snow like thought

Crowd of thoughts

2012-01-10T00:16:00.000-08:00

I'm workshopping a story over at Fictionaut. If you're a member or not, I'd love your input either there or here.

Surf training

2011-12-29T14:34:00.000-08:00

I found a great way to avoid the sales.

The sand was full of weeny iron bits (iron filings? - a science lesson gone astray?). They stuck to the magnets on my son's train when he buried it. When I dug it up I thought it was a bizarrely similar yet much older abandoned train with anemones clinging to it (...always the most ludicrous explanation is the most obvious seeming one....).

We found the most beautiful dainty shells in bone white and indigo fading to lilac....

...before our attention was caught by a flash of electric blue (photo credit Mike, currently photographer in residence at Muriwai Surf School - my surf pics were tripe).

The beach seems the most appropriate place to end one year and bring in the next; something about

the tide draws me there at the close of the year. And what a year.

I've had a productive one which saw twenty odd publications, starting with Otoliths through Horizon Review, ending in December with The Bactrian Room. I wrote a screenplay, penned a couple hundred poems, got longlisted for the Kathleen Grattan Award and started Escape Behaviours (the poetry for which I wrote this time last year).

Thank you all who've supported me in myriad ways - I feel grateful, and optimistic for the New Year. Here's to a creative and fulfilling New Year for all of you!

Oh Christmas three

2011-12-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

Three little baubles of happy news to hang on your tree this December:

Firstly - huge congratulations to Isobel J Hillman for getting her first poem published at Ink, Sweat & Tears - I'm particularly thrilled for her as she's my daughter, and she wrote Avalanches when she was nine (she's the grand old age of ten now!).

Secondly - I have a story up at The Bactrian Room. I'd love your thoughts on this one. My thanks go to Russell Streur who has virtually adopted me this year!

Thirdly - the names have gone into the hat - the person receiving a copy of The Juno Charm is:

Congratulations, Dan - drop me an email at teaforthetiller [at] hotmail [dot] com and The Juno Charm will work its magical way to you.

Thanks to all who've read and or followed the blog this year - your support means so much to me. However you choose to celebrate this holiday, I hope you have a relaxing and meaningful time - and a heap of fun ;) You really are the trimmings on the tree for me.

Tim to dance

2011-12-07T01:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve got the tunes on, prehistoric music, bass low enough to get your pulse flummoxed but not so loud as to make your brain feel like the last biscuit in the tin of your head. My dance partner should be here any moment….and here he is!

Hello, Rachel! Thanks for marking me on your dance card! If you hadn't said the music was prehistoric, I would have said it sounded a lot like Warpaint.

Hullo, huge welcome, and thank you for visiting snowlikethought, Tim Jones.

Let me get rid of your jacket – it is waterproof? It’ll still be there when you leave. Nibble? Biscuit? Drink?

Then what are we waiting for? Let’s dance. Mind the toy box, watch out for the rocker leg; not exactly a dance floor but all the world’s a stage, is it not?

As long as there's space for my elbows, I'm happy on the most crowded dance floor.

Now, Tim, I’m so thrilled you’re here to talk about your latest poetry collection, “Men Briefly Explained”.

In a recent radio interview you discussed some of the social pressures men are under to stand “alone” be “staunch”, and “not to show weakness”. .. that media possibly adds to these pressures by portraying men stereotypically. Could you perhaps give some examples and say how the characterisation of men in “Men Briefly Explained” differs from caricatures of men in the media in your opinion?

The characterization that comes to mind is the "Southern Man" of Speights advertisement fame. I like those ads, but our Speights-loving friend is the New Zealand "Man Alone" stereotype taken to a point just this side of the ludicrous – terse, laconic, giving at most a grudging nod (and a Speights) of praise.

It's a powerful stereotype, because the long-withheld approval of a stern father-figure/mentor is something a lot of boys and men find themselves seeking.

I grew up in Southland, and the stereotype is not entirely without truth – some of those real-life Southern Men populate the margins of a poem like "Men at Sea". But I wasn't born in Southland, or even in New Zealand — I was born in Cleethorpes (that's near Grimsby in Lincolnshire, a fact it's just conceivable some readers won't know), and Cleethorpes Man is a much more emotionally labile beast.

Hopefully you’re warmed up now, Tim, shall we up the tempo?

You began your reading at The Thirsty Dog, in the Auckland leg of your recent tour, by introducing your collection as (paraphrasing) a book for anyone who wants to know about men, including women. You followed “women” with a description that the book is only a slim volume. This struck me as a deliberately provocative comment to make – especially considering your suggestion that more women than men buy your poetry (especially considering I was in the audience!) – I was instantly aware that my interpretation of your poetry was going to be keener than if I hadn’t had the feminine rag waved at me. So, in light of that altered reception, I wanted to ask you if consider “Men Briefly Explained” a sort of Fight Club for poets? That is, if it is in any way a defence of masculinity, and do you even think such a defence necessary?

I certainly wasn't using "slim" as an insult, unless it was an insult directed at men — i.e. that it takes only a slim book to explain us – but it seems that didn't come across as intended. So far, at least, women have shown a lot more interest in the book than men, but perhaps that reflects the realities of the poetry-reading audience as much as the contents of the book. In any case, if anyone was offended by my introduction, I apologise!

I don't think of the book as a defence of masculinity — unless to explain is, to some extent, to defend. I do think that the genders are often quite mysterious to each other.

I love the quote from Kathleen Jones on the back of the book: “This poetry is how New Women want their New Men to be – strong, sensitive and empathetic!” Should we add ‘brief’ to that list?

There are so many meanings "brief" could take in this situation, but if it's the meaning I think you intend, that takes us back towards the strong, silent type – the "Southern Man" I started with. There are times when I imagine it's reassuring to have the strong, silent type around, I expect. I hope I am the strong type, at least when that is appropriate, but I struggle with the silent part.

You’ve got some devilish moves, Tim. Right, let’s put something a bit slower on. You can be Björn to my Agnetha.

As an ABBA fan, that's an attractive proposition – but then I remember that my favourite ABBA song, "The Winner Takes It All", was written by Björn for Agnetha to sing, from Agnetha's point of view, about Agnetha and Björn's breakup. Which is very sad, and at the same time, a little creepy.

Of course, the song has now been redeemed by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon singing it at the end of the best and funniest movie about masculinity I've seen for ages, The Trip.

(Yes, I am a nerd – why do you ask?)

Your poems aren’t just about men, though, are they, Tim? The poetry winks to a start with one of the most startling conception poems I think I’ve ever read.

Curved over islands, the world

dragged me south in a talkative year

slipping Southampton

as the band played a distant farewell.

It was better than steerage,

that assisted passage: ten pound poms

at sixpence the dozen, promenading

in sun frocks, gathering for quoits,

angling, in an understated way,

for a seat at the Captain’s table.

("Impertinent to Sailors", © Tim Jones, 2011)

This poem has the rare property (though not rare for your poetry) of being funny, cheekily so, yet transcendental, and ultimately very moving. Could you tell me a little about “Impertinent to Sailors”?

Thank you! Like many of the poems in the first section of the book, "Impertinent to Sailors" is closely based on my own life. As I mentioned, I was born in the UK, and my parents decided to emigrate to New Zealand when I was two – the classic "ten pound Poms" on an assisted passage. I remember nothing of the trip, but I've filled in the details – several probably wrongly – from what I've been told about it. The abrupt and disappointing ending is certainly correct: Dad, having been lured aboard by the promise of a job waiting at the other end of the voyage, found when we disembarked in Christchurch that the job had been given to somebody else.

I find that two-line stanzas are good for poems expressing alienation or disconnection: there's something about the way that the lines in each stanza cling together, with a wide space before and a wide space behind.

This poem has found an unexpected second life. I posted it as a Tuesday Poem on my blog, and it was found online by an Australian composer looking for a text for a choral work he was composing called "Brighton to Bondi" – for which I was very happy to give permission. The work was premiered in Sydney in September, and seems to have to been a success – I hope to hear it one day.

Ah the band is growing faint, I fear, Tim. Too soon, too soon. A slow dance to end? No? Let’s go out with a big bang then!

“Queens Of Silk, Kings Of Velour” I imagine will be the sequin of a poem you will never shake off from this collection forward. It’s playful, flirty. When I first read it I scribbled notes. Marginalia: man is geek; to be man is to know and have the reflux reflex to regurgitate facts. Is this “what it means to be a man”?

That's good to hear, because I usually feel that my best poems are those that arrive more or less fully formed, whereas "Queens…" went through quite a few incarnations before reaching its present form.

Knowing obscure facts about seventies bands is only one of the many ways to be a man, but in my line of work (I work part-time in the IT industry to pay the bills that writing, sadly, does not yet pay) I meet quite a few men for whom the detailed knowledge of the arcane of one aspect of life is an important component of masculinity. There is a certain sense of security in knowing that both Elton John (under his birth name, Reginald Dwight) and Bryan Ferry auditioned to be the lead singer of King Crimson. It helps to make sense of a chaotic world – and yet the women are on the dance floor, wondering (or even worse, not caring in the slightest) about why all the men are sitting on the sofa.

Would you look at the clock; we’ve danced the time away. What a blast. Reading “Men Briefly Explained” is to dance through the ages of man, and man, what a dance! I’ve had a wonderful time, Tim, thank you for humouring me. Please, where can I find more copies of “Men Briefly Explained”?

Can there be More Than This? Well, yes – in an abrupt segue from melancholia to marketing – there can:

Men Briefly Explained is published by Interactive Press (IP) of Brisbane. You can find out more about Men Briefly Explained, and buy it direct from the publisher, on IP's mini-site for the book: http://www.ipoz.biz/Titles/MBE.htm

On my Men Briefly Explained page, there are more options for buying the book, plus latest reader reactions and reviews: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/p/men-briefly-explained.html

Just before you go, (ah, see, your jacket’s still on the pavement, you won’t get wet feet crossing that puddle) I think I’ve mentioned online before your “Boat People” was the first poetry collection I read when I first arrived in New Zealand four years ago. It felt like I was meant to find that book in particular. It’s wonderful to have another collection from you, Tim, the prequel as it were, I’ll treasure just as much. Thank you very much.

It's lovely to hear that, Rachel! I didn't know that about "Boat People", and that makes your support for my work even more special. Thank you once again! I shall sail out of here with my feet not quite touching the floor…

Nuala risen

2011-11-30T14:14:00.000-08:00

Now there are some poetry books which make me want to dash off and write something myself and then there's The Juno Charm which just awed me into submission; I literally could not write for several days after I read it because it's raw and real and surprisingly funny where I didn't expect to laugh ("Mannequin Envy") and moving where I was determined not to cry ("Sons"), and because it's what I've come to recognise as a synonym for superb writing: Nuala Ní Chonchúir.

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway county. Her début novel You(New Island, 2010) was called ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times and ‘a gem’ by The Irish Examiner. Her third short story collection Nude (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the UK’s Edge Hill Prize. Her second short story collection To The World of Men, Welcome has just been re-issued by Arlen House in an expanded paperback edition. The Juno Charm, her third full poetry collection, was launched in November in Dublin and Galway.

Welcome Nuala, thank you for coming to snowlikethought to talk about your latest poetry collection, The Juno Charm.

This collection made me think of a pioneer sea voyage, in so much as the moon winking from many of the poems, the varied geographies, and lonely land marks. It’s a work rich with places. For e.g., “Blue House, Magdalen Islands, Quebec”: I read it from the bottom line up and the image of a photograph, my grandma in front of a lighthouse in Canada, came to mind – when I got to it, the title was perfect, and I wondered, how important is travel to your writing?

Travel is really important to me as a writer. It’s the old thing – I’m a hermit because I’m a writer so travel is the big bonus – being invited places to read. But also travelling for the pure enjoyment of experiencing a new place. It jolts my writing to be somewhere new because my senses are on high alert. I love getting away, it keeps me interested in life. I’m just back from four days in Paris and just being there, walking different streets, was fantastic. I have a story in progress set there so I visited the street where one of the characters lives and discovered it has a church on it, which fits beautifully with the story. You don’t get that kind of information sitting at home or poking on the net.

I suppose, at this point, I should mention I read the whole collection in reverse to begin with, but on re-readings, including in the order it’s printed, I felt it had a rhythm which could not be broken, wherever I began reading from.

Journeys, of course, aren’t restricted to crossing continents; you have an ability to bring life, the act of creation, to fresh focus, and there’s a cyclical feel to this collection – again, much like the appearance, disappearance, now returning of the moon – this collection has a pulse. How much conscious thought goes into arranging the poems within the collection – is the effect of the whole something you planned for or even anticipated?

Yes, it takes me ages to piece the whole thing together. I wanted the book to have a narrative that was book-ended with positive poems. I also wanted a thematic flow, so the poems about birth are grouped, as are the poems about pregnancy loss, the ones about marriage, the New York ones are all together too etc. etc. I guess I want the reader to become involved in the story the poems are telling, which is my story over a number of years. I don’t consciously choose to write in themes but I’m possessed with different things at different times and that comes out in the writing.

Finally, I want to ask you about birds. There’s a lot of symbolism in your poems, and references, some obvious, some less so, but they only ever add more to a poem which has already reached satin gloved hands inside you and slipped them off; it’s almost like I had to pull the images, your poetry, back out of myself after the reading, so I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on symbols, what they bring to your work, what’s your relationship to symbol?

Symbols are really important to me; I get obsessed by things from time to time - the moon, peacocks – and they start to feed into my writing. I’m a fan of Sylvia Plath (which will be obvious to anyone reading the book) and I love her use of the moon. I also love the Irish poet Matthew Sweeney’s moon cycle.

There are a lot of charms in the book – mostly to do with fertility and trying everything to get pregnant. I wouldn’t consider myself superstitious but when life is being hard on you, I guess it’s normal to look for signs and portents (in birds, let’s say) or to turn to any method possible to make things better, like carrying amulets.

And speaking of birds, a little birdie tells me you’re giving away a copy of The Juno Charm to one lucky blogger – readers, pop a mention in the comments if you’d like your name putting in the draw.

The Juno Charm is such a moving work, an utterly stunning achievement, Nuala, thanks so much for visiting New Zealand and talking about it.

Rachel, thanks a million for having me. Next week my virtual tour takes me to the lovely Tania Hershman in Bristol in the UK. http://titaniawrites.blogspot.com/

Words worth

2011-11-12T22:25:00.000-08:00

I just came across this over on AUT's facebook page, stuck a sample of my writing in, had it weighed and was very happy with the results: I am one lean writing machine!

Tarn wish

2011-11-10T12:14:00.000-08:00

I have one more poem up at Camel Saloon.

Sincere gratitude to Russell Streur, author of The Muse of Many Names, and bar keep extraordinaire.
I must have amassed a massive tab......

Care ear

2011-11-08T12:03:00.000-08:00

I have another poem up at the Camel Saloon.

Many thanks and much kindness to Russell Streur.

Cause you can

2011-11-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Just want to direct your attention to Thomas Taylor's blog where he's raising awareness of Team Hannah
by auctioning off a rare signed and illustrated copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. C'mon you Potter fans!

Love cent

2011-11-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

Too fantastic - I have my 100th follower and it's Jennicat! Utterly marvellous - Now, what to send you, Jenni :)

To risk

2011-10-30T13:26:00.000-07:00

My poem "Tourists" is up at Camel Saloon. Please feel free to amble on over - would love to know your thoughts on this one.

Many thanks to Russell Streur.

Could half dumb with

2011-10-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

Advice for all would-be-bloggers - before you go jaunting off into the ether with your trusty portfolio of comments, read this:

I could have done with reading it three years ago.....

Roman tic

2011-10-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

Thanks for your question, Elisabeth. Anyone else got a question about Escape Behaviours?

Expose her

2011-10-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

In response to Rachel Fox's question over at my facebook page:

Please excuse the scribblyness of this reply - I've been rather sick today.

If anyone else has any questions I'll do my best to answer them in similar fashion - quick and scribbly - without the vomit.

E scape

2011-09-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

I have a project I'd like to share with you. Venturing into unchartered territory, it has involved getting over my facebook loathing and incurring a sore thumb. You can follow it at Escape Behaviours and keep updated at my facebook page here. I aim to add a page a day until completion.

First speak

2011-09-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

A huge shout out of congratulations to Andrea Quinlan whose poetry chapbook "We Speak Girl" will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2012.

I can't wait to read it!

Two good

2011-09-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

HUGE thanks to Deirdra of A Storybook World

for presenting me with this fabulous award!

It's completely spiffing to receive any validation whatsoever and it's particularly lovely coming from someone as talented as Deirdra. Please do check out her blog. She has some wonderful interviews among other treats.

