who became my second husband and moved with him out to a remote bay on Banks Peninsula.

 

How did living on the peninsula affect you and your writing? It’s such a stark, bold landscape – there are no soft  green, rolling hills to ease the eye. The climate can be severe and you can be isolated for days at a time.

I lived at Otanerito for nearly 30 years. I never thought when I was younger that I’d live at the end of a gravel road: I’d always liked cities and towns with friends nearby and interesting buildings and lots going on — plays and concerts and people. But I loved living at Otanerito. I loved the peninsula. It’s a stunning landscape with all those deep indented bays and valleys. I loved walking over it, climbing up and down the hills, loved the weather: it did amazing weather. Great fogs that poured down over the hills,  huge Antarctic swells that surged into the bay so the air thrummed, you could feel it in your bones, and amazing rainbows — circular ones and vertical ones and multiples.  I loved the snow and being cut off for a few days — not too long, but three or four days of candles and quiet and cooking on the woodburner was lovely.

And though it was a long drive to Akaroa and Christchurch and seemed isolated, it wasn’t really. There were walkers every day from October to May. Around 54,000 stayed in our house in the time we were there and thousands more stopped in for a coffee or a swim at the beach, really interesting people. Plus friends visited and our family. And if I wanted to work, I had my hut up in the paddock. My husband set up my computer so it could receive a signal from down in the house and so long as the thistles in the orchard didn’t grow too thick, it worked really well.

I felt contained by the bay; I liked the rhythm of days there, and the shape of a year. I liked people coming down into the bay and being happy to be there. It felt good. I liked growing things, putting in fruit trees, and the writing was part of all that. I liked sitting at my desk and looking up from something I was working on, something I was imagining and seeing the bush up at Hinewai covering the valley all the way up to the skyline. I liked the sound of the sea, the rhythm of it, and the birds and the seals and that whole feeling of this beautiful world just ticking along. It was lovely.

We had to leave eventually. Age, energy, keeping the water running from a spring up the hill, a change in the way the track was routed that cut out the bay, all that. But for a long time it was really good.

 

 

You’d used historical settings for your plays and several novels you wrote over that period could be categorised as historical fiction, Mr Allbones’ Ferrets (2007) and The Hopeful Traveller (2013) —or do you not count them as such? 

Yes, I’ve written books that look like historical novels but they’re not really. I’m not really interested in trying to re-create the past. I don’t actually like historical fiction — I don’t believe it, for a start. It’s always fake, like those Pioneer Villages with bits and pieces piled into a room at random. I think all writing is contemporary. It’s completely bound up in the present. In the things we value right now.

So when I wrote Mr Allbones’ Ferrets it was because I was caught up in the debate around genetic engineering. I loathed the idea of fiddling with genes, and introducing these manipulated living forms into the world, specially here into this country, leader of the pack when it comes to species extinction. We were really aware of ferrets and stoats at Otanerito, trapping and so on, and watching the bird population recover.

I went up to Wellington and had a look at the papers of one of the men who had introduced ferrets to New Zealand back in the nineteenth century: a farmer, one of those arrogant knuckleheads who took no notice of warnings that it would be disastrous, just fixated on controlling the rabbits on his property. I came across his receipts for a shipment of assorted mustelids — ferrets, stoats, weasels. The agent who’d collected them and brought them out was called ‘Allbones’ which I thought was just such a great name for someone involved in helping trigger species extinction. I could have written non-fiction I suppose, but I don’t like coming at things head on. I like parables, and that’s what that novel is. It’s a parable that looks like a Victorian romantic novel. It’s even got a pink cover, a detail from a painting by Maryrose Crook that is exactly on the same wavelength. It’s a painting of a silk Victorian ball gown embroidered with images of all kinds of pests introduced into New Zealand, including ferrets. It’s called [The Sorrowful Eye of] The Pest Dress, and it’s absolutely beautiful, until you look closer and see what it is really about. It’s the perfect image for the cover of that book.

The Hopeful Traveller was a bit different. I was playing around with structure. I like doing that in a novel. I always think of books as objects. They are the perfect object to convey lots of complicated ideas and images in a compact form. When I’m beginning a novel, I start with the shape of it. I often have no idea what the book will be about, but I do know what shape I might play with: if it will be in lots of little bits — like the two quake books, all broken up, the way the city was post-quake and the way my head was dealing with reality at the time, all distracted and in pieces. Or maybe I’ll work with two related sections of six pieces each. With illustrations. That kind of thing.

Anyway, The Hopeful Traveller was about the idea of Utopia and it was written in two halves, both set on an island just off the coast with a little group of visitors, but separated by more than a century. So when the visitors come to the island it’s with different hopes. I wanted to write about this country — I always do. We’re living in such an experiment here, in a place where ideas of how people might live are being actively worked out. It’s a really exciting place to be writing. I remember thinking when I lived in the UK that it was lovely, with all that tradition and past and that long history of writers, but how much better it was to be here, working things out that hadn’t necessarily been written about before.

This country has been a massive experiment, right from the beginning probably — I don’t know, but I am guessing it has been like that since the very first waka came into shore. People coming from elsewhere who have to figure out how to live here, adapt, live alongside other people, determine where the boundaries will be, naming places and things. And since Europeans arrived, the experiment has become more complicated, and we’re still in the thick of it.  Trying to figure out how we can live in this place.

