Takahe Book Club

A big thank you to the Takahe Book Club at Brooklyn School who invited me to talk to them last week. These are Year 5 and 6 students who have been meeting regularly through the year to read and talk about books. It's great to see kids who are such keen readers. They could all tell me what they'd read and a couple of them arrived late, still reading as they walked in.

They had also prepared some questions and halfway round the circle I had to stop and grab paper and pen to write some of them down. Being given a question that you've never been asked before is a real gift because it always makes you think more about your own writing. So here are some of the great questions they asked:

• What does it feel like to have a book published?


• If you weren't an author, what do you think your life would be like?


• Do you prefer writing books where you make everything up or where you do research?


• Is writing a book ever boring?


• How easy is it to make up your characters?


• What would you like a reader to think about your books?


• How important is it to have the right name for your characters?

- Not to forget the random question about fish!

I thought these were especially interesting questions because they showed a real grasp of the nature of writing and what it's like to be a writer (and a reader).

So Adam, Hunter, Emma, Michael, Olivia, Shaam, Chloe, Joseph, Jonny, Jessica, Shea, Yusi, Amit, Emma, Xanthe, James, Anna and maybe a few more who couldn't be there today - thank you again (and for your card and gift); it was a treat to come and talk to you all, and I hope you get lots of good reading down over the summer holidays!

 

 

 

Courage Day 2012

November 15 is marked around the world as The International Day of the Imprisoned Writer. This was started in 1981 by PEN, the international writers' organisation, to acknowledge those who are subject to political, economic or other forms of repression.

Here in New Zealand we call it Courage Day. Dr Nelson Wattie, the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) PEN representative, introduced the recent Courage Day meeting in Wellington. He pointed out that the name refers to the courage that such writers display, but also recalls NZ writers James Courage and his mother Sarah Courage, who both faced opposition because of their writing - in James' case, because he dared to write about homosexuality at a time when such writing was discouraged and could be banned.

This year the NZSA Wellington branch decided to focus on courage shown by writers in a situation close to home, and we invited Dr Jeffrey Paparoa Holman to address us about the courage of people, including writers, in Christchurch, and more generally on writers' courage to speak in stressful and dangerous situations.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a prolific poet, whose books include As Big as a Father (2002), The Late Great Blackball Bridge Sonnets (2004) and Land Very Fertile (2008). This year he published Shaken Down 6.3, a collection of poems, photographs and an essay focusing on the Christchurch earthquake.



He delivered a riveting and moving talk, despite still getting over the effects of jet lag, having only returned last week from the Iowa Residency.

Jeffrey first talked about the courage shown by his family during the war: his father who was in the Navy, and his mother and grandmother who used to talk to him about being bombed in Liverpool during the Blitz. He told us about some of the writers he met at Iowa, in particular a man from Myanmar who in his imprisonment refused to let his art or his work be confined, and treated every item in his cell as a possible art object

Lastly, he read a number of poems from Shaken down 6.3 and talked about the situation in Christchurch: the lingering after-effects - both physical and emotional, the grief over loss of places and buildings around which you had built your memories - but also the greater community spirit, and a creative flowering with initiatives such as Gap filler:



This was the first time that we included the "empty chair" at our Courage Day event. The chair is placed to symbolise a writer or writers who cannot be present because they are imprisoned, detained, disappeared, threatened or killed. It added an extra poignancy to the occasion and to Jeffrey’s wise and moving words about the situation in Christchurch.

Since the meeting, I've been reading through Shaken down 6.3 and have found it a very moving collection. Jeffrey's description of what his parents and grandmother had experienced during the war added more depth to my reading of his poem living with heroes. The book also includes some poems from Japan, April-May 2011, including Densinya rice haiku which uses a frog and an egret in one small ricefield to tell the story of a terrible and enormous  tragedy.

New book, new setting

I am very excited to have a new book coming out next March. It has been a lot of work and a huge learning curve for me, and I've been very grateful for all the help I've received along the way - from the publishers, New Holland, and from many other people who have generously given of their time and expertise. The editing process has been intense, fascinating, time-consuming and complicated, but it is almost over with just a few things left to do.

I'll be talking about it at the Wellington Children's Book Association's annual Christmas Book Buying Night on Tuesday night (see here for more details, and come along if you are in Wellington) and I will be putting more details up on my website closer to the time of release, but in the meantime, here is a hint as to what the first part of the book is about:

First year at art school

First year print making at Elam:





Aren't they beautiful - and not only that, but they are printed not on paper but on either side of an old school folder, flattened and with the central clip removed.

Very proud mother.

 

Summer reading

Thanks to the wonderful Children's Bookshop for this beautiful image:



 

RSNZ Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing

The shortlist for the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing has just been announced on this page and I'm very pleased to be a finalist in the non fiction category.

This year's topic was on the future of science in New Zealand and it took its inspiration from the transit of Venus: "One day in 1769 the future of Aotearoa arrived quite unexpectedly, from the East, and in a form undreamt of. Just as it had some six centuries before. What future is on the horizon now?"



This competition always comes up with some fascinating entries and I'm looking forward to reading the other shortlisted ones, both fiction and non fiction.

The curious incident of the dog in the night time at the NationalTheatre

Our favourite cinema is the wonderful Penthouse cinema in Brooklyn and lately it's been possible to see not just movies there, but filmed versions of live performances - the Met Opera in New York, and from London the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, Shakespeare at the Globe and various National Theatre performances.

The National Theatre ones and the Proms are apparently shown live at sites all around the UK. Here on the other side of the world we have to wait a bit longer, but you still get something of the sense of a live performance - you can see and hear the audience and the venue and sometimes the backdrop: the dome of St Paul's in the background and the London Eye all lit up, revolving above the Thames.

The show we've just seen was The curious incident of the dog in the night time, and it was fascinating to see how a book that is told so much from inside someone's head (and that 'someone" an autistic boy) could be translated to the stage. But it worked, and the sound and lighting and special effects all combined to give the effect of the overload on Christopher's mind when things got too much for him.

The set was also fascinating: hardly any props apart from numbered boxes and a trainset, but the floor was marked by a grid of small lights that could be turned on and off in patterns, and some of the best scenes involved intricate choreography of rest of the cast, all swirling around him at the train station or the Underground. The shots were sometimes filmed from directly above so I don't know if the audience would have got the same view, but the scenes of Christopher going down the escalator, or the train passengers looking out the window - which were both filmed with the cast lying down - were very clever.

It made me think about how acting - and playwriting - is such a collaborative process, and so different from sitting in a room on your own and writing a book. And how watching a play is equally a social event, as opposed to sitting reading a book by yourself. And how interesting it is when something like this is transformed from one medium to the other.