In other exciting news, I have two poems in Horizon Review. My sincere gratitude to Katy Evans-Bush for all her hard work and for being such a pleasure to work with. Thank you, Katy.

Heir piece

2011-08-16T02:44:00.000-07:00

Huge thanks with frills and rare buttons on to Andrea Quinlan for hosting my piece, 'Tagged' over at Story Bought Dress.

The piece is less a fiction than an elaborate analogy of how vintage wear makes me feel. I love that each item carries a memory of its past - that by my wearing of a piece I can evoke a sort of haunting - but in the best way - and acquire the experience of the life of an other through their garments. And it's the sort of not quite one thing or another writing that I love to indulge in, therefore I am grateful to Andrea for indulging me!

In her written

2011-08-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

I've threatened to expose my views on feminism before on this blog, I think I may even have noted my rejection of the term 'feminism', but I must thank Women Rule Writer over at the Anti-Room for finally drawing out of me exactly what it is about the term that doesn't agree with me.

I think I'd like to add to my comment there - but to put it here rather than gobbling up any more comments space there - and say that, for me, patriarchy is at its strongest and conversely least detected within our language system. I'm not suggesting we change the language or that it would be possible or acceptable to drop gender markers, for example, from it - though this would whittle down discrimination at least in the written form. Shock horror, I don't even have the answer! But I do strongly, passionately believe that our entire value system is flawed and language is where it's clearest to see the discrimination, though most often ignored, and where it is easiest to stop. However, we have to learn to recognise it.

Our entire language is an extension of patriarchy. We don't gender every word so we have a better chance than, say, the French to rectify this but we do have gender in the language. Fact. We have masculine and feminine. Pretty simple so far, pretty fair, nest-ce pas? OK but what I think happens, all too often, still (no I am not the first to note this nor do I claim to have some enlightened position on the situation here), is how the masculine word is favoured over the feminine. Waiter/waitress (caps omission deliberate). Think up a few binaries. Try it. I am aware that there's some work being done to address this imbalance - actor is now favoured over the actor/actress dichotomy - this is progress and it's as much as we can aim for in the now given that we have to privilege one term over another ultimately to banish the inequality. It's much less practical to think up a whole new, gender neutral, term than it is to drop the recessive term in favour of the one we've privileged. But just take a look at the word we favour. In our promotion of actor, for example, we are acknowledging the superfluousness of the word actress. We are acknowledging that the feminine state was nothing more than a suffix to a male preference. All our progress looks, from this perspective, like a lot of running backwards - running with gusto, but not quite progress. And not equality. But a start. I do not think there is a solution to be found in privileging the feminine term either, I must stress that, my aim is not for an inverted form of sexism - patriarchy with a feminine hat (ouch - self-loather?) - I want equality.

And that's essentially it - no cure, no big fix because I don't think society is ready for what it would take to fix the inherent discrimination hardwired within our respective cultures. And, respect is key here. A lot of ands, but as me granny said, a lot of 'ands make light work. So it's not easy to remove the discrimination from language or to achieve equality through deconstructing binaries but it is what I advocate and what I believe in and what I believe we can all work together to achieve, AND before you criticise it - you taken a look at your beliefs lately?

Therefore, my thanks to Women Rule Writer, and to every woman who has stood up and been counted for her rights and beliefs. But here's to every other person who's been discriminated against, of whatever other gender, race, (choose own marker) variation because feminism is not just for women, it benefits us all - but can we have a fairer name?

PS. is fair regarded as a feminine word? If so, take that last line as irony. Balance things out.

Maybe someone can get me started on class distinctions - that's bound to amuse. Discrimination and oppression wear many hats but all smell the same to me.

Unhurried IT

2011-08-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot to mention, with all the pc wobbles I've had, my poem 'Inherited' was shortlisted for the 'University of Maine at Machias Eighth Annual Ultra-Short Competition' and will appear in the forthcoming issue of Binnacle. My thanks to Gerard NeCastro and congratulations to the winners and fellow honourees.

Ahem

2011-07-28T15:43:00.000-07:00

I'd just lke to draw everyone's attention to a fantastic new zine venture for all who are inspired by vintage, thrift and fashion: Story Bought Dress

Here's what the blurb says:

About

Ballad debt

2011-07-18T03:45:00.000-07:00

Illustration by R J Fenton 2011

Click to enlarge

Having major pc woes folks - sparks, smoke and EVERYTHING! Would be exciting (and for my life that is all it takes) were it not for the fact that it is costing me. I wouldn't have bought a settee if I'd known my computer was listing. Many trips to local library are the order of the day. And who made orthodontists the yankers of the purse strings? My advice to my daughter is - should she ever have children of her own - choose a partner with perfect teeth...then again, if her partner's teeth were unmatching in a perfectly opposite way, would that....never mind.

On pearly whiter news - two poems, owing much to the ballad tradition, in the latest blackmail press. My sincere thanks to Liz Breslin and Laura Williamson.

Make a cuppa first. Warning, contains strong language. Best get a couple of biscuits, too....

Let me know what you think - always love your (honest) opinions.

Tweet time

2011-06-24T15:42:00.000-07:00

These two little love birds were hiding out in my veggies and I didn't have the heart to separate them.

Well, hullo there strangers!

I've been a busy wee bee - more on why another time - but I was lucky enough to go to the launch of the latest issue of Sport a while ago (can't believe it's taken me this long to blog about it!) where the winners of the Unity Books competition, The Long And The Short Of It, read from their stories and launched the book of the same.

Cover art by Anastasia Doniants.

The competition was for stories under 1000 words or over 10,000 words. Emily Perkins introduced the winning pair and asked them lots of interesting questions about how they write and what they write, and why, before asking them to read.

First up was Kirsten McDougall who read with understated humour and perfect comic timing her story "Clean Hands Save Lives". It was a very deserved winner, a real stand out story, and ended, for me, just perfectly.

Emily asked some more questions and then Lawrence Patchett read from his long story "The Road to Tokomairiro" which made me wish I had entered with one of my historical fiction pieces. Lawrence paused for another chat with Emily before giving a second reading and afterwards I got the mic and asked a question of my own - whether the winners thought there was such a thing as a competition story. I mentioned how there seemed to be a rise in writers offering tutorials or courses in "how to write winning stories". Interestingly, all the writers said they didn't think a competition story should be any different from any other story - that your best work should be the aim of any writing, regardless of the venue or outcome.

I met Emily Perkins - again - afterwards and asked her lots of questions which she was lovely enough to answer even though I was gabbling my words terribly - nerves, I might add, not falling down water - and I had a chat with the very talented and similarly shy Anastasia Doniants who is responsible for the cover art on the book and who very kindly offered to give me advice on my latest project. Enough, enough!

And so, to show my love for my bloggy faithfuls - and a welcome hug to any newbies - I'm giving away my sole copy of "The Long And The Short Of It" - signed by both winners and Emily Perkins - and Anastasia Doniants - to the first person who can guess which of the following songs I won a gold medal for singing in my school talent competition, age12:

1) Like A Prayer (Madonna)

2) Walking in the Air (written by Howard Blake, popularly sung by Aled Jones)

3) Where'er You Walk (Handel)

4) I Think We're Alone Now (Tiffany)

Good Luck!

Wedded this

2011-06-14T00:42:00.000-07:00

All of you who took part in the Small Stones challenge earlier this year, like me, will be familiar with the lovely Kaspa and Fiona who organised it. I was lucky enough to have a stone included in the book - see side bar - and I'd like to take a wee moment to thank them both and to wish them HUGE
CONGRATULATIONS - they are getting married on the 18th of June!

Anyone who would like to wish Fiona and Kaspa well can do so by posting a small stone here on the 18th.

They are also running a free e-course for people interested in The Art of Paying Attention - see clip below.

I'll be back soon with more writing news.

Break hers

2011-05-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

I have a one sentence story up at MONKEYBICYCLE.

Mega thanks to Steven Seighman.

Woe men

2011-05-09T17:03:00.000-07:00

Two links to make you think.

The first is about a something that happened a long time ago.

How times have changed, eh?

The second is about now.

Some change.

You see, I'm one of those women who doesn't believe much has changed for women since Emily Pankhurst supposedly "shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back". People may hide behind religion or any other man made abstract constucts but there is only one question to be asked, still: when will women be given equality? I reckon I might be around in another forty years to see what's changed.

Love scent

2011-05-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

I read it's International Write-A-Tiny-Poem Day, over at Women Rule Writer's blog, and thought it would be lovely to join in and post a tiny for you here. It's also Mother's Day (if my blog posts this with the wrong date - it's lying - trust me it's mother's day; I have hand made cards, flowers with half of next door's shrub still attached, and gifts), one of my gifts has a curiously worded label, which is now my found tiny poem:
Bath Salts

to make beautiful
the love scent in your life

Leg it over there

2011-04-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

Is this the funniest photo of a pair of legs you've ever seen?

There is some excellent work in the latest edition of Otoliths, including a very moving poem from Michele Leggott - highly recommend read.

In other news:

went to a very interesting reading on Saturday evening, given by members of The Author's Mouth group here in Auckland. There'll be another on the last Friday of May, at Borders in Albany's Westfield Mall. In future I will not down two coffees immediately prior to meeting people or wear skinny jeans to drink said coffee and sit for a long period of time.

completed a first draft of my screenplay, finally, and it's awful. Putting it aside for some considerable period of time until I have fathomed what to do with it.

writing and drafting poetry daily and coming up with some interesting things and I got the idea for my next collection of short stories - all of them, all in one go - like being hit by a creativity mannequin and swapping outfits rapidly. Now I need to stay focused and finish what I've started.

discovered many things make me laugh, often at inappropriate moments.

What are you lot up to and what do you know?

Mashing nations

2011-04-26T01:01:00.000-07:00

Tea's up. Fancy a sup? Let's see who's made tea and who's got pot luck.

Tiny teapot or big draw?

And the winner is.....

A little dreg soaked, the winner.....

Drop me your address in an email, Steven, and Shamfeign will wind its way to you.

Thanks to all of you who took part.

We ourselves

2011-04-18T01:26:00.000-07:00

Excuse my wonky photography - the typeset on the actual book is not skewed as it appears here!

Saturday night had me at Browns Bay Library for the launch of Eye Street Poet Alice Hooton's debut poetry collection Shamfeign.

Having a bludgeon of a bout of anaemia and the kids home all weekend meant I only had time to read a few of the poems myself, so more about them later, but so far I would describe hearing Alice read several and dipping in myself like having my brain taken back in time and stuck in the head of someone reminiscing over an old photo album, flicking the pages familiarly and quickly before me, pausing here and there on particularly fond recollections. Mostly I was struck by their brevity: succinct but with emotion and gravity, and a wry, quiet wit. The excerpt on the jacket, from Strangers, could also describe the poems themselves:

today I paint a picture

of islands

a clipped blue sea

jostling windsurfers in the bay

a ragbag of hometalk

lest they forget

(Copyright Alice Hooton 2011)

Originally from Ireland, Alice's poetry takes in immigrant tales of Ellis Island, WWII, and relatives at home and NZ. I have a signed copy for the first name out of a teapot ( I lost my hat - which isn't to say I recommend wearing a teapot for sun protection - a burn is a burn is a burn...). Drop a smiley :) in the comments if you want your name to mash (also known in non S. Yorks circles as brew).

Any verse ay?

2011-04-10T01:34:00.000-07:00

April 10th would have been the birthday of poet Bella Akhmadulina, had she not passed away last year. As a fine tribute to her, Russell Streur has put together a special edition The Eye of the Needle where women writers, poets and artists have come together to mark her first posthumous birthday. I have several pieces of poetry and artwork there and am very pleased to have been asked to contribute. Many thanks to Russell for the opportunity.

Do so

2011-03-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

Me again. Have just finished making the pamphlet going up for auction here. Huge thanks to Keris.

And here it is, paint still wet at time of photographing - a totally one off collection of thirty poems, never before seen (ten of them written in the last three days).

Features:

first read of 30 original poems,

glow-in-the-dark presentation envelope,

authentic Japanese newspaper dust jacket,

hand beaded page marker,

hand painted front cover,

secret hidden, removable, original art;

all by me, for you, for Japan.

Auction ends this Sunday.

Dozo

2011-03-15T00:02:00.000-07:00

If you can write, paint, edit, proof read, make art and much more, you can for Japan here. And here. Please do.

In sight

2011-03-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, my husband stutters. It's difficult to argue with a person when you have to politely wait for them to get their retort out. I have also witnessed other people's reactions (non-stutterers) to my husband, such as the parents who ushered their child away from our son at the playground, the man in the spec shop who couldn't look at him, and the interviewer who said he couldn't give my husband a job because the job was communications based (it was an IT job - communication would have been primarily email), and these, and other moments, led me to write over a hundred poems about or connected to stuttering in some way.

I am extremely proud to have two of these poems, "Gecko" and "Fat Tongue" in Air Flow, the magazine for the New Zealand Speak Easy Association for people who stutter. Huge thanks to Bruce Whitfield, and for a very generous and appreciated hand of friendship.

Poems are on page 4 but please take some time to read the magazine, it's insightful and goes to show what excellent communicators, high achievers, and generally people you want on your team, stutterers are. And if there are any stutterers in Auckland, please get in touch!

A second

2011-03-11T19:36:00.000-08:00

Started this painting in October 2010 - in progress.

Update: https://dellasays.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/authors-for-japan-can-you-help/

Many thanks to Merc for dropping this link in the comments thread. If any authors out there can donate books/writing/critiquing services, here's how.

Got back from the fundraiser for Christchurch last night to a phonecall with a tsunami warning and the news there'd been a massive earthquake in Japan. My heart goes out to everyone there. It hardly feels real, only seems a second since Christchurch, and I've spent the greater portion of today feeling utterly at a loss for what to say: inactive sums me up. It was the second tsunami warning we've had since we moved here in 2007. They scare me. I came here from about as far inland as you can get in the UK - tsunamis were not a phenomenon we were concerned with in our daily lives. To experience one must be unimaginably frightening. Already, the loss Japan has suffered is beyond my comprehension.

I opened blogger to write this post and then couldn't type, so after a brief walk around the house, returned to find the following message typed:

hi i love you mummy

Dig in

2011-03-10T08:01:00.000-08:00

I sketched my mother some years back, the drawing has been the foundation of many other pieces and experiments including this.

I seem to be on repeat - feel free to visit My Mother's Land: it's about digging, oh and stinging.

Think I've got VIP membership now, at the Camel Saloon - else escorted off the premises for loitering! Thank you, Russell Streur.

In portent

2011-03-04T23:18:00.000-08:00

A few things:

Welcome back, Andrea at Rainbow Notebook.

My poem "Auckland" made it over The Second Hump and was chosen among Russell Streur's favourites of February.

Thirdly, February 22nd 2011 will be a day New Zealanders remember forever, I know I will. Like many poets here in NZ, and the world, no doubt, I have been moved to write several pieces about Christchurch, however, I didn't feel it was my place to post them and wasn't even sure I should voice them at all. Perhaps a sense of guilt, or a feeling of voyeurism - being so close yet privileged and distant altogether. But having spoken to a few writing friends I have been convinced I should let them be read. Therefore, when Russell Streur asked if I'd like to submit anything to a forthcoming special edition of women's poetry I sent along a few poems including a piece I'd written about Christchurch Cathedral. You can read it now over at Camel Saloon here.

My sincere thanks to Russell.

Bolder gestures

2011-02-27T18:48:00.000-08:00

A little while ago I donated a painting to my daughter's school fun fair - the painting I used for my blog header as it happens. After last Tuesday, I emailed the PTA and asked could funds be redirected to Christchurch. I am really pleased to report that all funds, including those raised by the auction of my painting on the 11th March will go to Christchurch. And it seems that even people in Christchurch are not letting Tuesday's tragedy keep them down - what do you make of this?

It's not not awards

2011-02-26T21:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks this week to the two lovely ladies who blog, respectively, at:
this writer's life, and
Ramblings From Yet Another Stranger On The Bus.

I usually deflect awards as the list of conditions for receipt often read like the instructions for flat-pack furniture. And the awards don't colour coordinate with my blog. Oh, and "passing them on" conjures imagery of contagious disease. But, aside from all of that, I appreciate people letting me know they like my blog - that means a lot to me - and it's a nice opportunity for me to note one or two blogs that deserve a mention.

Also, back in October, I said I would take part in a quiz from Patteran's Pages - I hadn't forgotten, Dick, but I hope this will do instead, at least for now.