I wanted to write about that and the idea of the ideal community. I’d been reading this French thinker, Fourier, who was a commercial traveller back in the nineteenth century and clearly had a lot of time on his own in hotels in strange towns in the evenings. He seems to have spent his time devising this fantastic, notion of the perfect community where everyone would have a place appropriate to their personality. So the serial murderers and psychopaths, the Neros, would be the butchers, using their natural tendencies to kill to supply the community with meat. (Fourier was a big meat-eater.) I just loved it — and that there were actually people (I read about some in America) who tried to put his ideas into practice. So that’s what The Hopeful Traveller is about — not history exactly, but a story told in two halves. You tip the book over to read each one, and you can decide to read the contemporary bit first, then go back to history, or the old bit first then up to the present. It was a kind of game I was playing.

 

During this period, you also had a number of overseas residencies, like the Katherine Mansfield fellowship in Menton, and the Rathcoola residency in Donoughmore, near Cork, in Ireland. The Pop-up Book of Invasions (2007) came out of the latter and it seems that the poems you wrote during your time there led you back home in many ways.

Yes — I’ve had a couple of residencies overseas. Incredibly lucky.

Menton was long established. I was the 26th writer to have it. I was there in 1995, an odd time in some ways — France resumed nuclear testing at Mururoa that year and there was a lot of protest, a second peace flotilla sailing from New Zealand. There were a couple of signs on walls in Menton but it all felt weirdly distant. We lived a kind of detached ex-pat life there — very pleasant, lots of swimming, nice walks, met some interesting people and I wrote the short stories that were published eventually as Light Readings (2001). The one set most strongly in the hills round Menton turned out as a kind of fairy tale, a bit detached from reality — and really that was how it felt being there: a bit detached, slightly unreal.

Donoughmore was different. It was a new residency for artists as well as writers. The resident before me was the sculptor, Denis O’Connor, the sculptor. I’ve got strong family links with Ireland through my father, but I knew very little about the place, so it was a real process of discovery for me, about Irish history which I found totally compelling, painful but compelling. And colonialism: how it was worked out in Ireland, then applied to New Zealand and what that meant in each place, if you were among the colonised on the one hand, and one of the colonisers on the other. I wrote really fluently there, just caught up in the place and all the ideas it prompted.

 

 

But then the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 shattered the tranquillity of life at Otanerito. Poetry seemed to come first in your response to the huge upheaval that the earthquakes wrought on your life and, from my memory of the time, that seemed to be the genre that most writers used to respond to their experiences in the beginning. The poems ‘The Horse’ and ‘The poem that is like a city’ were two of the most powerful and evocative for me. Why did you choose poetry or did it feel as though there was no other choice?

Lots of people reached for poetry after the quakes. Making things up when the whole city of Christchurch was in turmoil, in a mess beyond anything anyone had imagined, seemed a bit unnecessary. Poems are from the heart and direct and besides I think everyone was simply preoccupied with getting through each day, cleaning up, moving somewhere else if the house was totalled, dealing with insurers and so on. Novels take weeks, months, and a degree of calm.

 

You were personally affected by the earthquakes and your frustrations with and anger at the injustices being inflicted on people by EQC and the insurance companies drove the decision to write two books on this experience, one non-fiction and the other, a novel, Decline and Fall on Savage Street (2017). I remember sitting in a plane as I read the opening of The Villa at the Edge of the Empire in which you describe a map and I was able to look out the window and see the topographical features that you were referring to below me – I was aloft and detached with the god’s eye view you were depicting. 

Well, I know I don’t have to tell you that the earthquakes were overwhelming! I mean, you’ve only just got your home repaired after what? Eleven years? They were utterly overwhelming and all consuming. I was completely caught up in the strangeness of them, the politics of the rebuilding, the way they exposed the reality of where I’d been living for twenty years. They also completely changed the way I knew people: suddenly people I’d known for years in one way, casually, as friends or colleagues or acquaintances were revealed as these extraordinarily brave and stoical and inventive human beings. Relationships simply shifted to a whole new level and they have never reverted from that. I don’t think they ever will.

I just fell in love with the people I knew and the city too. And all I wanted to do was write about it, try and examine what this place was where I had been living all that time with my eyes only half open. I loved meeting people through the interviews for The Quake Year (2012), and then I had this amazing piece of good fortune in being given a grant, the two-year Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship to write a couple of books about the city. I wanted to write about it via facts but I also believe that fiction has a way of opening up reality too. I believe that feelings, which are at the core of fiction,  are an equally valid — maybe more valid — way of understanding a major event.

I imagined the two books in a single box set, balancing one another. That’s never happened — but I’d like it to happen sometime and if I ever win Lotto I might see if I can publish them together like that. They took ages to write, of course, but it felt wonderful doing it. A total exploration.

 

Tell me about the joys and difficulties of collating Nouns, verbs, etc: Selected Poems (2020). I know a collection like this is a significant work in a poet’s career, a time of reflection. You say in the preface, ‘It’s so difficult in 2020 to convey just how it felt to be in this world where men, past and present, stood about booming to one another like so many kākāpo on a steep hillside’.

I wanted to say at the start of that book how very different it was when the first poems in that collection were being written, that odd world of domination by male writers, that has shifted so totally, especially among poets. Though at my granddaughter’s high school, a co-ed, I can’t help noticing she’s been taught only male writers. Still jolly old Baxter. None of the recent young New Zealand women writers, for instance. There seems to be a  time lag at the universities where the teachers are being taught and that time lag and lack of research interest is affecting what’s being taught in schools. It’s hard to shift the monoliths.

I did love making a collected poems, gathering pieces together and seeing them come out in a handsome cover, with a ribbon. I’d always wanted a ribbon. I’m working on prose now — have been for the past two years, but that novel is almost due to be published and then I’m going to go back to poems for a while. I want to pay attention to the here and now and the fine detail, and poetry is the way to do that.

 

You take infinite delight in exploring language, the form, the use, the sound, the look, seemingly every possible permutation and combination. How we order and discipline it. There are those poems in The Inhabited Initial (1999) about punctuation marks, for instance. 