Both awards ask me to list seven things about myself:

1. I had my first newspaper article published when I was fifteen.

2. I sometimes wake myself up laughing in my sleep and I once had a giggling fit for forty minutes, non-stop.

3. I don't believe you have to find a husband to lose your father's name.

4. My great great grandparents on my maternal grandpa's side were Irish and fled an Gorta Mór.

5. I was Mary in my primary school nativity and the angel Gabriel was my cousin, although I didn't find out until after I left school. My teacher told her she would have made a better Mary. I was deeply hurt (I'd auditioned and everything, and still remember the song!).

6. I was the first girl to wear trousers at my high school (and got summoned to the deputy Head's office for my audacity).

7. I was once dragged by my ear to explain what I thought was funny about The Lord's Prayer - it was this:

For The Love Of God, What's That Up Your Sleeve?

Bless me, mam, for I have sneezed, a snail slick
of snot shot out, top speed, hauled up my arm
and dried shiny hard like a graphite thick
drawing, rubbed, over worked by childish palm

to glossy grey like slates in the rain. And
I tried to explain when Betty dragged me
by the ear but she couldn't understand,
I'd got my head hung so they couldn't see

the candles dripping from my nose, sticking
to my hair, and so she hauled me up on
stage: full view. They all thought I was laughing
as my sniffs increased in speed and not one

explanation could I give standing there
for “what's so funny about the Lord's Prayer?”

And to the nominations; considering these awards are doing the rounds, and the whole six degrees of separation thing, I'll just note a couple of blogs I enjoy reading for kinship as well as content:

Sara Crowley's A Salted - for real and raw writing with no mincing of words.

Lori Tiron-Pandit's Daily Writing - for searching questions and creativity.

Helen Caldwell's My Writing Life - for a store-house of writing related info.

We should all wish for sisters like them.

And thanks again to Leslie and Teresa for nominating me - you are both the human equivalents of home, for different reasons; I want you to know I'd nominate you right back!

A quake

2011-02-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

WATER FOR CHRISTCHURCH

If anyone in Auckland can and wants to donate:

Highlife Entertainment, George FM, Cafe Massimo and Y Generation will be joining forces this weekend to collect donations of bottled water to send to the effected areas in Christchurch after the earthquake.

There is currently a major shortage of clean water in Christchurch so bottled water will be needed for families, rescue workers and clean up teams over the coming weeks.
Drop off points at George FM 105 Ponsonby Road, Cafe Massimo Takapuna, Newmarket and Albany have been organised for donations this Saturday February 26th and Sunday February 27th between 10am and 5pm.

We ask that bottled water is delivered in boxes but if for any reason this is not possible, then bottles of water in plastic bags will also be fine.

Donations of canned food, clothing and other items of interest will also be accepted.

All donations will be delivered direct to Christchurch next week.

For more information or if there is any support that you or your company could offer, please contact Adam Bennett on the following details below.

Adam Bennett 021 649 100 – adamb@highlifeentertainment.co.nz

Highlife entertainment: http://www.highlifeentertainment.co.nz/

George FM: http://www.georgefm.co.nz/

Cafe Massimo: http://www.caffemassimo.co.nz/
*

Update: There's a call for anyone who can offer accommodation in Auckland, for those who cannot travel home to Christchurch, to contact here.

*
A quake has caused devastation in Christchurch. I am reading the news in utter disbelief. My thoughts go out to everyone there.

Man the lights

2011-02-19T21:01:00.000-08:00

My poem The Garden Of Earthly Delights is up at The Literary Burlesque. My sincere thanks to Melanie Browne.

To risk watching

2011-02-19T11:27:00.000-08:00

Auckland, November 2007. Photo taken by me: I'd been here three months.

Auckland is now available for viewing at The Camel Saloon.

Lowly kindness and high regards to barkeeper Russell Streur.

I saloon thee

2011-02-15T12:44:00.000-08:00

My poem "Pack Thi Bags And Guh, Lass, Teck Thi Ook Nar" is now up at Camel Saloon. Many thanks to Russell Streur. Amble on over, pull up a stool, you're in great company.

Tale of two piccies

2011-02-06T19:15:00.000-08:00

I have two photographs over at The Camel Saloon. My round and sincere thanks to Russell Streur, bar keeper extraordinaire. Poems coming shortly!

Inner ear

2011-01-31T13:59:00.000-08:00

Quick word in your ear:

I have a poem in Otoliths. My sincere thanks to Mark Young, I hope the snakes brought by the floods have now gone.

Update: with more floods on the way, my thoughts go out to those in Queensland.

Greywacke blogs

2011-01-09T01:02:00.000-08:00

Saw this at Titus' blog and thought it was a lovely thing to be part of. It's all about taking a moment to notice something. Although I may not post my stones daily on the blog, I will be collecting them daily and will add them here as and when I can.

Monday 10. 7am
A crack in the ceiling; a volcano rising out of peeling emulsion seas. An ant climbs Rangitoto.

Tuesday 11. 9:30am
Staple caught in the carpet; wool dyed to look like sand. A history of everything in brown.

Tuesday 11. 7pm
Bluebottle: all the colours of earth viewed from space. A fly carries the world on its back.

Tuesday 11. 8pm
Tui calls; briskly stirred drink, particles combining. Tapping spoon on china.

Tuesday 11. 8:15pm
Leaden on the swan plant where stained glass should be; dying monarch.

Wednesday 12. 6pm
Sandstone warm at my back; sunning. My thoughts walk a street of clouds.

Thursday 13. 5pm
Bluebottle; blue heart, pulmonary departed. Sea-breathing jellyfish; misplaced lung.

Bluebottle jelly fish, photo taken by Rachel J. Fenton, Thursday 13 January 2011.

Friday 14. 5pm
Coal faced mynahs beak pick beach quarry for snap.

Friday 14. 5.30pm
Three rams chase egg, butt to retrieve it without breaking, fall apart giggling. Rugby ball bounces on damp sand.

Saturday 15. 9am
Clothes tag on the table; commercial breakfast.

Sunday 16. 3pm
A spill on the notebook; penicillin in progress. Writing as medicine. Self heal; eat your words.

Monday 17. 10.am
Bird call; lapping glass.

Tuesday 18. 9.30am
Laundry basket on kitchen floor; still darks in morning.

Wednesday 19. 3pm
Toy tractor lifts book from rug; book lifts child from realia.

Thursday 20. 9.30am
Wisteria reaches for the window; holds out the light.

Friday 21. 5.30pm
Cables chime on flagless poles; Empire folded, the band plays on.

Saturday 22. 7.20am
Drawers left open. Another scratch. Bleeding washing.

Sunday 23. 11.30pm
Hot chocolate on white bedding dries as blood. I surrender.

Monday 24. 10am
Woman stares out through office window, file in hand; pending.

Tuesday 25.
Scribbles in red ink; my name (Rae), and what looks like an eagle's claw; sun dance.

Wednesday 26. 5.30pm
Sparrows flick playground bark: wood chirpings.

View from my house.

Thursday 27. 2pm
The bench, looking out over Mairangi Bay, where I last ate pastries with my mam. Before we left, how did I picture home? With buddleia growing out of her hair, smoking like a forgotten foundry in Attercliffe. And now? Against the backdrop of the sea; Pacific.

Friday 28. 9.15pm
Wedding anniversary. Rain forecast. Lick finger and press to the table: eat inside.

A collection of mugs. Note the Yorkshire Rose!

Friday 28. 10.30pm
Man with a toadstool for a brolly walks a pied dog in the storm: he must be on something.

Saturday 29. 6.30pm
Bulldog on lead. Dog's happier.

Sunday 30. 10am
Teens, taut as swingseats, lark in togs at beach playground.

Sunday 30.
Evolution: two seals stand in the time it takes a wave to break. Gnarly wipeout.

Sunday 30.
Ironing: men with boards press the sea, crease in its waves.

Sunday 30.
Statue: a sheathed phallus, protected from acid rain; environmental consummation.

Sunday 30.
Low barrier promotes Fence Hire; false advertising.

Monday 31. 5am
Morning stretches its wings, pigeon call and dove grey at the window. Whenuapai bird cuts a track clean and rigid as a cleaver. Small bodied chirpings huddle together or fall from the block to bush, defiant in pre-verdant screen in this colourless hour, tone in sound alone.

Monday 31. 8am
Last night's crumbs on table: coconut crack.

My thanks to Fiona and Kaspa for allowing me to take part in this project, which I've thoroughly enjoyed. I hope you've enjoyed reading my daily greywacke. My final stone is here.

Water wait

2011-01-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

Waiting.....

I went to the beach yesterday evening. As I arrived a man parked his bike, got into a wetsuit, put on red flippers and headed out towards the ship on the horizon line. I watched him. His strokes were even, rhythmic, and every third stroke or so a wave would hide him from view. At about five minutes in, he became indistinguishable from the sea. I waited. Fishermen arrived. Families picked up their beach umbrellas and left, couples came in from the water to cuddle on towels, a fish flew above the water; feeding time. Two hours later a flash of red appeared. He let a wave carry him onto the beach, took off his flippers, walked to his bike and got his towel. I went up to him. How far did you go? He smiled. Language is more than plosives and fricatives after all.

Four today only

2010-12-21T01:44:00.000-08:00

Surely the world's scariest Santa? He beckons but his wink has ceased to work! Sit on his knee, anyone?

Poet at the Wheel

“I'll throw a poem”. The clay,

plastic

cut from the earth in elastic slabs,

submitted

beneath my feet incognito

before being

lifted

to tread a higher existence.

Polar attraction. We make do,

with sedimentary action until the earth yields

a finer particle to weigh and wedge.

I extrude the shape all nature aspires to and drive it down again,

slip fingered, thumb ridged parings, off centred

and the whole thing spins out of control like a mad dervish.

Broken back.

Cheese wire and flick

of the wrists clears the wheel

for the next attempt.

A second clod is kneaded.

Thump and lift,

slam

and wedge again.

Dropped

like a drunk

on the wheel to reel another

time.

Its form rises within the wings of my hand, twin encouraged

I press my will, imprint it. Drawn, compressed,

raised and razed and sponged and my foot lifts off the pedal.

I made this.

“I think it's perfect”, I say.

Teacher,

wire in hand, splits my poem piece,

cleavers

out its heart and says, “you're right,

it was, now throw another just the same”.

This is where I'm at - writing everyday in the must-be-nuts-to-keep-doing-this way that I do, all the time reminding myself to write better and find a more creative way to fall. It is humbling, and necessary.

My thanks to everyone who has offered guidance and advice - I appreciate it - even when it stings - and I do put it all into practice.

My son is two*; I'm struggling to find blogging time but I am still reading and visiting blogs and, most importantly for me, I am still protecting my writing time. Poetry for the last few months. Several per day some days (four today), always trying to find the perfect metaphor; the this-is-how-I-see-this-share-my-view-point way; did anyone else even notice that?; and other forms of autopsy with gentler tools.

Merry Christmas to those who believe and/or celebrate (including those hypocritical atheists such as myself who keep the tree and the pressies and say it's for the kids blah, blah but really we love the rituals!) Happy holidays to everyone else.

*For those of you who have experience of toddler boys - you know they should come with pads and crash helmets! I salute you! For those who have no experience of them, I laugh, I cry, I pity, I envy you.

PS apologies for my apostrophe sin - tis the season. It's the least abhorrent of my recent typing errors...tell you that one later....thanks, t'other Rachel.

In significant worlds

2010-12-02T00:37:00.000-08:00

Warmest greetings to Jo Cannon who is at snowlikethought to talk about medicine, Malawi and Mercy (but not Madonna), in her short story collection Insignificant Gestures: twenty five stories which take the reader from such diverse continents as Africa, Europe and Asia, to Self.

Thanks, Rachel! It’s a pleasure to be here in New Zealand.

Jo, I came to your work completely blind, ignorant (embarrassingly) of your writing and all I knew was that you are a GP, so I was astounded that I should leave your fiction with my eyes clamped as wide open as they are. I'm very pleased to have been introduced to your writing.

Thank you, that’s kind.

More than a few of the stories in your collection are written from the point of view of a doctor or from someone associated with or visiting a doctor. I thought we could look at the title story here. Set in Malawi, “Insignificant Gestures” is the story of a doctor who is haunted by the outcome of his failure to diagnose an illness in a woman who was not his patient. And it's extraordinarily powerful, not simply because of how the plot unfolds or the events it depicts, not in the telling, but, I thought, in the way that you frame the intimacy between the characters, how you show them, and how it is intimacy which gets in the way of objectivity. Intimacy is, if not the cause of the woman's death, the reason her illness goes undiagnosed. Would you agree? Could you talk a little about this and the title?

Yes, in a way. Ian’s judgement is clouded by shock at the violence he believes Celia has suffered, and his affection for her. The intimacy between the two is subtle, based on shared moments of intense creativity. Ian may be in love with Celia, but he’s an upright guy who knows that it would be inappropriate and harmful to act on this. But mostly, Celia’s illness is undiagnosed because Ian is an inexperienced doctor, forced, due to the lack of medical man-power, to make decisions that are beyond his capability. Her death and his disabling distress are consequences of the deprivation and poverty in Malawi.

The title alludes to those unexpected moments of intimacy, or significance, which temporarily break down the barriers between people and reinforce our shared humanity.

As soon as I'd read the title story my mind was filled with anticipation, expectations and questions – so many questions – one of which was the thought of humanity as a hindrance to science. And it should be contradictory but the line “patient heal thyself” crops up which leads me to my next observation. There's very much the sense, reading your stories, that the characters within them are faced with the limitations of medicine, of knowledge, even, and they are forced to look within themselves, to the unexplainable, for what cannot be answered by science. I thought of science and doctors being seen as faith substitutes. Were you aware your book raises such profound questions, did you want it to, or are stories purely for entertainment for you?

I didn’t intend this theme and I’m interested that you picked it up! I see medicine’s limitations every day in my work and take it for granted. I’m privileged as a G.P. that people trust me with their most profound thoughts and emotions. So, if I have a symbolic role, it is to be a witness.

No, I wasn’t aware of these questions. I mostly write for fun, to clarify my thoughts, and to understand how it feels to be someone else. If a reader spends money and time on my book, I want them at least to be entertained. If they find it thought provoking too, I’m delighted.

Following on from the notion that when knowledge fails people look within to find answers – to the commonality among all beings – many of your stories seemed to be about people who didn't find help or, often, they are connected to others who see them as an answer to an unanswerable problem whilst their own problem also goes unanswered. You don't try to wrap anything up in your stories or answer any of your characters' questions, there are lacunas. Could you talk a little about this?

I suppose we all reach out to each other for things that no human being can provide. It starts with the child’s disappointment that her parents are flawed.

Real lives are mostly messy and rambling, and some are desperately difficult. Everyone struggles to find meaning. It is satisfying to make up stories with more shape and clarity than real ones, but if everything was wrapped up they would be unbelievable. I want my fictional people to have happy endings, or at least hope, but in real life nothing is ever finished. After every story, there is another one, which may be better or worse. Until we die, of course.

I think it was René Descartes who said “question anything that involves the senses”, and many of your characters are relying heavily on their senses. What are your thoughts on perception and representations of truth in fiction?

I’m interested that you see them relying on their senses. Most of my characters are preoccupied with their inner worlds, and have a skewed idea of what is going on around them. The apocalyptic backdrop to some of the stories isn’t real, but a projection of an individual’s emotional turmoil, caused by bereavement, childlessness or abandonment for example. I think we make up our reality. An important role of fiction is to help us understand that other people do too.

The blurb talks about “exile and belonging” and “what it means to be an outsider” and there are characters who are refugees or who travel abroad for work or marriage, but it was my interpretation that these terms were more applicable to the characters' psychologies, indicative of a state of mind. I thought it was a clever way of showing that the differences of any consequence your characters have are the internal ones, in their minds, and what I think your writing is particularly skilful at is depicting oppression as a construct. Oppression and repression actually, both internal and external. Characters suffer less from illness or medicine's limitations but from the expectations and shackles placed upon them by society. Is this something you would agree with or are conscious of flagging in your writing?

Yes, I intended those words – exile, outsider – to refer to my characters’ sense of separation from others. As you point out, some characters are displaced by migration, but for others, exclusion is a feeling that results from an unconventional sexuality, body shape or emotional state. I suppose you could say it is a construct. Or an illusion.

Following from your thoughts on society as construct, do you have any thoughts on “self” as construct?

I do think we ‘make up’ our selves, like one might the character in a story. Certainly we all rework the narrative of our lives to give it meaning. We are born with personality traits, and other habits of thought and behaviour are engrained in childhood. But every minute, we chose how to interpret the world, our thoughts and feelings, and other people.

I saw Insignificant Gestures less as a book about standard notions of marginalisation but more as a book about the self-imposed limitations people adopt, perhaps through social conditioning so that they become/have become active in their own displacement. In effect they are dislocated rather than displaced. Is dislocation or exile for your characters externally applied or self-imposed? What are your thoughts on this?

It’s both. Nasma’s treatment at the hands of an oppressive regime derailed both her external and inner world. Theresa in ‘Theresa’s Spear’ had no choice when she was banished. But mostly, in my stories, exile is a state of mind: depression, shyness, loss, for example. At some level it is chosen, but an individual may not have the awareness or inner resources to change. Someone else may need to break in and alter a fixed pattern of thought, by an ‘insignificant gesture’, maybe. And everyone feels disorientated on occasions by time and change. Eve, although rooted in family, is an observer, who never quite believes she fits in. I’m sure this is a universal feeling.

We've talked already, a little, about your being a doctor and some of your characters being doctors but you also write from the perspective of people whose position you obviously cannot have experienced first hand. In “One Hundred Days”, for example, the reader inhabits the first person perspective of someone directly involved in genocide; reading “Daddy's Girl” is like viewing CCTV footage of the events leading up to a suicide bombing. How comfortable were you giving a human voice to people who commit atrocities?

They can have no other voice but human. Amos, in "One Hundred Days", finds himself ‘administering’ an atrocity as a result of his ordinary failings: vanity, inattention and passivity. People who do these things have families and friends. In "Daddy’s Girl", I wanted to show that many bomb victims are far removed from the explosion. In particular, I hoped to describe the terrible effect on the bomber’s daughter.

In several stories you start off in either an “exotic” (compared to the home location of the protagonist) or mundane or familiar location and end in the opposite location. I found this very interesting, for me it brought home the crux of the story and highlighted the social constructs on both sides but did you have a specific reason for choosing the locations other than for contrast?

They are all places I can picture, either because I’ve lived there, or because patients have described them. I work in an inner city where people wash up from all over the world. So I’m aware that you can start off in one society, and through a series of circumstances, end up somewhere completely different. And if you wish, you can reinvent yourself.

Following on from POV and location, I want to talk about writing “other”.

Terry Eagleton posits the social and historical changes in the latter part of the twentieth century as giving rise, from the 1980s onwards, to:

"a new generation of literary students and theorists […] fascinated by sexuality but bored by social class, enthused by popular culture but ignorant of labour history, enthralled by exotic otherness but only dimly acquainted with the workings of imperialism..." (Literary Theory, 2nd Ed)

The supposed male centric 'medical gaze' has long been criticised for not being able to encompass the lived experience of women, particularly ethnic minority women and yet you manage to convincingly write of not only African and Pakistani women but of African and Pakistani males; in One Hundred Days you write directly from, presumably, a Rwandan man's perspective. Some critics might be tempted to levy the accusation at your fiction that it is “cultural tourism” or that, as a white woman writing from the imperial centre, you shouldn't attempt to mimic the post-colonial experience. How far do you agree with this potential critique? Would you say your fiction utilises post-colonial tropes to personify philosophical explorations, for example?

I think that the function of fiction is to make us see from another person’s viewpoint, and if a writer does this successfully – and I don’t claim to – then surely the world is a better place. I write about human beings, with whom I share far more than I have differences. Many of the stories are about post-traumatic stress, sometimes caused by physical assault, as with Nasma, but mostly by emotional events, as in "Fairy Story" or "Needle-Stick Baby". In "One Hundred Days", the trauma was to Amos’s sense of self. All these characters experience similar altered brain biochemistry. The human repertoire of emotions and mental states is the same, whatever one’s race, gender or orientation.

When I interviewed Adnan Mahmutovic I asked whether or not he thought racism and sexism work on the same principles, clearly I think they do, but there's another thing in there, bound up with racism and sexism for me, which I didn't mention then but which I want to ask you about and that is, do you think class distinctions also work on the same fundamental principles?

Yes, I’m sure they do.

In “Evo-Stick And The Bigamist” you tease out class markers with wonderful and endearing humour. But do you think it's currently more socially acceptable to write from the perspective of another culture/sex than it is to write about another class? Do you believe class distinctions still exist?

Evo-stik is a piece of nostalgia about my sixties childhood. I didn’t intend to write about class. I strung together memories of a certain time and place, in the hope that people might smile at ones they recognised.

The greatest class division in UK that I see is between those who work, and people who never have. The most harmful results of this are emotional deprivation and paralysingly low self-esteem. And there is another, unseen, class – illegal immigrants – who are excluded from accessing the most basic necessities, like health care, whilst maintaining everyone else’s lifestyle.

Going back to Eagleton, again in the afterword to Literary Theory, he states “like feminism and postmodernism, post-colonial theory is directly rooted in historical events” and I thought about “Daddy's Girl” and “One Hundred Days” in particular here, again, and I wanted to ask how important to you is it that your stories are grounded in a social and or historical actuality. And what are your thoughts on writing and social function?

I don’t think my stories are historically accurate. "One Hundred Days" is a parable - magical realism. It isn’t really about Rwanda; the village life I describe is Malawian – a very different country, but one I’ve experienced and so can describe. Atrocities like that have happened all over the world, so it could be set anywhere. As in "Daddy’s Gir"l, a historical event is the springboard that allows me to imagine the inner world of people caught up in it. More important to me is that the emotions and behaviour are authentic.

I hope that the social conditions I describe, based on observations mainly, are accurate though.

It was my opinion that you handled the tough themes we've discussed with extreme sensitivity and dexterity. Your empathy and eye for detail resulted in stories which reduced me either to tears or induced me to laugh out loud, and some, such as “Rictus”, do both in equal measure. Aside from the powerful gravity of some of your stories, there is great humour in this collection (and lots of running), I want to quote some examples if I may.

"...he's seen her – he can't believe it – shuffling along in wellingtons on the far side of the field beside that strange jogger. They look so absurd he wants to laugh. There reaches him airborne, like a sound muffled by wind, a sense of something he nearly forgot. As she approaches on the next lap she spots him standing astonished by the gate. Suddenly she's bent double, a gesture he hasn't seen for years, crinkled up with laughter and clutching her belly, helpless. The wind takes away the sound but he hears it in his head like a song remembered." (Cannon. 2010. “Rictus”: p21)

"The conversation moves so fast I'm disorientated. Used to my lugubrious father and Gavin's masturbatory ramblings, I can't believe how much ground we cover." (Cannon. 2010. “The Alphabet Diet”: p57)

"She flicks through Men's Health […] Then spotting a facet of the male psyche usually concealed from women, reads avidly; “Don't worry if in bed with a new girlfriend, you find she has grey underwear, an untended bikini line or hairy legs […] If her panties are baggy, congratulate yourself. She's gone to bed with you before she intended.”' (Cannon. 2010. “Pump It Up”: p97)

As well as a strong talent for humour, and at times very dark humour, you have something of a poet's eye for imagery and detail:

“She wears glasses and she's got ferrets” (Cannon. 2010. “Daddy's Girl”: p66)

“[M]en and women journey on different sexual railway trains.” (Cannon. 2010. “Pump It Up”: p97)

"But I'd take anything not to wake at three in the morning with my thoughts crawling round and around like caterpillars along the rim of a glass, endlessly circling the same regrets." (Cannon. 2010. “Insignificant Gestures”: p3)

“The desert is beautiful. You must eat and get strong and when you're better I'll take you there.” (“Shutters”: p121)

Some of these lines may slip by on a first read but to me they were rich and I luxuriated in them. Do you write poetry, Jo? And can you talk a little about your writing process; for example, which is more important to you, story or language?

I read a lot of poetry. I’ve written some awful poems, none of which must ever see the light of day. I’m closely involved in the work of a poet friend, Carolyn Fisher (The Unsuspecting Sky). When she is polishing a poem, we deconstruct her every line, word and punctuation mark. She taught me two things: that poetry is primarily metaphor, and the importance of every word. I think the quality of language is vital – an art-form, or thing of beauty - and metaphor can be the most powerful way of conveying truth. Plot is less important to me, which is maybe why I write short stories rather than a novel. This year I’ve written more flash fiction, which is a genre even closer to poetry.

Each story deserves a slow and care-filled reading because it strikes me that's the spirit these stories were written in. I felt challenged by Insignificant Gestures which was sometimes unsettling, often surprising and constantly stimulating. How long do you spend on any given story?

I can write a story in a few hours, or maybe a day. But I spend weeks and months rewriting and editing every sentence, an embarrassing, maybe pathological, number of times. I return years later and change things, down to the position of a comma. My sons say I’m a nerd.

What, if anything, would you most like the readers of your book to take away from it or this interview?

I hope they enjoy my book and identify with the characters. If they find my descriptions of emotions or mental states authentic, maybe clarifying something they have experienced, I’d be delighted.

I hope this interview encourages people, who might not otherwise have come across it, to read my book. And if they understand the stories and their context better as a result of our discussion, I would be thrilled.

Well, Jo, I enjoyed Insignificant Gestures immensely, I found your writing very moving and will, no doubt, be thinking up questions I'll wish I'd asked you for many months to come, or even writing an essay – I can see this collection being on the reading list of English courses and it deserves to be. Thank you so much for giving me free rein in these questions and for your generous and candid answers.

Thanks, Rachel. I found this interview really challenging, actually! You are the first person to give detailed feedback, and it's interesting to see how a reader brings their own experiences and understanding to a book. I suppose stories form from the sub-conscious like dreams, and an outsider might sometimes interpret them more easily than the dreamer.

I’m grateful that you paid my book such close attention. And after such a thoughtful and sensitive reading, I’m honoured that you liked it.

It was a real pleasure, Jo. Insignificant Gestures is published by Pewter Rose Press and can be bought directly from the press.

Today ism

2010-12-01T23:56:00.000-08:00

Some posts feel like toadyism but this feels necessary; an acknowledgement that something has affected enough of New Zealand to have affected me.

Today was the memorial service for the twenty nine miners who lost their lives at Pike River. My thoughts are with their families.

Mish taken

2010-11-30T22:22:00.001-08:00

YA Author Talli Roland is on a mish – to make the Amazon bestseller list, even if just for one day, with her debut novel The Hating Game. Best of luck with this, Talli! Read on to help her.

Help Talli Roland's debut novel THE HATING GAME hit the Kindle bestseller list at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk by spreading the word today. Even a few sales in a short period of time on Amazon helps push the book up the rankings, making it more visible to other readers.

Amazon.co.uk:

http://amzn.to/hNBkJk

Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/hX2ieD

No Kindle? Download a free app at Amazon for Mac, iPhone, PC, Android and more.

Coming soon in paperback. Keep up with the latest at www.talliroland.com.

About THE HATING GAME:

When man-eater Mattie Johns agrees to star on a dating game show to save her ailing recruitment business, she's confident she'll sail through to the end without letting down the perma-guard she's perfected from years of her love 'em and leave 'em dating strategy. After all, what can go wrong with dating a few losers and hanging out long enough to pick up a juicy £2000,000 prize? Plenty, Mattie discovers, when it's revealed that the contestants are four of her very unhappy exes. Can Mattie confront her past to get the prize money she so desperately needs, or will her exes finally wreak their long-awaited revenge? And what about the ambitious TV producer whose career depends on stopping her from making it to the end?

Facebook & Twitter Status Update

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With the Amazon.com link (depending on your location):

Help debut author Talli Roland Take On Amazon today!

http://amzn.to/hX2ieD #TheHatingGame

With the Amazon.co.uk link:

Help debut author Talli Roland Take On Amazon today! http://amzn.to/hNBkJk #TheHatingGame

Any RTs appreciated!

Reviews & Tags

If you do buy The Hating Game and you like it, a review on Amazon would be greatly appreciated! If you don't have an Amazon account, you can also post reviews on

Goodreads. Thank you!

If you are on Amazon and in a clicking sort of mood, it would be fantastic if you could click on a few tags ('Tags Customers Associate with this Product' - located underneath the Product Description). Cheers!

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PROSPERA PUBLISHING

Thank you to everyone for reading, and for responding to my call for help!

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch!

Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to help me out! I couldn't have done it without you. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email me at talliroland@gmail.com.

Harbour abridged

2010-11-02T02:34:00.000-07:00

Painted from the impression travelling over Auckland Harbour Bridge left on me: after I went to see Emily Perkins and Dylan Horrocks present their graphic conversation "All Hail Ellie". I think the real bridge is much bigger.

First up, huge thanks to Vanessa Gebbie and Zoe King for all their help and advice and for housing my story "Sticking the Needle In", and poem "Words With Charlie", in Tom's Voice. I'm extremely grateful. Vanessa is the author of Words from a Glass Bubble, a collection of very touching stories, as well as Storm Warning, which I'm looking forward to reading (more links on the side bar).

It's been a stressful few weeks: my husband was told his company's Auckland office was closing at the end of November. The options were: move to Wellington or get another job. Now his office is moving down the road and there's a reprieve until April. I've been feeling unsettled.

I was going to post a poem about writing a poem but Dick's posted one which cannot be rivalled. Hats off to you, Dick. So you've got a repeat (no pun intended). I posted this a while ago, then removed it, and now I'm posting it again. I've written a few poems about stuttering. My husband stutters. It's hard to argue with someone when you have to wait for them to insult you. Laughter replaces intended crimes of passion. He doesn't stutter with our toddler, nor with animals (you wouldn't catch me talking to the animals). Thanks to Donna and Thomas who spotted and left lovely comments on this the first time around. And apologies to Lori whom I confused at the time.

Aubade to Balbettare

Refused your words, gum in a torn pocket,

they are caught within the fabric of your

tongue. Confidence droops like a shamed face, set

to counter exasperation. Breathe. More

lowered, your lids self shield. Self-healed you start

again, and, and, and conversation stalls

till late at night, when all but one dear heart

can be heard, you speak into me. Crystals

hang sparkling about my ears: sentences,

uninterrupted, unfinished by choice;

utterances full-stopped by our senses.

Bodily parenthesis given voice

to mock Aurora before she scatters

your eyes with her curse of fettered letters.

Chilled run

2010-10-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

Happy Hallowe'en. The scary story/poem challenge is here. Andrea and Lori are taking part in the festivities and have posted some Hallowe'en themed poetry - please follow the links - and I'd like to thank them both for injecting a little spookiness into an otherwise warm and unspooky weekend!

Before we launch into the story proper I thought I'd tell you a couple of real life scary incidents to get you in the mood and set the scene for where my story takes place.

I grew up in the last remaining row of what had once been several railway terraces. Our garden was the grave of the demolished houses which were levelled around the time Queen Victoria heaved her last. I have the ceramic body, still, of a doll I unearthed from one of the many invisible rooms in our garden, her cheeks as rosy as if she'd just sniffed an overdose of carbon monoxide from our car and not been decomposing underneath the groundsel for decades at all. And there were clay pipes, bits of them anyway, and along the other side of the rail lines, if you weren't afraid of the ditch they dug (to stop us wandering into the newly planted woods and out of the other side onto the newly laid bypass), or of skinning your knees scrabbling back out, you could find tiny blue bottles. The remains of a Victorian bottle factory. I have a bottle with a marble stopper, too. So it was an evocative play yard for one with an imagination such as mine, though it is possible that the landscape gave birth to the imagination and not vice versa. When I asked my mother how she'd met my father and she said he'd crawled out from under a stone it seemed perfectly logical.

The railway carried coal, pre nineteen eighty four, from the pit which was the only landmark to compete with the church spire. Picture it: sunrise on the front in my parent's room, all day shining on the absent houses and lanced on the spire each evening. And the pit out of sight from my window but always the great wheel turning. I wasn't allowed down there, the path which led to the pit also led to the pit pond. People drowned. You could look at the taddies on a summer afternoon and not believe it could get so deep so quickly, it wasn't a big pond as far as ponds go, but it was big enough for pike and who knows how many rusting supermarket trolleys and bike frames from some daft buggers who thought it would be a jape to cycle down the embankment at top speed, and there was nearly always a stray shoe stuck in the mud by the reeds. Of course I never went there alone, except just once or twice, and I always ran all the way home, keeping to the trees in those newly planted woods all the way so that my parents wouldn't spot me from the kitchen window, legging it over the field. The trees gave me the creeps.