I’m fascinated by the strangeness of words, the way human beings have developed this amazing capacity for nuance from a base of grunt and squeak. And then that further development when those words are translated onto a page or screen. It really is magical. And punctuation was part of that, the way signs are used to signal surprise or query or a pause for breath or whatever. The history of those signs fascinated me — that an exclamation mark for instance is actually a word — it’s a letter ‘I’ over little circular ‘o’ and it means Io, or ‘joy’, a Latin word that scribes inserted into texts when something wonderful and miraculous occurred. I’ve always loved that sort of thing. I was the sort of child who liked writing secret codes in lemon juice on bits of paper, or writing my name using the futhark [alphabet].

 

It seems like you have mastered every genre. Was it a progression from one to the other, or were you writing all simultaneously?

Sometimes I just like walking round a theme in different media — like an artist sketching something in pencil, then switching to oils. You get a different effect with each way of arranging words. I also like the feeling that I’m learning a craft, developing a variety of skills, that I know what I’m doing professionally. I know I hop about, from poems to short stories to plays to journalism and so on, but I think I would be bored if I kept working in just one genre.

 

 

 

You wrote in The Broken Book (2011) about lying in bed as a child looking for faces and patterns in the paisley frieze in your bedroom. You said, ‘That’s what I do now when faced with the randomness of ordinary life: I insist that unrelated details arrange themselves in something I am capable of recognising … I try to write it down. Lines and circles forming in orderly rows across a blank white page.’

Writing for me is always exploring. I don’t plan. I simply sit down every morning and see what’s there. It’s a very peaceful meditative state. I’m constantly surprised by what my mind throws up. It’s a bit like dreaming really. I don’t usually recall what my dreams have been about, but those I do remember when I wake are always about a journey through unfamiliar territory. I’m usually on foot and I’m walking along tracks and roads through strange towns, in and out of unknown houses. It’s not an unpleasant sensation. I never plan when I start to write, nor do I consider an audience.  In fact, it always feels like a bit of a shock when the book comes out and people begin reading it. I never anticipate that, for some reason.

Every time that I begin writing something I feel like a total novice. I have to learn how to do it all over again. I write very slowly, taking months, sometimes years to finish a novel. I love the feeling of sitting at my desk every morning, seeing if I can make the words work today, if I can solve the puzzle I’ve set myself. It’s incredibly enjoyable. It’s a kind of childish pleasure, really and I don’t ever want to lose it.

 

 

 

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Morrin Rout has spent over 25 years organising literary events and festivals and producing and presenting book programmes on national and local radio. She is the former Director of the Hagley Writers Institute and is a current member of the WORD festival trust board.

 

‘The Award Changes Everything’

Paula Morris talks to Stephanie Johnson and James Norcliffe about their Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

 

Neither Stephanie Johnson nor James Norcliffe were expecting the call from Malcolm Burgess from Creative New Zealand. Burgess, an affable former journalist, has the bureaucratic job title of ‘Arts Practice Director (Literature)’, and is usually the sounding board for writers’ complaints, demands and laments. Johnson says her ‘initial response was one of total disbelief.’ Norcliffe, working in his garden when the call came on the rarely used landline, thought that ‘someone had nominated me as a referee on a CNZ application of some sort.’

Both were ‘delighted’, they say, when they realised they were both being given one of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Three—for poetry, fiction and/or drama, and nonfiction, each valued at $60,000—are awarded annually. Johnson was this year’s fiction recipient and Norcliffe was recognised for poetry. Nonfiction was awarded to historian Vincent O’Malley, winner at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards this year for Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa.

 

 

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards will be thirty years old next year. In 2003 the prime minister was Helen Clark and the first recipients were Hone Tuwhare (poetry), Janet Frame (fiction), and Michael King (nonfiction). Tuwhare was in his 80s and Frame in her late 70s, their selection setting the precedent for giving the awards to writers senior in both years and status. King was in his late 50s, but had just published the landmark Penguin History of New Zealand. (His award, sadly, was just in time: he died in a car accident the following year.)

In the following decades, the PM’s Awards have recognised a number of writers born in the 30s and 40s, including Kevin Ireland, Vincent O’Sullivan, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither, Cilla McQueen and Fleur Adcock, for their poetry; fiction writers Maurice Gee, Margaret Mahy, Patricia Grace, Albert Wendt, C.K. Stead, Fiona Kidman, Owen Marshall, Marilyn Duckworth and Witi Ihimaera; and nonfiction writers Philip Temple, Anne Salmond and the late James McNeish.

As high-profile career awards, they’ve inevitably been the source of controversy, particularly when older and more acclaimed writers seemed overlooked: historian Claudia Orange and Māori arts scholar Tīmoti Karetu, both only received the award (in 2021 and 2020, respectively) after nonfiction writers more than two decades their juniors, and arguably not their equals in prominence, had been awarded.

In 2018 Peter Wells, terminally ill, was widely anticipated to win the nonfiction prize; it went instead to Wystan Curnow for his art scholarship (rather than his poetry), leading to some accusations of malfeasance on the part of CNZ’s ‘expert panel’ who assess the public nominations: one of that year’s panel, Murray Edmond, had taught alongside Curnow for many years in the English department at the University of Auckland. It was also the second year in a row that the nonfiction award went to a fine-arts writer who had retired from the English department at the University of Auckland (Peter Simpson, in the same year another retired Auckland professor, Witi Ihimaera, was honoured as well.)

Still, Johnson says, the Prime Minister’s Awards are ‘unique and important’ because ‘writers are nominated by their readers and peers.’ (Disclosure: I have nominated Johnson myself more than once for this award.) ‘It’s validation and acknowledgement and makes an enormous difference to a writer’s state of mind and generally shaky self-belief.’