Anyway, that's the place, and there were nine houses in our row, then two pairs of big Victorian semis before the dyke. There were dykes and ditches all around us. Unlit (the local authority forgot all about us once the by-pass was built, though if twelve of us kids had gotten run over we'd have qualified for a crossing, never mind the fact that there weren't twelve kids alive to begin with); walking at night was done at your own peril. Our house was the second from the top, nearest the rail crossing. The first house, once a store, was bigger than the other houses on our row but had been empty for as long as anyone could remember. Between it and our house there was an narrow entry; a walkway, and above it was the extra bedroom that made the empty house bigger than ours. I often heard a child crying in there but my mum reasoned, quite sensibly, that it was just the wind, and the wind was fairly powerful through that entryway. I loved pulling my coat over my head, my arms still in the sleeves, holding the corners by the zip and letting the wind catch my up like a sail and spit me back out by the front wall. I digress. Midway down the terrace lived Sam. She was about the same age as my brother and they were friends and partners in crime when it came to nicking fags and puffing away in the Old Dear's fruit and veg patch at the far end of the row. I went with them once, I took a bowl of sugar, and we got caught, them with a woodbine and a regal king and me with a stick of rhubarb. Only the rhubarb was mentioned when we got rollocked for it. One up from the Old Dear lived the girl my story is about but we'll get to her in a moment. The first of the big semis was also derelict. Sam and my brother used to dare one another to go inside and navigate the rotting staircase and wave out of the attic window as proof of their bravery to the one left standing in the yard below. I don't know who was more scared, the one grinning saucer eyed through the filthy glass or the one seeing the face appear at the window, grey and mottled through the muck. They'd got some spunk, that's for sure.

Sam's parents had a ouija board. Sam, my brother and me were the only kids on the row, oh, and Pinny Anne. I wasn't there when they got the board out but I knew something wasn't right when my brother came home without my mother having to explode her lungs shouting him in. Not long after, Sam's mum confided in mine that Sam's dad had been demonstrating some peculiar behaviours. Sam and her mum moved out and Sam's dad put the house up for sale and holed up down the pub along the tracks (ironically, The Railway pub is the only existing railway there now). My brother was sad; he'd lost his pal, and I had lost the chance to be an accessory. We spent more time in our garden, digging up the chipped carcasses of dead kids' playthings and corralling the sock bodied caterpillars of the cinnabar moth into jam jars and trying to count which had the most stripes. Evenings were spent watching the A-Team, Wind-in-the-Willows or some show hosted by a bloke who looked like one of the undead; waxen grey suit (and matching face) de rigueur. A couple of times per week we'd walk the mile and a half to my grandma's, along the old rail lines and into the mouth of the sunset. It was when we were returning from my grandma's that the strange thing happened.

We all clattered down the entry and stared in bewilderment at the back doorstep. Specifically, at my mother's chopping board. Mum picked it up, put it back on the table, under the fruit bowl where she'd left it earlier and me and my brother got ready for bed while my dad chained the dog up for the night. Mum screamed. I was first down. My dad came running in, he thought we had an intruder. I remember clinging to my mum's leg while my dad checked all the rooms. It was only when he came back in the kitchen that my mum was able to say what had scared her. The chopping board had flown across the room at her.

Things got worse. My brother had gone to unchain the dog first thing and took his breakfast out only to come running in crying: our beloved collie had gone for him. My dad went to investigate and found Turpin whimpering, head on paws, but when he tried to unclip his chain he went to bite him too. I peered over the fence and couldn't believe he was the same dog: snarling, a mouth of red, black and foam. Dad shouted for me to get something to wrap him in, to take him to the vet. When I brought him the blanket he was dead.

My story begins a little before Sam left.

Pinny Anne

Pinny Anne lived in the last house but one of our row. Whenever me and my brother went down the yard to play, or when I went to watch my brother play dare with Sam in the derelict house, Pinny Anne would be there, at the back bedroom window, staring down at me with her hands flat against the glass. I never saw her parents and I never saw anyone, Pinny Anne included, enter or leave that house. The lights were never on and no one answered the door on Hallowe'en. Opposite Pinny Anne's house there was an old horse chestnut tree and sometimes I'd climb it and stare at Pinny Anne's window but she never appeared then. If you were wanting to see her you never could, only when you walked by and remembered suddenly could you look up and see her there, staring at you between the pressure pale wings of her hands. It was hard to tell what she was wearing as the windows were as dingy as those of the derelict place but it looked like it was a pale nightie or dress. She never changed it, else she had heaps all the same. It was the Old Dear who first told me her name was Anne. I was staring up at the window one day and the Old Dear came out and asked what I was up to (always we were up to something), and when I asked her who was the girl that looked out of the window she took me by the arm and put her tree skin close to my ear and said

    -her parents never fed her and her father beat her terribly, kept her locked in that room all day and night every day and night. Poor Anne

I wanted to ask if she did anything about it but I knew better than to ask the Old Dear more questions than I was invited to, so I just nodded and I thought she was going to hold me until my arm fell off like a lamb's tail, she seemed to be in some sort of trance of remembering for a while, and then she shook me and let go and went into the house. She walked funny, Sam called her the cripple duck, but I didn't feel like laughing that day as I watched her waddle away. And no sooner had the Old Dear gone back inside than Anne appeared at the window. She was thin, even through that dress I could tell there wasn't much more than a lamb bone to her, as my mother used to say. I went to the back door and knocked. I looked in through the mail flap, there was no carpet, just dirty bare floorboards and a few yellowed sheets of newspaper. I wanted to shout hello but I wasn't that brave so I ran home and drew a picture of her and wrote “Pinny Anne” and an arrow pointing to her and that's how she became known as Pinny Anne.

I drew lots of pictures of her over the years but I saw her less and less. One of the last times I saw her was when my brother and Sam invited me to play dare. I thought my heart was going to bleed out of my ears, I was twelve (a few days before Sam and her mum left), and I remember thinking I'd rather nick my mum's fags any day than this. But I wasn't going to chicken out, not with Sam there.

I crawled in through the missing panel in the door, there were sticky spider webs which caught in my hair and I cut my knee hurrying through the gap to brush them off me. I rubbed the blood and had a little taste. I could hear Sam and my brother laughing, so I went to the foot of the stairs and looked up. You couldn't see all the stairs at once, there was a landing halfway up and then a hairpin turn, the first half being almost in darkness but for the chink of light on the landing. I imagine the house would have been all dark the first time they did this but a few years of waving like idiots through that window had allowed a little light to penetrate and I was grateful for it. I took the stairs to the first landing two at a time. If they creaked I didn't notice; my heart was where my brain ought to have been. Two rooms extended directly from the landing and a narrow runway led to another two, smaller rooms beyond and beneath the next run of staircase. This was harder to negotiate, some of the stair panels were missing altogether and I had to lean against the wall to stop me losing my balance and falling down, there was no bannister. There were more webs there and my fear of spiders became inflamed when I saw the curled up bodies of some pretty huge arachnids. I was navigating these corpses, not wanting to get their legs caught in the toe of my sandals, when I heard the stair creaking behind me. I turned but the noise was coming from beyond the hairpin. I don't think I could have gotten to the attic window any faster if I'd flown but the worst thing was, when I looked down at the yard my brother and Sam weren't even there; I had no proof I'd done it. I was sweating, breathing hard, my heart was pumping fast and my thoughts were turning over and over like the pit wheel, so when I saw the face in the window staring at me, mouth open and grinning, and felt the hand on my shoulder and then another, I screamed, felt my eyes bulge, closed them and ran and fell and ran some more, all the way down those stairs. I scrambled on all fours through the gap in the door but the strap of my sandal got caught on something. I tugged and could feel something sharp biting into my foot and I started to cry. There was a scuffle of something on the bottom of the stairs, coming towards me, and I gave my foot one almighty yank and ran home.

My mother was angry about my sandal and banned us from going into that house again. She made my brother apologise for scaring me like that and made him look at the gash on my foot but he denied following me up the stairs and said it was my own fault if I didn't come down the stairs the way they'd told me to. My mother said it was a wonder I hadn't slipped clean between the broken floorboards and disappeared into the cellar and then where would I have been? In the cellar's what I answered but my mum corrected me and said “in the dark”. My brother said I was always in the dark so why would that be any different but he was just sour at me for getting him done. I was fine with it, I never wanted to go near that house ever again. And I almost didn't.

After Sam left my brother and I didn't play together so much. He went off to play at other lads' houses and I had my own friends; books mostly, and pencils and paint. The pit closed and the surroundings didn't look so sinister after the wheel was demolished and by the time I turned thirteen I was allowed to go out by myself. Just in the nick of time because that's when I had my first boyfriend. Rice was from my school but I only met him on a school trip. He had hair like a bobble hat without the bobble (we didn't call them beanies) and we used to walk along the old railway, trackless, holding hands, and we'd sit on an old sleeper while he sucked at my neck and I fussed his hair. He hated that, according to Persephone (the school's ballerina; she's a whole 'nother story) who knew everything about boys and stuff.

This one time he came to call on me and it was near the end of things for us really, looking back, and he was clearly bored with my neck (it does go on a bit), so I told him about the house. I was naïve. I realise now that he must have thought I wanted to take him there for something darker. Private. He was older than me and had already conquered Persephone. I was shocked at his suggestion, it didn't sound like anything you could do with Sindy and Action Man. I said I'd just got my first nest shedding, that was my mother's stupid term for it, and he thought I was stupid when I said it, too. It put the dampeners on things alright. He was cross and asked why I'd bothered taking him there if I wasn't going to do anything. My neck was purple by this time and he'd gelled his hair with some stuff that had dried real crusty and made my insides feel funny when I touched it. I asked if he'd ever been in a haunted house before and didn't he think it was scary. He said it was boring and the only thing more boring was me. Neither of us said anything for a minute until this gust of wind blew in. I got dust in my eyes and I heard Rice cough and then the wind stopped as though it was on a switch. I swear I heard a sound like a pin dropping. I asked if he'd heard it, too, but he just stared over my shoulder, his eyes big and wide and then he legged it. He didn't speak to me at school after that and he must have said something about me to Persephone and some of his mates because they laughed at me and made flapping actions every time I saw them.

The bullying made me miserable. It got so bad I wanted to run away but I had nowhere to go. I stopped going out after school and at weekends and spent all my free time drawing or watching tv. I liked the fashion programmes, the girls all looked sad, just the way I felt. started to wish I could just disappear.

I stopped eating, just skipping breakfast to begin with and cutting out sweets. Then I cut out sugar altogether, and then anything which wasn't plain fruit or vegetables. It worked. It was months before anyone noticed, the winter had allowed me to hide under baggy jumpers and my big coat, it was only in the summer that anyone noticed. You want to eat something, my mother said, else you'll drop through the gaps in the floorboards. She laughed then but when another few months passed and I still didn't eat she didn't think it was so funny.

She told people, doctors, but they never admitted they were doctors, they had cool names and encouraged me to call them by their first names and they had this way of talking to me like we were best friends, only they thought they were teenagers instead of the other way round. I don't think they thought of things from the other way round, from my perspective, else they would have seen exactly why I wasn't eating; what I was scared of. It was all around for anyone to see and they were in no position to tell me to face it when they were obviously running from it themselves. They got frustrated and took my drawings away, to look at more closely, show their friends who knew about my kind of art, even the pictures I'd done of Pinny Anne. Everyone was being so mean to me. I thought I knew how Pinny Anne must feel, locked up all day and night in that room. I decided to call on her, try, one last time, to talk to her.

No one answered. I knocked as hard as I could and this time I shouted,

    -Anne, Anne, it's me, I understand

I listened and looked through the mail flap as I had done the time before. Some of the papers moved on the floorboards and I called again.

   Anne, if you're there, I want you to know I care and I'm here, can you hear me, I said I care about you

    -what are you doing?

It was the Old Dear. I said

    -I'm talking to Anne and it's none of your concern

Starving had made me brave. The Old Dear got this funny look on her face, like she was going to shout or laugh at me but hadn't made her mind up which, and then she moved to put her hand on my arm but all she got was a handful of jumper and she drew her hand back and I think she was crying, though it's hard to see when you're disappearing and I must have been vanishing quickly because I couldn't speak. I went home.

I stared at myself in the mirror, if I was going to disappear I wanted to see it happening, and that's when I saw her for the last time; Pinny Anne, staring right at me. I put my hand forward and she put hers out to touch mine and for a moment I could feel her cold, flat little hand. I withdrew mine but she kept on reaching until she was out of the mirror and sliding down the glass, thinner than a cellophane off the sweets I still had over from my birthday. I asked her where she was going but she didn't answer me, and I already knew. There was a draught coming under my door, pulled through by my open window and it caught her up and she fluttered around my bedroom like a feather or a piece of paper, side to side, until she touched the floor and then she slipped right through the boards.

No one called me to dinner that night. I went and sat where my plate should have been and listened to my mother talking about the weather, the orchard and the first of the apples she was putting in a bowl at the centre of the table. I picked one up and took a bite. No one saw me.

Writers reign

2010-10-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

All white on the grey.

My sincere and grateful thanks to Amber Lee Starfire for including my artwork and poem "And They Were Only People" in Writer's Eye Magazine. It has a fab new look and is a fantastic venue for new and upcoming writers. Please, take a look, submit.

In other news: Think storms, Gothic windows, strange figures with stony glares and bewitched objects. Tis the month of pumpkins and spooky tales, alas it used to be. Here in NZ there is scant evidence of Hallowe'en at all and I miss it. Therefore, I have challenged Andrea at Rainbow Notebook to something of a scary story duel. Each of us is going to write the scariest story or poem (or whatever pops into our heads and out of the keyboard onto blogger) and post it on our blogs with a link to the other's on October 30th. Feel free to join in, add your own offering! Rahahahahahah!

Shortened long

2010-09-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

Not quite there yet.

Two lovely snippets of news for you:

One of my stories made it to the longlist of the Sean O'Faolain Prize - Congratulations to overall winner Nikita Nelin and to all the other entrants, and huge thanks to Tania Hershman for posting the list.

Secondly, Mark Reep has done an awesome job of setting up the Ramshackle Review and I was lucky enough to have a poem chosen for the first issue. It's a very cool venue and I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops as Mark is an especially talented artist and writer who blogs here.

Me meme

2010-09-14T04:08:00.000-07:00

Titus - the brainiest most talented poet terrier EVER - sent me a meme and, although I don't usually do these, I thought that seeing as I was only going to post the winner of the graphic conversation I would pad it out a little and do this, too. Thanks Titus!

1. Why did you start blogging?

It was a dark night. I sat alone in the diner on the corner of fifth and fourth and a quarter eating the dried up crust of a marmite sandwich and stared out of the window. It was raining hard. If it had been raining any harder the rain would have bounced back up and it wouldn't have been wet. But it was wet. Not just any wet: it was the wettest wet I'd ever known. It was Auckland. I wanted to get the rain out of my head and sitting on my ear wasn't working, I decided to try something. First there was the bungee jumping but that made the world spin for twenty four continuous hours, not even a five minute break, and then there was the scoot boarding (as my daughter calls it) but my street cred was falling fast; I needed to do something, something big, and I needed it to be soon...dun dun duuuuun!

What actually happened was I wanted to see if I could get some stuff published and I thought blogging would be a good way to meet other bloggers and put a little pressure on me. That's the official reason. The actual reason is that I was researching for a novel - aaaaargh - the truth is out!

2. If you could travel anywhere in the world with no restriction of costs, where would it be and why?

America - all of it, until I found what I was looking for - because Edward Norton lives there!

3. Did you have a teacher in school that had a great influence on your life? If so, what?

I had three: one told me I was a poor working class girl and as such should be satisfied to work in a local supermarket. I have been trying to grow a bigger moustache than her ever since.

The second got me work experience at the local rag and had a belly like Father Christmas and every English lesson I lived in hopeful fear that a button would ping off his shirt and knock my nemesis in the head.

The third tried, with much patience and perseverance, to teach me French and told me to send my stories to magazines.

4. If you could spend the day with a famous person, who would it be, and what would you do?

Edward Norton and I would discuss ways to end world poverty over a shared sandwich.

5. Toilet paper – over or under?

I am SO over toilet paper - it is so last season. Scootching along the grass for me every time now. And the winner is: R.F. It's me! Kidding! Rachel Fox - you lucky blogger!

6. Name one thing in your life that you would do over if possible.

Is this a rude question?

7. Tell about your pets – if any.

Bubbles the hamster weed on my arm when I was twelve and I didn't tell then but I am now. So there! Oh, ABOUT, not ON....hmn...there is a spider, outside my kitchen window, whom I have named Roberta the Bruce. RtB and I have a deal: she stays put and I don't have to clean the windows - but she isn't allowed inside!

8. Do you live in a small town or a large town?

I live in a city within a city which is the size of a town by UK standards within a city which feels like a town. I live in North Shore City - it is a real city, honest guvnor, but it is within the better known city of Auckland and each has its own mayor and they don't really get along (if you believe the report of one attendee of the most recent meeting) or they really want to hug a lot (if you believe another report of the same recent meeting).

I am supposed to pass this on - like chicken herpes - but you may have had this already. If not, and you want it - come and get it!

And for those of you who just scrolled to the end for the winner - hahahahahahaha - go back up and look again :) I'm a scamp and a half!