Norcliffe agrees. ‘Writing is of course a solitary act and if you are, like so many I know—including myself—something of a perfectionist you’re never completely confident in the worth of what you’re doing or entirely happy with the finished product. To have your work validated by others—readers, critics, reviewers—is both gratifying and necessary. This award is in many ways the ultimate validation.’

It may seem strange—to people who aren’t artists—that writers of such experience and pedigree still relish ‘validation’. ‘It is a sad truth,’ Johnson says, ‘but for most of us, even when we have written many books or plays or volumes of short stories or poems, imposter syndrome can still hold sway. I think New Zealand writers are particularly vulnerable to this, because we are (mostly) writing only for our small population. I remember years ago a publisher saying to me that if my books sold to the same percentage in a larger population, I would be a wealthy woman.’

New Zealand writers living in country must, Johnson says, ‘to some degree, embrace a modest lifestyle. Most of us have to teach, act as mentors, carry out manuscript assessments, review, drive buses, wipe bottoms, pluck chickens and wait tables. It worries me that many of our younger writers, particularly those carrying large student loans, anticipate that they will one day make a living from writing. A tiny percentage will, and mostly those are writers who leave our shores, and/or embrace writing genre. If you play your cards right, there’s money to be made writing crime and romance.’

Although the Prime Minister’s Awards are genre-specific, both Norcliffe and Johnson have published widely in various genres. Norcliffe says he wears ‘a number of writing hats: poetry, fantasy fiction for young people, fiction for older people, and editing. I sometimes wonder whether the poets regard me as a children’s writer who writes poetry, and the children’s writers regard me as a poet who writes children’s fiction. That’s one of the reasons this award was such a delight as I always felt I might fall between the stools when such accolades were being decided.’

 

         

 

Norcliffe has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection and the 2022 novel The Frog Prince, as well as several award-winning novels for young people. He believes that his ‘breakthrough children’s book’ was The Loblolly Boy (2011), winner of the 2010 NZ Post Award for Junior fiction and also had international success. His sixth poetry collection Villon in Millerton (2007) was an artistic turning point—‘I felt lifted my work to a higher level’—that served as a foundation for his subsequent collections.

 

..     

 

In 2023 Johnson will publish her fifteenth novel, Kind, and her fourth short story collection. She’s also the author of two volumes of poetry and two non-fiction books. ‘When I look back over them,’ she says, ‘the books I feel the fondest of are The Heart’s Wild Surf (1996), The Open World (2012), The Shag Incident (2002), The Writing Class (2013), Everything Changes (2021) and The Whistler (1998). These are variously historical fiction, satire, contemporary fiction and science fiction.’ She’s also proud of the 2019 nonfiction book West Island: Five Twentieth Century New Zealanders in Australia.

 

        

 

‘I didn’t start out as a prose writer. Like many of us, I wrote poetry first, and then plays. My play ‘Accidental Phantasies’ enjoyed two long seasons in Wellington and Auckland, and won me the Bruce Mason’s Playwriting Award, when I was twenty-four. I have had plays produced since, but none so successful.’

 

   

 

Both writers have also made major contributions to New Zealand’s literary scene and infrastructure. For the past twenty years, Norcliffe has worked with Glyn Strange on the annual ReDraft collections of the very best writing by teenagers. His fellow selector for some years was Tessa Duder, recently replaced by Michelle Elvy. ‘Each year we find upwards of a hundred prodigiously talented young writers whom Glyn publishes in a handsome collection. The best of the contributions are Landfall quality. Sadly, only a smattering of these young writers carry on to make names for themselves in the wider literary world. Perhaps events overtake them, perhaps they lose interest, perhaps the opportunities are not there.’

 

     

 

Norcliffe notes that despite our challenging times, ‘some adventurous new publishing ventures [are] entering the market’ along with new online journals. ‘Over the last few years, I’ve been involved in helping put together some major anthologies—most recently Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (with Michelle Elvy and me). Such a range of voices and what depth and brilliance!

 

 

In 1997, with the late Peter Wells, Johnson founded the Auckland Writers’ Festival. ‘Penelope Hansen, Jill Rawnsley and Anne O’Brien in their capacities as festival manager/director made the festival what it is today,’ she says, ‘but I am fiercely proud of being there at the start, acting as director and serving on the Board, in various roles for around sixteen years.’ A number of other local writers and advocates ‘worked just as hard on the Auckland Writers’ Festival as we did over the first years,’ singling out the late Keith Stewart and Stephen Stratford, who ‘were supportive and inspirational.’

‘At the outset, Peter and I wanted to showcase New Zealand writers. We did not intend for the festival to become, in Peter’s words, ‘a landing strip for the Booker shortlist’. It was our great pleasure to introduce writers that had not necessarily ever won a prize, but whose books deserved relishing.

‘It was also our objective to build a bridge over the Tasman and introduce Australian writers to festivalgoers. We hoped that this would become a mutual exercise with the Australian festivals. To date, there has been some improvement but perhaps not all we hoped for. The immutable fact is that if we don’t celebrate our own national literature, our own writers and their work, no one else will.’

 

 

Like Norcliffe, Johnson continues to identify and mentor new voices. A long-time judge for the Sunday Star Times Short Story Award, Johnson is a fiction judge for the Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, to be awarded in 2023 at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. ‘I can report that our fiction is in excellent health,’ she says. ‘I am continually surprised by the inventiveness, diversity, proclivity for lively language and the compelling story-telling skills of my compatriots.