Name some paper

2010-09-10T04:53:00.000-07:00

Signed by the lovely Emily Perkins and the handsome and jovial Dylan Horrocks.....

I have a copy of their collaborative graphic conversation - on why Emily writes fiction and Dylan draws it - to give away....

....all you have to do is be your usual startlingly witty selves and leave me a jolly comment and I'll pop your graphic/literary representations (erm, names on a bit of paper) in a hat and announce the lucky winner....

....when I have ten comments (not including my replies!)

Have a great weekend :)

Ride on

2010-09-05T01:41:00.000-07:00

Still working on this but I don't mind you seeing my mistakes; I'm still learning.

My weekend was not as productive as I had hoped, not helped by the fact that I was feeling guilty for sending off HOM with the kids to the playground then discovering it was Father's day! Why can't the world decide on one day? It was June in the UK, which bright spark moved it to September? And the internet was playing up. I didn't get any new stories down, as intended, but I did manage to work some more on a few existing pieces as well as my screenplay.

The screenplay is now up to 115 minutes which means, it being a comedy, I have only another five pages to write. Five pages? What the hick!? So how come I am only up to page 146 of the 267 page novel I'm adapting?
I predict a lot of editing. Note to self, adapting = shrinking.

I am now making more harsh critical choices as I write. It's been an eye opener. And I am taking consolation in the knowledge that although I cannot get across all of my novel with the limitations of the time frame, I will still have the novel; the screenplay doesn't erase the novel. They are different and that's what I'm learning to love about the screenwriting experience. Some novelists who have signed over the rights of their books to film agencies lament that the film doesn't stay true to their vision. Well, I am in charge of my vision, so although I am changing elements which simply do not transfer to film, I am still deciding how those elements should be presented. For now. Which brings me on to my next point.

Film is collaborative. I love that about it. It excites me. With the input of others my story can be even better than I could have imagined. How cool would that be? What I lose in page points I acquire in the beauty of cinematography. However, there is also the distinct possibility that, even if I were to be lucky enough to sell my screenplay once finished, it might never get made. This happens all the time. Being good enough and getting nowhere is not the privilege of the novelist/short story writer. It goes right across the board. But what can you do? All rides and no fun makes for an unhappy playground but I simply must write on.

Blog off

2010-09-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

This morning I had so many plans - write write write!

So far I have read internet news for two hours, eaten chocolate and cereal and had five cups of tea! I am expanding my interests if not my creative output!

I have purposefully left my current reading material in the family vehicle which has now departed for the library/mall/ice rink with my off-sprogs.

Big hullos to passing bloggy partygoers.

I have a screenplay to finish and some competition standard stories to write - the day is but an infant...I have an idea about an ant in a thimble....it has to have chocolate in there....and Edward Norton....it's a big thimble....

A quake

2010-09-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to send out well wishes to all in Christchurch this morning.

Be t' reader

2010-08-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

Just listened this interview at Guardian Online - I wish A. S. Byatt was my beta reader!

Apologies for being a blog pest - will no doubt go back to my once a month posting before too long!

(for those of you who like to decode my post headings - the "t'" is meant to be read as Yorkshire dialect!)

Bits added

2010-08-24T17:53:00.000-07:00

No idea what this shot was meant to be but I like the colour and the blurry eye full of tears quality to it. Short of poking myself in the eye or standing staring into the wind, it's the best you're going to get!

I'm really getting into the swing of my screenplay now. I've got seventy minutes of screen time and by a quick estimation (based on the heap of MS still to adapt) I can tell I am going to run over time but that's okay as I can edit it down when I'm through with the first draft.

The novel I'm adapting is the one I wrote last June and I must have read it though, first page to last, about a dozen times now, either for editing or for my own amusement - yes it has comedy and yes, I am that pathetic! Here's the strange thing - it still makes me cry at the sad bits!

Is this usual? Do you cry at your own writing (and I don't mean from a lamentable state!)?

"L"earning

2010-08-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

Big hullo to all you lovely bloggy types out there.

I have a review of You at Melusine and my poem "Breathing Apparatus" is up at Camroc Press Review. Very big thanks to Janelle and Barry.

Other than that I am adapting one of my novels into a screenplay and have thirty minutes screen time written so far. I'm also working on another screenplay/novel in tandem. It's a very enlightening process. I am amazed at how different the same story appears on the page and I now have so much respect for screenwriters! Next time I go see a film adaptation of a novel I will not grumble that it is not true to the book!
I am very much writing with "L" plates at the moment but hopefully this can be a way to start earning from my writing. And the change in perspective can only be good for all my writing.

I am very excited about all the new things I'm learning and feeling very positive. Well, all that's left now is for you to tell me what you're all up to?

Forgetting

2010-08-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

Adnan Mahmutović talks to me about reading with a pen, Beverley Hills 90210, and a girl named Fatima.

Hullo and a huge welcome, Adnan, thank you for visiting snowlikethought and for taking the time to answer my questions about your novel Thinner than a Hair.

AM: Thank you for giving me this space.

RF: Your novel is the most stimulating, thought provoking and enjoyable yet moving book I have read this year and I found myself making notes and circling text, marking pages the whole way through because there was so much in there which I wanted to know more about or which triggered a thought or made a connection, and yet, on the surface your book tells a very simple story.

AM: I have to tell my wife I’m not the only one who reads with a pen. While she’d say I destroy books, I think the very drive to mark memorable things is the greatest compliment I can give to a writer. So thank you for scribbling in my book.

RF: As with all great books, I like to start from the end. The blurb on the back reads:

[t]old in the first person voice of a young woman coming of age as her country falls into war and hatred, the deceptively simple narrative takes the reader on a journey across landscapes, political boundaries, assumptions and emotions.

The story of Fatima is not a complex story on first impressions and yet it deals with some intricately difficult themes, and as I read your book (very quickly, in one sitting) I was struck by how plainly, matter of factly and with simple eloquence, you dealt with, in essence, genocide. It isn’t a subject matter for the faint of heart but what was amazing to me as a reader was that Thinner than a Hair didn’t read as a “war book” but as one girl’s right of passage and I wondered how difficult it was to achieve this so called simplicity; was it something you set out to do or did the story tell itself?

AM: It was incredibly hard. The war is such a powerful thing in itself, it overshadows everything. By this I mean certain features of a war, certain ever-repeating horrors prevent us from seeing the full complexity of it all, prevent us from seeing the ‘how’ of life. If everything I’ve written so far is somehow tied to the war in Bosnia, I have first and foremost wanted to depict the part of the iceberg under the surface.

Historiography, especially that of genocide, seems to attract certain stereotypes and sanctioned forms of narrating them. The writers feel obliged to tell certain things and omit some less attractive events, as if these would diminish the feelings, the pain, the importance of both remembering and forgetting of that which has happened. I always felt that telling a different story would give me a better sense of it all. I love one sentence from Beloved which is repeated several times “This is not a story to pass on.” When I think about it, I’m puzzled, what does “story” refer to? The history of slavery? Yes, but also love, sisterly jealousy, children’s games, and boredom. Does the latter invalidate or enrich the former? To take my ‘history’ as an example, my uncle was in a concentration camp, a small one, in a town just a few miles from where I lived. There were battles over there, we could hear explosions after air raids, and yet for months nothing happened in my city. It was incredibly boring. A terrifyingly unproductive time. I felt like grabbing a rifle many times even though I was a boy. Same thing in Sweden. No war, but nothing happened for months on end.

RF: I once read that the difference between war and genocide is that in war women and children are accidental casualties, whereas in genocide they are the primary targets and I thought of Aziz’s “disability” and was, am, intrigued to know if there was a connection here, as a means of making Aziz a target through gender also?

AM: This definition of genocide sounds true for Bosnia, no doubt. It was in fact that “targeting” that made me start writing. I wanted to understand how all these women actually came out sane and stronger. Early on I wrote a story “She Looked so Cheerful” which is one of the few that recounts an event that happened in my family. What made a rape victim smile? A refusal to let this trauma take charge of life? Having a character who is in-between, sex-wise, gender-wise, was for me a way of exploring potentiality. He becomes a soldier and yet he could just as well be, and in fact is in many ways, a target of this calculated genocide. My question was, if his “disability” was discovered, wouldn’t he be a target of his own fellow soldiers as well?

RF: I thought about how you cut through gender stereotypes and assumptions, was Aziz’s “disability” a means of breaking down barriers of difference – just as Aziz is neither clearly male or female in a stereotypical clearly defined way – is Aziz more than a metaphor for being mixed; un-labelled, un-pin-pointable? Or a way of showing that labels and religious labels, just as gender terms, are only ever needed to discriminate and do not matter in day to day life?

AM: I’d say the latter. During the war everything had a label. I needed to depict a life in which these labels broke down, or rather were hard to apply. For this reason my heart skips a beat when someone asks me how to label my book.

RF: Gender, for me, is not a male female binary but more a spectrum, possibly on the line of an inverse bell curve with more standard male female types on the outer ends and less typical convergences as you move towards the centre. Do you think racism and sexism (particularly against women) work on the same principles?

AM: I couldn’t agree more. While we constantly make abstraction and form types, in my view, maintaining these takes a great effort. This is where a lot of negative energy is boiling: the conflict between how things really are and how we want them to be. I think one of the greatest books that shows how both racism and sexism work on the same principles is Morrison’s Beloved. Everything I’ve written was in that spirit, or at least an effort to attune to it.

RF: Again with the “simple narrative” there’s a line spoken by the character called Elvis where he says:

But if you haven’t noticed, there’s a war going on. You don’t just walk into somebody’s office and ask for a passport. You need connections, bribes, you know what I mean? Money talks, brandy talks, VCRs and TV sets talk. Deutsch marks, dollars, and pounds untie all tongues. These things make even the Gordian knot a child’s game.

(Mahmutović, 2010. p96)

and my eye was first drawn to the Gordian knot and I thought what a brilliant metaphor that is for both your book and the issues at its core. But there are so many off-shoots of thought from that one image, such as how many other cultural references there are within the book which are not of Bosnia or associated with Muslims in any clear linear way but which, if you go back far enough you see where all these cultures are so similar at their roots and this was what I thought was the real beauty of your book; the way it not only transcends supposed cultural boundaries, but also points out clearly the artifice or insubstantial basis of the boundaries themselves. But then my eye fell on the words “pounds untie all tongues” and I wanted you to talk to me a little about this line, also.

AM: While many things in the book probably have to do with my Swedish education, and moreover my studies of literatures in English (rather than English literature), it’s important to emphasise that Bosnian culture is not tied to any one religion, ethnicity, or political creed. Many people who we today denote as Christians or Muslim were, for the most part, Communist. Bosnians of any religion have been affected by other religious texts, traditions, and folklore. Russian and English literature has been a great part of our education. Talking about a Gordian knot or any Biblical reference is perfectly natural for me. It doesn’t take an extra effort, except when I try to do something new with these things. It would be much harder, and as you say ‘artificial’ to try and draw boundaries. All boundaries are artificial, no doubt. At the same time we should not refrain from talking about differences. There is danger in politicising cultural differences, and turning them into boundaries.

I guess you reacted to the use of the British currency in Elvis’ line. Bosnians have always had a peculiar penchant for Deutsch Mark, and nowadays Bosnian Mark has the same value as the German currency. In the 80s and 90s the Yugoslavian currency ‘Dinar’ had no value. A loaf of bread cost like two-three million dinar. As much as they could, people used German, British, Swiss, American money. When we had to bribe our way from Bosnia we tried to sell whatever we had in our house. We had to get Deutsch Marks because the soldiers wouldn’t have anything else.

RF: Back to the Gordian knot for a moment: you make a lot of references to imagery throughout the book. Here are some things which I noticed on what could be termed a biblical theme:

“Aziz was like a rib I’d torn out of my body. It was bent like a soft penis, yet hard. I’ve never been able to make it straight, for fear it would break.” (p78)

“Instead of an answer, Father closed himself in his shed, banging on wood and metal, sawing, filing, making something; I have no idea what, an ark perhaps.” (p93)

“Perhaps I walked the entire way back, out of my mind. Perhaps an angel carried me on its back.” (p126)

And these on a philosophical theme perhaps:

“That was how my father fell, like a tree trunk, like a country; the world should have shaken when he hit the ground with his flushed face.” (p128)

“The pen snapped in two sharp pieces and cut my hand as I reread what I had jotted down.” (p128)

“The town was strangely silent about the blowing up of the mosque and the imam’s death. It was such a simple and clear evil, and all chatter ceased. The entire mosque building was levelled except for the minaret, which looked like a broken pencil.” (p 72)

It is some of the strongest and most exquisite imagery I have come across, particularly the last example, (the pen is mightier than the sword came to mind and was promptly inverted) and this was, I thought, what I would carry of your writing to tell others about. Your strength, for me, as a writer, is your ability to note grand events in an understated way; making the events seem poignant not because of their gravity but because of their beauty even in failing.

And, one final quote, if I may be permitted an indulgence:

Mum didn’t say a word about refugees […] She peered into the closet and at the two sole hangers with a sweater on each.

I expected a slap on the head, or at least some shouting. I hated her silence. I wanted her to be strong and alive even if that meant I’d get regular portions of nagging and scolding instead of meals.

She said through a laugh, “You saved these two I made for you.”

“Of course.”

She ran towards me and kissed me all over the face. I was so drenched in her milk-smelling saliva I needed a towel to wipe it off, but I didn’t dry my face. I let the traces of her kisses dry so I could smell them when distant explosions woke me up at night.

(p69-70)

Does writing like this come naturally to you or do you have to work at it, edit and pare down to achieve the maximum of showing with the least telling?

AM: There’s nothing harder than tracing my steps back to the origins or even the very process. A good answer would be ‘I don’t know.’ But, that’d be a lie. I am very conscious of some narrative gestures like putting images in contrast, using old hackneyed images to say something different. I assume the reader will at least subconsciously recognise some things, but then I feel I must not fully meet the expectations. There has to be a surprise of sorts, either in terms of imagery, or action, or paragraph structure. The ‘rib’ is something I did with a lot of thought. I didn’t want to go into the entire difference between Islam and Christianity in terms of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. The Qur’an never mentions the rib. Eve is never the culprit in that original drama. However, I once heard a story which said women were created from Adam’s rib, which was not perfectly ‘straight’. If one tries to make it straight, it’ll break. If one doesn’t try, it’ll remain bent. I wanted to reverse the places, especially since Fatima is unsure if Aziz is fully ‘straight’, whether he’s a man or a woman. It puts an entirely different spin on the sex and gender issue.

Sometimes I test images until it feels right but often I use something that surprises myself, like the pen thing, or a scene from the film I made where the character does something with incredible symbolic potential but at the same time it is very much a gut reaction. After the screening the audience was intent on interpreting that scene, and the beauty of it was that I didn’t have the authority over its meaning. Everyone had a personal interpretation and they were all right. I guess I experienced the famous ‘death of the author.’ Anyway, to answer your question, sometimes those powerful instances come easy and sometimes there’s a lot of ‘conscious’ work behind it all.

RF: What I was most impressed with in your book was the way I came away from it feeling like I had read a much larger book and I think this was, in part, due to your skill for using double edged imagery and how you manage to tell so much by omittance, by framing what is missing from the picture to make it stand out all the more. I think of the TV here: US television show Beverly Hills 90210 (nicely timed - all new version now out), being beamed into Bosnian tellies and yet where are the Bosnian, or other, shows being shown? But you never make such obvious comparisons in the book and it is all the more powerful for it.

I remember the war unfolding, as a seventeen year old British girl, on the news and it seemed like it was in another world, unconnected to my life in any way. There was a strong sense that the world, and I in it, was little more than a bystander and that the troubles in Bosnia were little more than a show unfolding on the TV set. So it was staggering to read the lines in your book about the TV sets and the way you simply, yet deftly, posit the notion that the West was preoccupied with itself and that, just as Aziz and Fatima watched the US show on their TV, the rest of the world was doing just the same. And I thought how brilliant that this book will get inside homes the way the cable shows do and what an impossible to ignore instalment it will be, but did any of this even cross your mind as you wrote Thinner than a Hair? How much were you conscious of the TV as metaphor?

Do you think the news provides misrepresentation of cultures in the same way as shows such as 90210 do?