In addition, this year alone, Johnson taught a semester in creative non-fiction at Massey University; worked for a production company as a hired writer/director on a podcast; assessed several manuscripts, both fiction and non-fiction; examined a thesis for the MCW at Auckland University; written a reader’s report for a publisher and reviewed many novels for several magazines and websites, including the ANZL. She enjoys the work by admits that ‘much of it is poorly paid. I perhaps wouldn’t have enjoyed driving busses and trucks, but just before I heard about the award I made enquiries about getting my HT licence. There’s a shortage of bus and truck drivers, and I was willing to give it a go.’

‘But the award changes everything,’ says Johnson. ‘Before August I had written about 30,000 words of a new novel. Now I will be able to go back to it because the Prime Minister’s Award has bestowed that elusive quality that eludes even senior writers: peace of mind. There is money in the bank and life is not entirely pointless. This new book is partly set on Waiheke Island. I think I might go overseas to do some research.’

For Norcliffe, the award reminds him of ‘being awarded the Burns Fellowship in 2000—another huge fillip to my confidence and feelings of security as a writer.’ He ‘cannot stress enough,’ he says, ‘the importance of such residencies and awards.’

 

 

Reading Dangerously

.

David Eggleton on the books he read in 2022

 

 

Around the World in 80 Books is the wannabe-enticing title of a new guide from Pelican by Harvard University’s David Damrosch, a series of short chapters on ‘masterpieces of world literature’, but I searched in vain for books from the Pacific region: nothing but a void between Japan and Mexico. How to Be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels by John Sutherland, first published in 2013 and reprinted in 2022 also came up zilch. Praised as ‘wise’ by the Times Literary Supplement, this ‘how to’ from Penguin failed to include even Janet Frame between Fowles, John; Francis, Dick; and Franzen, Jonathan — no Albert Wendt, no Witi Ihimaera, no Patricia Grace, and certainly no C.K.Stead.

 

    

 

This year I got around to reading last year’s What You Made of it: A Memoir 1987–2020, the third volume of C.K. Stead’s autobiography, truffling amongst the inadvertent comedy of so much self-serving reminiscence for the throwaway but incisive remarks of an undeniably perceptive literary critic, particularly on Modernism: ‘For Ezra Pound everything came back to language and language was unstable. It came in through the ear, in different accents and with different emphases and every word or phrase carried with it the shadow of other sounds, other meanings, a different history, another language. Pound’s base was scepticism — uncertainty, indeterminacy, and his talent lyrical not epic.’

 

   

 

In his latest book Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, Terry Eagleton rescues from the dustheap of current neglect a quintet of Modernism’s most original and influential literary critics: T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams. Eagleton’s witty, fast-moving text reads like pulp fiction with the pips left in and gives spice to the idea that 2022, one hundred years after the publication of ‘The Waste Land’ and Ulysses, could also be a Year of Reading Dangerously, with or without a Kindle:

 

Empson writes nonchalantly in conversational, even garrulous style, while Eliot occasionally writes as though he is preaching in a particularly resonant cathedral. Richards’s brisk, rather bloodless prose is quite distinct from the speaking voice. Like Empson, Leavis deliberately avoids the formality of academic prose. Leavis writes as though he were speaking, while Raymond Williams spoke ponderously as though he were writing.

 

Meanwhile, James Courage: Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell and just out from Otago University Press, is about decades of living dangerously as a gay man in twentieth-century London. Courage was the expatriate author of A Way of Love, the first openly LGBTQ novel written by a New Zealander. It was published in Britain in 1959. In 1927 Courage had moved from Christchurch (where he was born in 1903) to London, and writes of his exhilaration in arriving there: ‘Can’t you imagine the London streets in the dusk, full of lights and hurrying people — somebody flying past in an opera cloak and just around the corner coming on a beggar, one side of his face a great red scar, drawing with coloured chalks on the pavement the illuminated words “To Live”.’

 

      

 

His Diaries reports on a wide-ranging luncheon conversation with T.S Eliot, when Eliot was a director at Faber & Faber and considering publishing Courage’s work. Later, there are encounters with the eccentric D’Arcy Cresswell, the emollient Charles Brasch and the ‘crapulously obscene’ Denis Glover, as well as vivid reportage of occurrences during the London Blitz blackouts.

In his thorough-going Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: the bizarre life of writer, actor, Soho raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross, which came out in a revised paperback edition in 2013 and which I only caught up with this year, biographer Paul Willetts gives us the extraordinary story of a bohemian man of letters. Julian Maclaren-Ross was the original for louche bookman X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s great novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. One anecdote will have to suffice. Maclaren-Ross was about to start a bar-room brawl in a Soho pub with the Invercargill-born novelist Dan Davin, then serving as a Major in the New Zealand armed forces Davin drew a copy of John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing out of his greatcoat pocket and held it up like a talisman, explaining they were both in it. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were a writer?’ Maclaren-Ross exclaimed. ‘We thought you were an army officer. Here have a drink.’

 

       

 

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, is also centred on the turbulence of World War Two Britain, when all sorts of career possibilities became possible for women on the home front after the men marched off to battle. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley were four student friends at Oxford University studying philosophy, and caught up in the spell exerted by Ludwig Wittgenstein. But they were also instrumental in bringing metaphysics back into moral philosophy, which had become obsessed with linguistic definitions. Three remained academic philosophers, but this book wonderfully conveys a sense of the life and times of the young Iris Murdoch as a rebel and self-willed amoral personality, before she emerged as an important novelist.

 

    

 

In his new book The Last Days of Roger Federer, Geoff Dyer shuffles aimiably from pop culture reference to pop culture reference while advancing opinions of lateness, ageing and last things. His self-centred, fingernails-buffing style is by turns exasperating and amusing. He has a nice line in snark, sneering at the later works of Martin Amis, and deriding Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time as snore-inducing. Of poetry-readings he says, ‘At any poetry reading however enjoyable, the words we most look forward to hearing are always the same: “I’ll read two more poems.” (The words we truly long for are “I’ll read one more poem”, but two seems to be the conventionally-agreed minimum.)’ Now that growing old disgracefully is out of fashion, the only vice Dyer owns up to is siphoning off all the shampoo and conditioner from the containers in hotel bathrooms to carry away.

The Elizabethan essayist Francis Bacon famously reckoned that: ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed; and some few are to be chewed and digested: that is, read with diligence and attention.’ In Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 -2021, author Will Self asks the question why read at all, with so many other distractions and cultural delivery systems available? He answers: ‘Reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding there is. To enter the flow-state of reading is to swim into other psyches with great ease, whatever their age, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, class or ethnicity.’

 

 

Asked why I read, whether 80 books, or, as this year, quite a bit more than that, my answer is that reading is a form of travelling, a way of expanding my horizons and gaining insights while hardly moving, except to put the jug on. At the same time, mindful of Francis Bacon’s admonition, I read as a stereotypical self-aware consumer, one handling and weighing up cultural packages, embellished with endorsements and gaudy covers and genre specifications according to taste. I go in like a prospector, boring core-samples. Some books I fast-read, skimming or stopping to graze; other books demand and often get full immersion; some books are read at glacial speed, meaning I’ve been reading them for years, a few pages at a time. Other books, many books, are on the carousel, ready to be read again and again, as the bookworm turns.

Yet the hospice shops and charity book fairs bulge with the clutter of the cleared-out shelves of the analogue era, when books, and their readers, seemed to positively hum with promise. Recently I was wandering through the Auckland University Library when I was brought up short by the sight of row upon row of empty shelving about to be disassembled to make way for more wi-fi enabled desks. In corridors, on wheeled wire cages, were the ancient tomes on Homer and company, all bound for the knacker’s yard, like battered gladiators of the old Graeco-Roman Empire awaiting the final sword thrust. Nobel Prize novelist Boris Pasternak, trapped in post-Stalinist Russia, wrote: ‘A book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience — and nothing else!’ But perhaps not every book.

 

 

I was enlightened by Black Earth: a Journey through Ukraine,  by German journalist Jens Mühling, first published in 2015 and hurriedly reprinted this year. It outlines, through the author talking to a diverse range of inhabitants, something of the push-me pull-you history of a borderland state that goes back a long way. As an antidote to the fatalism and bleakness I also read Kate Quinn’s latest best-seller, The Diamond Eye, a novelised account of the true story of an heroic Ukrainian woman. Lyudmila Pavlichenk was a young historian who became a formidable sniper, one of the most lethal in the Red Army during World War Two, defending her people from the invaders from Nazi Germany. She was wounded numerous times. After the War she returned to her job as an historian and raised a family. Quinn’s novel, though, is also something of a feminist rewrite in that it exposes the pressures on its heroine in a military controlled by men.

Another book for bleak times is This Life, published in 2021, a debut novel by Quntos KunQuest. This is the nom-de-plume of a black American who has been serving a life sentence without parole since 1996 in Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. His protagonist Lil Chris symbolises the fate of many African-Americans in the United States, who make up 12 per cent of the country’s population but who form over a third of its prisoners. Lil Chris finds a kind of escape through rap-poetry as a ‘dope lyricist’ who can ‘spit mad flow’. He also survives by developing a Buddhist mind-set and by disciplined meditation — and of course by reading.

 

   

 

So, reading, is it really that powerful? The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters, by Megan Walsh is a short book published in 2022 by Columbia Global Reports, and offers a glimpse of the status of Chinese literature now. While a plethora of state-approved writing courses push writers in the direction of propaganda narratives beneficial to the state, and mainstream publishers toe the party line with books about communist history, a new generation has been navigating this unpromising terrain by subtly transforming facts inconvenient to the government into metaphorically loaded fiction, often science fiction, and publishing it online where legions of readers await.

With so many young writers embracing internet publication, the literary publishing establishment has been disempowered. But it is a balancing act. ‘Chinese online fiction is the largest publishing platform in the world,’ Walsh tells us. ‘It is also one of the most insecure.’ We learn that government censors police content tirelessly, as energetic freewheeling writers strive to keep ahead of them. Online platforms, on which Chinese women writers can publish anonymously, have also served to create subversive genres that, symbolically, have flipped the authoritarian patriarchal dynamic on its head.

 

 

In his 2022 book Imagine a City: A Pilot Sees the World, Mark Vanhoenacker, an international airline pilot constantly girdling the globe, essays a poetic travelogue reflecting on his two decades of repeated short visits to many of the world’s big cities. He muses that:

 

the suggestion that we all dream of the same city, though it may appear differently to each of us, making its reality sometimes tantalisingly unclear, is the loveliest idea in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Calvino’s cities and words reinforce my faith in the idea that behind all the real cities lies one that is archetypal, though our vision of it may be no less flawed and clouded than we are.

 

Another book about the traveller’s perspective that grabbed me by the sleeve and held on was Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays, by Charmian Clift, edited by Nadia Wheatley and republished this year. These essays were first printed in the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1960s, after Clift and family returned from living for years in Greece: ‘Australian suburban architecture is without doubt or question the ugliest in the world. There is nothing to come near it on the civilised globe — or uncivilised either, for that matter: grass huts are beautifully cohesive and harmonious.’

 

    

 

Australian globe-trotter Paul Dalla Rosa also pinned me down with his startling debut collection of ten stories, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, in which his cast of disaffected, abject and nihilistic millennials, spitting out a side-of-the-mouth comedy, trail from Melbourne to Tel Aviv to New York to the Gold Coast to Adelaide: ‘We had met in Melbourne at a large outdoor dance party. He was travelling. He stopped me as we danced, his eyes dilated, took my phone from my hand, typed in his Instagram handle and pressed follow.’