AM: I wasn’t very conscious of that. I realised it much later when I asked myself why in the world did I write an entire scene around that show. As an afterthought it struck me as irrelevant? Why not depict a battle or a concentration camp? But I stuck to my rule ‘Don’t exclude that which seems trivial. It probably isn’t. Wait and see how it plays with the other things.’ I remembered hiding in my attic where I had a small TV set and a VCR watching Beverly Hills and action movies with Schwarzenegger and Stallone whenever there was power. Terminator and Rambo were really quite great for killing time. Hiding all the time, doing nothing, was devastating. We swapped pirated movies any chance we got. I think your idea that Bosnians watching American shows and Americans doing it at the same it is brilliant. There’s another crux with television. The war was quite different in different parts of Bosnia. In my city we had no direct experience of the war as it was in Sarajevo, or Srebrenica. We heard it on the news, just like you did. We talk about it as ‘one’ thing, as ‘Bosnian’ experience, but it’s actually very different for different people. We were in the middle of it, and yet also partly detached.

RF: Well, Adnan, we started this interview with the blurb on the back of your book and I wondered if we could end it with the title on the front. Could you first say a little about where it comes from and why you chose it?

There is a similar passage in the Katha Upanishad:

Arise, awake, and learn by approaching the exalted ones,
for that path is sharp as a razor’s edge, impassable,
and hard to go by, say the wise.

(Katha Upanishad – 1.3.14)

This provided the title and epigraph ([t]he sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard) for W. Somerset Maugham’s novel: The Razor’s Edge, thus again, for me, showing similarities, rather than differences, in all cultures, and I wanted to ask, finally, what lasting thought you would like readers to take away from this interview?

AM: Very interesting references. I wasn’t aware of them. I relied on the story about the Sirat bridge that leads to the afterworld. It’s thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword. The path to Salvation is hard. In the novel this higher path has its more material, immediate counterpart, the pure survival. I guess my question is, given what Fatima does in order to survive, how do we imagine her walking on such a bridge as Sirat, how do we judge her, do we judge her at all?

What any reader should notice in such an interview as this is the way a good reader can challenge a writer on his own ground and make the entire reading experience a great deal richer. A reader is not just some sponge that suck in whatever is served to her or him, but always partly a co-author of meanings and ideas in any work.

RF: Thank you so much, Adnan, for giving me so much to think about and for your book which I am certain will go on to become a very important text. I've thoroughly enjoyed interviewing you.

AM: Thank you for asking me such brilliant questions. This has been a great pleasure.

Thinner than a Hair is published by Cinnamon Press and is available from their website and from Amazon.
Catch up with the rest of Adnan's book tour at the following:

Kathryn Magendie at http://tendergraces.blogspot.com/

Vanessa Gebbie at http://vanessagebbiesnews.blogspot.com/

Valerie O’Riordan at http://not-exactly-true.blogspot.com/

Caroline M Davis at http://advancingpoetry.blogspot.com/

Nik Perring at http://nikperring.blogspot.com/

Tom Vowler at http://oldenoughnovel.blogspot.com/

Joakim Jahlmar at http://the-mad-swede.blogspot.com/

Tania Hershman at http://titaniawrites.blogspot.com/

Bad as

2010-07-29T00:30:00.000-07:00

Cars, climbs and crimes. Note, none of the cars pictured were or have been involved in any crimes - as far as I know!

The last couple of weeks have been very interesting for me: by turns, as bad as being stuck in a porta loo at a rock concert in a heat wave, and as good as getting the goodliest visit from the good fairy to tell me I am as good as goody goodness gets.

I went to hear the top bods of Penguin and Random House NZ talking about the dire state of the publishing industry.

Books are not getting published which would have several years ago. Commercial is winning over literary. Memoir cookbooks are top sellers - really - did you know that?

The e-book is trying to take over the world and, guess what, the publishers want it to!

They didn't speak about the kind of novel I'm working on so I ambled over to Mr Penguin, at the end of the session, and asked him for myself. I asked him what the market's like for my novel - pretty good - and showed him my pitch - two sentences - he liked them enough to give me the name of an agent. Cool, except that I sent my sample chapters off and said agent didn't like them!

I scuffed my heels for an hour - ah, woe is me - and then got to it. I cut 10,000 words - yes, you read that right, four zeros - and I ripped out the structure and thought outside the box. My novel was a triptych - it's not anymore! My sample reader (not husband) emailed back "brilliant" (and he is one mean critic), and I'm polishing sentences again and gearing up for the next phase. I wish I could work on it all day every day.

However, I have family stuffage! Yesterday's stuff involved giving someone a lift to and from the dentist. Said passenger was heavily sedated. I only realised how heavily when a car reversed at speed towards us and said passenger hardly flinched! I, on the other hand, whacked my horn on and nipped out of the line of impact only to see a woman chasing the reversing car, shouting " Stop them! They've stolen my....". I shouted out of my door "Get them!" and zipped around to the next exit - where I thought they would appear - only they had zoomed off.

Ironically, the police station is just across the road from where all this happened. I went in and said there was a robbery underway and had no sooner said this when a chap came into the station - having heard a prolonged beeping of car horn (that was me) and thinking he should take the number and mark of the car speeding from the car park!

Several minutes later the police had caught them! How cool is that? My work here is done, I said, and went home rather pleased with myself.

To summarise: I blew my chance with the agent by getting carried away with myself and not giving myself enough distance from my novel to be absolutely cut throat critical about it - won't be doing that again - but I did do a good deed and was rewarded, if not with an agent/book deal, at least with the knowledge that I am one formidable lady and kick ass baddie catcher!

Alba back

2010-07-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

Photograph courtesy of The McGowan.

A novel lesson, part two: an exciting incident.

You may be wondering if you blinked or, shock horror, if my last post was all a dream.

No fear - your comments are saved and much valued.

Breathing Apparatus

Coasting

On shore in the dark -

not night -

two thousand miles

between us; ocean flicks

its tongue.

Pick a shell,

lift it to my ear; it sighs

into me.

And there is sand between my toes.

Tumbling

“Doing quiet somersaults

thinking of you”;

I have run away

with your circus.

Plumbing

He'd never managed to fix your tap

and his car set tongues wagging

but he saved your life

though all you can report is that you saved his.

You knew it was a heart attack

when his plumb line went flat

but your husband wasn't convinced

it was necessary to remove the plumber's

trousers to give him mouth to mouth.

Tuned in

2010-06-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

Get those critical receptors tuned folks, here's the Transmission guide you've been waiting for.

Actually, I typed the review last night and then in a bolt from the electronic divine my pc crashed and destroyed all traces of it. So here is a more succinct rendering.

It was a less ambitious book than The Impressionist and it seemed as if Kunzru had more confidence for it or perhaps his confidence came across more enjoyably and less like arrogance with regards to the subject matter. Anyhow, the point is, it is a contemporary set novel about a computer geek (I can say that, I'm married to one) who rolls like a ball of liquid lead solder around the circuit board of the novel's plot which takes the reader through the intricacies of computer viruses to Bollywood in an unlikely yet plausibly connected way.

It is funny in places, very funny in some, especially if you know a pc geek (or are married to one) and you recognise the similarities, but all too often it feels like a scene from UK TVs Goodness Gracious Me. I'd be really interested to know what any Indian readers make of this book - let me know guys. Anyway, it's not trying to wow you with its knowledge of neat references to all things Empire and it's a crisper and more acerbic book for it but, yes, there's always one, I wish Kunzru would know when to stop. Time and time again he has a great line or observation but then goes on about it as if to say, did you get that, did you notice it, there, I said that and wasn't it good, no, really, read it again. It's as if he's afraid to be subtle.

If I had read this book first I might have had more sympathy for The Impressionist. Here you recognise the same narrative voice in your ear only it's set to the right tone for the subject matter in Transmission, whereas in The Impressionist it was woefully off key. An enjoyable if not stellar read which hits the right note in the din of geek fiction; literary fiction this aint, but at least Transmission isn't pretending to be (even if the jacket designers try to convince you to the contrary).

Plotted pants

2010-06-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

Yet to realise I had been stood up, I recently found myself in the adult fiction department of an unfamiliar library with a very disgruntled toddler who was somewhat traumatised by the music and rhyme going on in the children's department. As my eyes sought escape I thought I had found it in the covers of Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist and Transmission.

The Impressionist was Kunzru's debut. I had been meaning to read his fiction for a long time - always on the list but never quite pressing enough to lure me to buy it - thank you library, you saved me from a fate worse than waste. I began reading deliciously ignorant as a ripe virgin only to feel like snatching back my cherry on page 24. Yes, shock horror, I got that far! Having avoided any reviews and deliberately skipping the blurb I threw myself blindly over the precipice that is to absorb oneself in fiction and cried "I believe"....but this book is no smooth Disney production and the fates always know when you're lying and I landed in a pile of plot. I did read on substantially further - only because I wanted to put off starting the second book as long as possible - but my impatience got the better of me. I played guess the plot then read the blurb on the inside cover and, guess what, I won. Erm, what? Well, nothing. Oh, but that's not true, I won some time back! Always an upside!

What I felt was that there was a very good book in there which had been completely ruined for the sake of sensationalism and cramming in as much plot as possible. It began slowly - very enjoyably - well written and thoughtful and, most importantly, it made me think. However, it was as if the whole novel changed tact at the very early first sex scene and then it was little more than continuous tumbling from there on in. It was the same feeling I got when I read The Kite Runner which was so moving until it turned into an anti-Taliban action yarn and destroyed, for me, every subtle strength it had carefully built up to. What I did think, though, was what a ripping film it would make - ha! But it did make me see where my own fiction may be wandering astray and it's given me lots to get my teeth into this weekend.

Alas, undeterred (that bit's not true) I wanged it aside (neither is that bit - it is a library book - I placed it carefully and considerately back in the fabric library bought "save the planet" bag...that's also a lie...I put it in a carrier bag by the front door, lest I should forget to take it back! Far, far away from my bookshelves to prevent anyone mistaking it for one of my chosen ones!) and so began the reading of Transmission.

Which I'll tell you all about next time!

Backing the pack

2010-06-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

"A wise [wo]man knows [s]he knows nothing" - who said that?

Well, I've been reading The Perfect Screenplay by Katherine Atwell Herbert and it's brilliant. Much of the advice applies to novel writing either directly or by omittance and it is so quick to read. And even if you aren't interested in writing a screenplay, it's great to read how all those big films you've seen started out - their taglines and what viewers, and readers for that matter, find a real turn off in a film/novel.

After a long break and masses of re-writes I've begun submitting stuff again - that novel I wrote this time last year - is out there - be kind to it, it's gone through a lot.

And I've entered a couple of comps and am thinking of entering another couple: Teresa Stenson's got a few mentioned on her blog this week which are worth checking out.

And I'm reading - heaps and stacks of books and loving every stolen moment of it! Even the ones I've thrown back in the pack after losing the will at page three have been valuable! - more on what I'm reading/have read coming soon.

So to all of you ploughing on with novels, short stories, screenplays or just general life - keep on keeping on! Best of luck to you all.

Beg in

2010-06-06T16:20:00.000-07:00

Paula Phillips is calling out for writers to pitch in and help with a really great cause but I'll let her tell you all what it's about in her own words:

SUBMISSIONS WANTED FOR ANTHOLOGY :)

With the rise of Bullying in Teens, Ive come up with a book idea - A bit like an Anthology of messages of hope, stories, poems to reach out and show teens and vicitms that there is somebody that cares. It only takes one, and if we think about it doesn't take long to jot something down. If you are interested in writing a piece and being included in this idea send me an email at: paulazone [at] live [dot]com and place in the subject line - Stop Bullying :) . Please, as the saying goes, it only takes one person to save another, imagine what we can do if we all get together - We could help save the next generation :) Please pass on to friends, families, groups you belong to, anyone you can as I already have a publisher interested in the concept.

I've submitted my story, who else is up for it?

Garden of reading

2010-05-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

A2 watercolour.

This is my garden. It's been raining and so the only things flourishing right now are fungi but I'm hoping my guest today won't mind.

Hullo and welcome, Grace Wells, to Snowlikethought.

I thought, if it's agreeable to you, Grace, we could talk about your début poetry collection When God Has Been Called Away To Greater Things whilst perusing the garden here, though I must warn you, it's not at all like most gardens, not finished at all.

Well Rachel, first let me say how lovely it is to be here.

When God Has Been Called Away To Greater Things takes into hand some very difficult subject matter and I'm thinking particularly of the accounts of domestic violence in the book here and of abusive relationships. You said in your interview with Nuala Ni Chonchuir that your “book is like a blueprint, a map for a way out” and I wanted to refer this back to the text, poems such as “Clearing”, which has the margins bursting with thickets and briar and all manner of overgrown brambles and weeds and it struck me that the book describes very well how to cut and clear a way through uncultivated terrain but there is also, running parallel to the human taming of nature; garden versus wild, the notion of the poetry's speaker as wild animal having forged paths through the roots and stems beneath the protection of the vines and I wanted to ask if this was a conscious imagery choice and if you see the garden as the thing being tamed or as the tamer?

And related to that last question I wondered about your thoughts on how much is your representation of garden rooted in the notion of garden as a thing to be fought with – against nature – or a thing which protects and is a barrier against nature? How much of the cutting back is a removal of self defence; an exposing of self?

I do love gardens, and this one, where you’ve listened so acutely to my work, and paid it such a great compliment by thinking about it, and then going on to create this lovely space for me, well, this has to be one of the nicest gardens I’ve ever been in.

But as to your very provocative questions, what can I say? My poem, ‘If I owned a dress’ ends with the lines: “Don’t ask me to understand these mysteries/speak of wildness or explain the freedoms of tamed things”. And I really think I can’t talk about these things, except in elliptical ways through poetry. The trouble is I know a lot about them, about wildness and tamedness. Too much. And I don’t want people to take what I say the wrong way. I certainly don’t want anyone to think I’m suggesting women should be tamed, or anything like that. I’ll try and be succinct about this, but really I could go on for hours. That’s the real reason why I say, “don’t ask me to speak about these things”, because I might never stop.

I know a lot about the pain inflicted by human wildness run amok. I know the horror of being tamed and caged. If I use imagery of the wild animal it’s unconscious—most of my work is created through unconscious processes and edited through conscious ones—but the whole male/female dynamic is deeply concerned and enmeshed in a wildness/tamed dichotomy. That’s at the simplest level, even in the healthiest of relationships, but your questions brought to my mind all those women currently being shipped from foreign countries into the West as sex slaves. They’re like wild creatures being caught and caged, their wildness tamed and abused, just as once men brought animals here for zoos. So I think all this territory is very important, very relevant and in need of being written about.

My major healing came from the wildness of a mountain in Ireland. Of course there were other sources of repair, more expensive ones, therapy and osteopathy, dance workshops and a kind of Spiritual quest. But the key one, the primary one, was my relationship with the peace on that mountain, the stillness within its wild, untamed freedom. So I definitely see the mountain, the wild place, as tamer, it brought me in from the cold, brought me back from isolation.

A garden is a whole other thing. When I bought this land, where I live, it was a wilderness, and awful at that. Briars had won, nettles ruled. There wasn’t the space or the place for anything valuable or beautiful to grow. So it had to be tamed. Now, especially now in the early summer days, my garden is a paradise. It took years to make it that way. And I suppose there was a direct parallel, my garden, like myself, was something that had been ruined by wildness. Taming it helped me to heal. The tamed garden restored and constantly restores my faith in living.

But I also own a field, and my field and I have a constant battle between wildness and being tamed. I have to say, where wildness is tamed there is the chance of beauty, and where tamed things are allowed to run wild, there is also the space for beauty, so it’s about exploration and balance, and knowing what’s good for you.

Later there was love, and this love pushed me back into therapy and to a much deeper level of healing. So ultimately love and maleness and a certain kind of tamedness actually gave me new freedoms. But really don’t ask me to talk about these things, because the boundaries between good wildness, bad wildness, good taming, bad taming, are all so fine and so close, that it’s nearly impossible to speak about them. The only thing I would say is I think these issues are pertinent in every romantic relationship. They’re our dance, and ultimately I do think, horrible as the process may be, they lead to wisdom and even Spiritual understanding. I have a line, which says, “through it’s fire I came to all that remains immutable”. So yes, in answer to your question, all that wildness and taming can expose the true, immutable self.

Sadly women have to be careful the whole time. We need to protect our wildness from harm, but we also need to find safe and appropriate ways to channel it. The truth is, those places where it can be freely expressed are very small within our culture, female wildness, just like areas of natural wildness, are endangered landscapes that we have to keep protecting with vigilance.

Now, if we step this way, I have some lovely fruit trees I'd like to show you, I'm thinking of starting up a little orchard here, mind your head on that apple. Strange fruit that, resolutely refuses to fall.

I should like to talk next about MMR, no, not of the immunisation variety but the Metaphysics, Milton and the Romantics. As I read your poems I felt very much that they were part of a greater literary tradition and at first I thought of the Romantics, Wordsworth primarily but then Blake. I know in your interview over at Women Rule Writer you mention Paula Meehan as a great source of inspiration but I'd like to present a quote from Wordsworth's Preface from Lyrical Ballads and then ask you a little about your ethos:
The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems, was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.