Kingsley Amis once asked: ‘Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart or squash it flat?’ James Brown in The Tip Shop, his latest poetry collection, does both. Laconic, wry, sophisticated, this is a book of considerable stylistic virtuosity, written in a confident tone but with a certain cryptic wistfulness. He’s an artist able to rhyme ‘home’ with ‘poem’ and not look back.

 

       

 

Robert Sullivan’s poems in his Tūnui: Comet are charged, mesmeric, trance-like. These poems dance and sing, fall over, get up, raise the roof, point to the stars. They feel animist, alive with small details, with colonial bric-à-brac muttering to itself, and the Māori language chanting its oratory.

Rotuman poet Mere Taito’s chapbook of poems, The Light and the Dark in Our Stuff, published a little while ago, but which I only encountered this year in the course of co-editing a forthcoming new anthology of contemporary Pasifika poetry, weaves garlands of words, acutely aware of the oceanic: ‘the sea/ gate-crashes your lunch/ through an opening/ in the bus shelter wall’. Samoan poet Faumuina Felolini Maria Tafuna’i’s debut collection My Grandfather is a Canoe, which came out in 2021, ranges across the Moana Nui ringing the changes on environmental damage and land loss in inventive ways, as in ‘green climate fund’:

 

Green dollars rolled thick like leather

Soaked in brine and aged so tight

It has meshed into itself

Unable to unfurl its cash liquidity

To compensate your sinking island

 

Coco Solid’s novella How to Loiter in a Turf War is both impassioned and confrontational; graphic and idiomatic in the way it explores a neighbourhood subject both to galloping gentrification and the unceremonious ousting of the disenfranchised. Three Pasifika underground besties, Q, Te Hoia and Rosina support one another in a gritty urban environment where it all mostly sucks, thanks to fickle, semi-anonymous corporate raiders. But casual street meetings hold promise: ‘Could this be her equally angry Pacific dreamboy?’

 

       

 

Maria Samuela, in her interconnected assemblage of nine stories in Beats of the Pa’u, too, doesn’t flinch from sharp clear-eyed realisations and measured depictions of complex truths about a particular neighbourhood, using demotic language articulated with an insider’s precision and radar-like ear, though her stories, taking time’s pulse, also have chiaroscuro carefully worked in.

Dominic Hoey’s new novel Poor People with Money has an urgent, staccato, street-wise rhythm to its telling, as well as an underlying sense of melancholy. Straight out of the beating heart of Tāmaki Makaurau, it traverses love, loyalty treachery and regrets, all centred on a young battler, Monday Wooldridge, who is a part-time bar-worker and also a part-time ring-fighter, striving to overcome heavy odds and people betting against her.

 

   

 

Books interleave with books to breed more books. This certainly seems true of a number of recent New Zealand non-fiction books that time-travel back to the 1960s, when there was something heady in the air. In his 2021 compendium Okay Boomer: New Zealand in the Swinging Sixties, musician and music historian Ian Chapman saunters down Memory Lane with a variety of nostalgia buffs who were there in the Sixties, albeit still at school, and can rustle up anecdotes to bear witness.

In his 2021 cultural history Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, Murray Edmond informatively traces the spirit of the carnivalesque, from its tentative presence in the city’s sly-grog dens and coffee-shops in the early 1960s, to its flower power efflorescence in the late 1960s in the form of gambolling crowds of young people in parks and streets, and notably at the Jumping Sundays in Albert Park. In her 2022 memoir Raiment, poet Jan Kemp, from her perspective as a sometime golden girl of the Sixties — Kemp, like Murray Edmond, participated in those Jumping Sundays — writes about the expectations and pressures placed on her in spaces where woman poets were still a rare sight: ‘But who was I to tell (male poets) how to behave?’

 

        

 

Martin Edmond, in his autobiographical Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole Days 1974–1980, published in 2020, provides another connecting thread, with his account of the life and times of Red Mole founder Alan Brunton who, in the late 1960s and after, seemed to be everywhere as an instigator of the carnivalesque,

The best part of music composer Jonathan Besser’s 2022 memoir Around the Corners, Out to the Edges is about growing up in New York and studying music there; and then, immediately, the chance suggestion which led him to the New Zealand immigration office and a one-way air ticket to Auckland in 1972. The Auckland of that time, a sleepy subtropical backwater, as he saw it, is evoked with an outsider’s perspective, though he too flats for a while along Grafton Road, like Jan Kemp and Murray Edmond and Martin Edmond (who are cousins).

 

    

 

And finally there is Jumping Sundays, the book, by Nick Bollinger, memorably illustrated with photographs by Max Oettli and others, which gives us another twist on the whole sweeping panorama of 1960s and its long aftermath. Even though it unearths all sorts of curious incidents and stories and weaves them into an extraordinary almost psychedelic pattern, Bollinger’s cultural history too is not the whole narrative. We are not done with New Zealand in the 1960s, Jumping Sundays, nor the political radicalism winding from then till now.

 

 

Messages from God

Philip Temple on the books he read in 2022

 

It must be December, because Paula Morris asked, What have you read this year? Can I even remember? And did I really read that, when the book’s actually still sitting there, pressing my guilt button? Attached to the side of the first book-case in our library is this postcard from The Snooty Bookshop Fifty Literary Postcards by Tom Gauld, just to keep us honest. We have books in our library which fit every category except, surely not, Purely for Show.’

 

 

I get through 40-odd books a year, other than books consulted for research. These may be new books, recent books that have been waiting patiently, books remembered and re-read, or books that should have been read long ago. From all those, not so many remain clearly in the mind, ones that have registered with lingering import and enlightenment and, sometimes, joy.

 

 

First, the fiction. The most intriguing local work for me has been Vincent O’Sullivan’s Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques. The title work, a novella, is a marvellous imagining of what happened to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s creature after he was abandoned in the Arctic. Here he is picked up by a passing ship and transported to Fiordland where he escapes into the bush, joining a fellow disfigured creature. It is a moving and intriguing parable for all outsiders rejected by humanity and centres a classic story in our own history. Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques deserves to be published separately in a small format, illustrated hardback edition but I doubt if the publisher has the equal imagination for that.

 

 

Richard Powers’ Overstory deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for its fictionalised account of protestors who tried to save the great redwood forests, and the Canadian woman who first posited that forest trees supported each other in communal ecosystems. She was derided by male colleagues but eventually proved right. But it didn’t help the redwoods much. Good ideas and inspiration here for all those fighting to save our native forests.

 

                                     

 

Oh, those Irish fiction writers! I found Colm Toibin’s The Magician (about Thomas Mann) disappointing after his The Master (Henry James). But Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a masterpiece.  It could refer to the length of what is strictly a novella and can be read within a couple of hours (I couldn’t help myself). But Keegan has produced something mighty, a work of such sympathy and sensibility around the people and 1980s social climate of New Ross and the convent on the hill with its laundry girls that one is brought to both tears and joy. It also rates as a Christmas story of such power to become a 21st century A Christmas Carol.

Diane [Brown] went down to the Regent Book Sale (one book in, one book out, she lies) and came back with William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault, knowing how much I admire Trevor’s work.  It was shortlisted for the Booker (like Keegan’s novella) all of twenty years ago but I had somehow missed it. This takes a bit longer to read but is equally difficult to put down. Set a hundred years ago on the coast somewhere near Cork, it tells of a family forced to leave their estate under threat of house-burning rebels during the turbulent establishment of the Irish Republic, and of how a young girl becomes separated from her parents. To say more would be too much of a spoiler but the novel covers thirty years of change to a small town and rural community through the story of a house and its inhabitants. I once kissed the Blarney Stone near Cork but, alas, it did not produce for me the effortless lyricism of Trevor’s prose.

 

 

Biography: I found Patricia Grace’s From the Centre: A Writer’s Life humbling. Her unassuming and calm narrative reveals a life led by someone who has always known who she is and what matters, whose values have remained true and rewarding for everyone around her. And from that calm at the centre of the busyness and demands of whānau and community she has produced some of our finest literature. Tū, for example, remains our best war novel.

 

                                                            

 

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. Yes, I know. But book club members assured me this was something different. Brown says he played a kind of ‘Where’s Wally? Or a super-snobby version of I-Spy’. He trolled through every account of Princess Margaret, public and private, to produce a different kind of biography that presents hall of mirrors views of someone who, one reviewer thought, displayed ‘utter rottenness’ of character (but blames it on her Mum). Yet Picasso wanted to marry her as did Jeremy Thorpe, along with many others among the line-up of vile supporting characters. I cringed, was appalled, laughed out loud—and was fascinated. After the Coronation in 1953, a friend said to Margaret that she looked really sad and she replied, ‘I lost a father and now I’ve lost a sister.’  So, in the end, I even felt a little bit sorry for her, too.

 

                                                           

 

Faber & Faber, The Untold Story by Toby Faber is a great writer’s read, telling the story of the most enduring London publishing house just knocking on its centenary door. T.S. Eliot (with his second wife Valerie) dominates but the book reveals his fallible judgments. He turned down Orwell’s Animal Farm (and consequently 1984) while William Golding’s first novel only made it through when a member of the secretarial staff suggested a good title for it would be Lord of the Flies.

 

                                       

 

The Bush by Don Watson is a no-holds-barred, and deeply informed, account of the destructive clearance of the Australian ‘bush’ by someone who grew up on an outback farm. A heart-breaking account of what has happened to the natural world across the Ditch. Unsurprisingly, it won the New South Wales Premier Book of the Year Award.

 

 

Over the past few years, I have been reading, researching and writing about our two Big Issues— massive resource depletion beyond Limits to Growth with its spawn, Climate Change; and Treaty of Waitangi matters and co-governance. This year I have read He Kupu Taurangi by Chris Finlayson and James Christmas, which covers Treaty settlements and cases of co-governance; and historical accounts and analysis in the form of The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (which I’ve reviewed for Reading Room) and Vincent O’Malley’s The Great War for New Zealand.

 

           

 

Discussion with others led me back to 2002’s Histories Power and Loss edited by Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh. Its essays on ‘uses of the past’ by such luminaries as W.H. Oliver, Te Maire Tau and Judith Binney remind me that there has been much informed and wise commentary lost sight of amid current polarising arguments. Lyndsay Head’s ‘The pursuit of modernity in Māori society’, in particular, tells us that the current narrative around the attitudes of Rangatira towards British settlement needs a more rigorous and balanced examination.

 

                                         

 

By Christmas I expect to finish time-travelling with Bryan Walpert’s intriguing novel Entanglement and David Grant’s more plodding journey through the chronology of Anderton. For sheer pleasure and doses of wisdom I dip into 100 Poems: Seamus Heaney, selected by his family. The Faber & Faber biography reveals that when T.S. Eliot wrote to say he accepted his first book of poems, Heaney said: ‘It was like a message from God.’ Some of Heaney’s poems come across just like that.

 

 

P.S. Did I say we had nothing in our library ‘Purely for show’? Er … gathering dust in the corner is the large-format Timechart of Biblical History with old and elaborate images illustrating Bible stories. Another refugee from the Regent Book Sale, I think, and definitely messages from God.