(Romanticism: An Anthology 2nd Ed. Wu, Duncan. Blackwell. 2004, p357)

When I began this question I was thinking of your poem, “Adrienne Wants Due Regard for Home-making”:

Stapled across one crate, a cooling tray for baking
boxed things off like the grille of a cage.

Behind it a pestle for pounding herbs and a paddle
for slapping dairy produce into shape.

From the wire hung an implement for carving butter,
yet sharp and strange enough

for procedures on the body, a forgotten cure
for hysteria, the vapours or nerves.

(Copyright © Grace Wells, 2010)
but now I think of your work as perfectly juxtaposing not only the ordinary made unusual as Wordsworth put it, but of the out of the ordinary made homely, such as the home in “The Only Medicine” being not a home but a prison whereby the outside creeps in to offer promise of escape and the abuser's absence is the comfort which clothes the house and the children. Would you say this contrasting, this juxtaposing of homely with un-homely (I'm thinking Freud here, too) is a particular feature of your writing?

Yes, well people have told me that. In some ways I’m very dim about my own work. I’m always surprised when other people perceive things in it that I’ve done unconsciously. One of my great patrons, Jeff McMahon, editor of Contrary magazine has written that my work: “treats the most ordinary of human concerns, like loneliness, with the most extraordinary language, and treats the most immediate of concerns, like violence, with timeless calm.” I do love language. I love Dylan Thomas, all that wonderful playful spirit within words. So I think, yes, let’s give the ordinary greatness, let’s decorate the ordinary the way people once decorated trees that grew beside holy wells. Most of our lives are ordinary, I think we have to learn to love that, and honour it.

And then of course, life is very brutal, so we have to stay real about that too. I’m not one of these people who is convinced it should all be nice, and we should be happy, I’m much more down to earth.

Another feature which impresses me about your work is your use of metaphor and in particular the way you personify abstract concepts, as you do brilliantly in “Threshold”, to make them not only tangible but human and as possible as meeting a friend in the street. This had me thinking of the Metaphysical poets. Would you say you have anything in common with the likes of, say, Marvell (I'm thinking of The Mower Against Gardens)?

Well Rachel, I must confess to a small secret, don’t tell a soul, but I feel that as we are here in your beautiful garden, I can whisper in your ear: I haven’t read as much as I probably should have. Poetry for me began with Annie Cameron and Raymond Carver. They opened the doors of its wonderful world, and have allowed me to go back and forth in time, reading bits here and there, catching up, learning, loving. But I’m not schooled in poetry, I don’t know my Romantics from my Metaphysicals—(well, not properly, not in depth). I can tell you the names of all the wildflowers that grow around here, but there are gaps in my knowledge of literature. So if there are connections with their work and my own, it’s largely co-incidental. As you asked specifically, I looked up, and really enjoyed The Mower Against Gardens, and I was almost shocked to see that it ends: “May to adorn the gardens stand;/But, howsoe'er the figures do excel,/The Gods themselves with us do dwell.” Which is really the same as the end of my poem “My Garden and Those who made it”, where I say, in the winter the garden dies back, “to reveal the Christ-being within.”

Plants courtesy of author. Raindrops nature's own.

And I am brought to a remembrance of my grandmother's birdbath which had the following inscription on the plinth:

“One is nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth”

There is a strong sense of spirituality which comes through some of your poetry which I found very interesting. As someone who could be described by others as a feminist, I am inclined towards a feeling that a traditional acceptance of God equates to a submission to patriarchal values and I am curious (as Eve) to know, is this something you have thought about in depth or explored with purpose in your poetry?

Absolutely. I ran out of church as a young woman. It mortified and mortifies me the way the church has capped women at the knees. And yet, sooner or later I discovered I was a very spiritually-minded person. I began a quest, dabbling with Buddhism and Sufism and all sorts. I’ve read extensively about prehistoric Goddess culture. I love all that stuff. I just adore going into museums and finding all those wonderful ancient figurines, and all the language written into the symbols drawn on them, all those things Marija Gimbutus has written about. I’ve been to gurus and teachers and a whole crazy jamboree. I’ve tried to find a spiritual pillow on which to lay my head. I think as a woman it’s very hard to find an authentic spiritual centre.

For me female spirituality and female sexuality are two of the last uncharted realms on earth. They’re very connected. So, yes, it’s something I wanted to know about and understand, and then as my life became more complicated, I was forced to explore ideas of forgiveness and so forth, and these questions were really put into my hands like solid objects. I’ve gone hands first into the dark, trying to make sense of them.

For a time I ran a group called ‘Unfolding the Sacred in Women’. We just met together in a local arts centre. We talked and wrote about our spiritual upbringings, we danced, sang, chanted, painted, laughed, cried, explored. It was a wonderful experience. At one point I asked the women to go away and design “churches” or sacred spaces. They came back the following week, and almost to a woman said, “Oh, I didn’t want to, for me sacred space is about sitting out in nature by a stream, or in the woods”. I railed against them, “But it rains, it gets cold. Go back, do it, do this for me”. And back they came the following week with the most beautiful designs you can imagine. Female churches. It was a very powerful experience, first seeing how stripped we’d been, that we didn’t even feel we had permission to do this, and then, when women stepped forward into that creative space, it blew the roof off some things.

In “The New Life: part three, Whenever We Had Sheep in the Field, You Quoted Milton” there is a wonderful evocation of past times, of the pastoral idyll, of Paradise Lost and in the poem as a whole I get the sense of a pagan inclination embracing Christian motifs. Do you feel that spirituality, in the absence of an icon, is possible?

Well I like icons of all sorts, usually the more outlandish and foreign ones, some of the Christian ones give me the creeps, but then they can also be incredibly moving, so I do tend to borrow them and put them in my work. I think that even in the pastoral idyll there were icons, may-poles, the face of the Green Man or the Horned God carved somewhere, maybe even the patterns carved into the woodwork above the threshold, had iconic meaning.

Spirituality without any icon is difficult, and has the potential for the Emperor’s new clothes syndrome, in that some people can see it more clearly than others. I suppose I have absolutely no tolerance at all for religious bigotry or fanaticism, but I actually feel quite generous toward all our different religious furniture and knickknacks. In our women’s group, some women spoke really movingly about creating May alters for Mary, or of little rituals their grandparents had done out in the woods. I love these tangible expressions of our admittance that there is something more than just human ego at work on the earth. Imagine if you put a little bit of everything human beings have ever worshipped into the one room, it would make for a fantastic voyage.

I cannot decide where I want this flax or if I should have a tree where the stream was.

This way leads us to a comfy seat where we can sit back and contemplate the camellias – you know it's coming up for winter here in New Zealand. I cannot get my northern hemisphere brain around the seasonal shift – and, just before we leave literary tradition behind, I thought often whilst reading your poems, of Christina Rossetti. Of her struggle with religious faith. I thought of your imagery of nuns and shamed shaven headed women and I was pondering if you saw the hope at the threshold of your collection, because for all its dark content I did get the sense that it is a very optimistic outwardly hopeful book, and if you see the regeneration of the garden each spring as a fin de siècle catalyst on a smaller, more domestic but no less epiphanic sense?

Yes, ultimately there is hope. I believe we will “leave here brighter than we came”. I believe in the worst of our human suffering there is some kind of spiritual growth. That’s important to me, but it’s a lesson I’m always forgetting. And yes, it is very domestic because after all my searching, my gurus and incense and bells, I came home to being human. I’m not looking for God with tracker dogs and searchlights anymore, I see spirituality in my friends, in the pain within our crazy lives, and out here, in the garden. And though yes, Spring does give us that sense of rebirth, but it’s really Autumn, and the dying back that is in a way more generous, more revealing of our own inner spiritual strength.

Watch out now as we walk this way, I don't mean to alarm you but I have seen a wee green snake about of late. It's so hard to get the balance between acceptable nature and cultivated menace right, I find. I'm sure you have lots of handy gardening tips.

Well, I may do, there’s so much to learn with a garden, it’s a bit like poetry, a never-ending world. Still a snake, now that has to be good. Gimbutus describes it as “a seminal symbol, epitome of the worship of life on this earth. It is not the body of the snake that was sacred, but the energy exuded by this spiralling or coiling creature which transcends its boundaries and influences the surrounding world.” I suspect yours is a Paleolithic or Neolithic snake, maybe it belonged to the Minoan snake goddess, or it crawled off a Scandanavian rock etching in the Bronze age, or slid off from Meigle in Scotland, where Pictish stone carvings have snake Goddesses with legs and hair as twisted snakes. Strange that it should have got stuck here in the Garden of Eden. Don’t you think this would be a good moment to set her free?

Do any of the representations of garden in your poems take root in any actual leafy plot, in reality, or are they pure manifestations of a very rampant imagination?

Oh yes, they’re all real. That’s what’s so terrible and beautiful about it, the dynamic between wildness and order is ongoing, unending, calling me away even now.

For those who would like to know more, and I'd seriously urge bloggers everywhere to take a look at Grace's poetry for yourselves, When God Has Been Called Away To Greater things is available to buy where and how?

You can find it on Amazon, and via Dedalus Press’ own website—www.dedaluspress.com

Finally, Grace, I would like to thank you sincerely for this amble through my little patch, which I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing with you, and to offer you a cutting – virtual of course as the Ministry for Agriculture and Farming (MAF) won't permit real exchanges of plant life overseas – and I also extend warm welcome back to you any time.

Thank you so much Rachel, it’s been brilliant spending time with you. We should definitely do it again!

Up date

2010-05-09T02:03:00.000-07:00

It is nine pm on the fourth day. For the last three days I have been writing for sixteen hours each day but it has been totally worth it because I now have a completed first draft of my novel. Mothering Sunday is officially my Up date!
Watch this space. I may be some time.....sleep, coming at you!

Too little

2010-04-16T18:36:00.000-07:00

There is a reason I chose this picture but you'll have to wait to find out what it is.

Two little things for this month (and, really, the chances of me getting to do a "proper" post in April are slim and diminishing by the day):

I have a story in this month's issue of Eclectic Flash (Summer in Winter)
and my flash Rogue Trading has been shortlisted for the FISH one page story prize.

(My thanks to Nuala, aka Women Rule Writer for pointing that out to me! And to everyone who has contacted me variously with a leg up, a shoulder or and arm - your efforts haven't been wasted.)

On the novel front - I'm forty thousand words in and deleting every day! Got a working first draft of the central section and I'm chomping through the first section. For some reason my dialogue wants to be all flippant and I am struggling to keep my characters reigned in. I'm going to crack the whip this weekend!
I still haven't got back into the swing of this thing we call blogging - too little time and so much to do!

PS Well done Beanie for completing the Ocean Swim today! You gave it heaps!

Like old things

2010-03-22T02:33:00.000-07:00

Big pan or leetle feet?

I like old things, they make me feel

young.

I like that they have lived

and show it and I have not

and do not.

Each scratch only adds to their appeal.

If I revealed my imperfections

I would be considered

damaged.

But I am not for looking at

like old things.

Blogless

2010-03-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday Beanie! See, you got your poetry books published!

This is a wee skinny note so please don't bother commenting - going to be back soon with the pics I promised you in my last post - but I just felt the need to state how blogging is affecting me. It's pulling at me in so many ways and rendering me useless for writing. The odd bits I have written over the last few weeks have been dire. Apologies to those who have suffered me recently! I have come to the conclusion that I need to blog less. I miss writing and my writing is suffering from the lack of attention. I want my writing back.

I like to compare writing to art - at least to my process of creating pictures. If I go for any period of time without drawing or painting I lose some of the skills I had. I have to draw or paint for quite some time to regain those skills to the same level I had them before. It's the same with my writing. I don't want to be stuck at the same level of writing through not leaving myself enough time to practice. I want to write lots and lots and improve - and woman do I need to improve right now! And not just at writing or painting.

I am still going to be reading all of you but I'll be posting a wee bit less myself. Except, of course, now that I've declared this I'll get the urge to blog more!

Wearing the world were you?

2010-03-13T02:47:00.000-08:00

This image is from Wiki as I found it difficult to take my own photograph whilst also holding the world. Note how the colours compliment my blog scheme.

My plan to take over the world failed. Joshing you! About the plan. There wasn't one - not that I succeeded. I didn't. At anything.

I am no Atlas but I do seem to have been attempting to carry an awful lot lately, hence the absence, only, well, as I said, I am not of globe carrying strength and I dropped a lot of stuff. It was heavy. Picking up what and where I can now in more manageable pieces. There.

So, I am back... I should probably grrrrr there in a leo sort of way but I feel like a prat just thinking about it...how's this instead - hullo you.

Well where have I been? What have I been doing? Who am I and why am I typing as though anyone is reading this and or gives a monkeys? Do I like avocados?

Nowhere and here. Everything and nothing. Me and um? Yes and um?

That last one you may remember me asking some of you a while back and not for no nothing neither. The reason was all to do with my plan to grow the world's biggest avocado plant to generate my unique recipe for a totally environmentally safe, recyclable and biodegradable avocado mobile fuel. No. That's a lie. There is a really good reason for me asking about avocados but I'll tell you another time. I know, I shouldn't keep you hanging on like this but, in the current narrative arc of my blog it shouldn't take much to get you all hooked and inject a little excitement into the plot...yeah...I have a plot....plot, plotty plot.

Obviously I thought long and hard about my magnificent return to blogging.

Anyway, that's enough about me. Oh, except, did you know that I can write backwards and forwards with both hands? I can, but only with a pen. Here's what happens when I try to type my name like that: rtsavcghrekl. It'd be grand if there were two of every letter though.

Really building the suspense now aren't I? No? Well, that's because there is none. Nothing happened - that I can blog about. Well, that's not true. Some things happened that I can blog about. I will do. Just not now.

What I can do now is this:

a little while ago (here used in the style of Lemony Snickett to indicate an exaggeration in entirely the opposite direction to indicate a period of exceedingly long and painful separation) I was "tagged". No, I wasn't sure what it entailed. I was relieved, however, to discover that it didn't mean I had to wear a bread bag clip on my ear and dangle my udders at passing farmers. I once read that farmers blamed hedgehogs for spreading TB around farms by "stealing" cows' milk - ha - imagine how long their legs would have to be! And besides, everyone knows it's badgers who are the real robbers - they even have the masks. I digress. So - ray me far so la tea doh...here are ten things (and here I have used "things" to pertain to actual three dimensional objects - artifacts - hereby excluding all persons, literature, activities, music and such like which may render me liable to ridicule and or prosecution. Ooh - sounds naughtier than it is meant to. Good. Never been a rebel):

P) My satchel.
I) Grandma's 1950s evening bag.
Y) Granddad's paint tin.
H) Map.
T) Grandma's chest of drawers.
N) Great grandma's cast iron frying pan.
A) Spiral leg table.
P) Red boots.
H) Midnight blue pendant.
G) George Elliot's Scenes of Clerical Life.

H. This map belonged to my grandparents, like many of my treasured things which make me happy, and it is a map of an area which hold many special memories for me. I have written poetry about some of these places and this map is very dear to me.

A. I've already blogged about the spiral leg table here.

P. My red boots are five years old but I am never so pleased as when the weather is cool enough for me to tap the sidewalk happy.

P. My satchel was bought from Sheffield's Castle Market on one of my many Saturday shopping excursions with my Aunt May. I was eleven when I purchased it. It's getting on a bit now and the leather is worn so thin in places it feels like rabbit ears. My eldest brother nicknamed me after this bag.

Y. My granddad taught me to paint with these watercolours. I was never allowed to touch the tin without his supervision. You would have thought it had once contained the crown jewels and not shortbread at all.

T. These drawers have featured in several poems of mine and they are what I first look at when I am stuck for words with my WIP. Every time I use them I think of my grandma. You have to hold both handles and pull evenly to open the drawers - just so - and I can't help but smile. Everything else in my home is haphazard and thrown about but not these drawers!

H. This pendant was made for my eighteenth birthday by a man who, I later realised, was in love with me. I had once described to him my favourite colour: the summer night sky.

I. Social clubs were, evidently, all the rage in the fifties. I have photographs of people lost in a fog of fag smoke smiling and looking more relaxed than I ever saw them in life - probably on account of their being much older when I saw the real them and me being much younger then. Logic, eh? This bag makes me smile because it is the last thing I would have expected my grandmother to accessorize with.

N. This pan has many MANY uses and it is everything proof. It makes me very happy - except for when I forget it is cast iron and I pick it up without a cloth around the handle!

G. I know I said not literature but I only included this because it was given to me by a complete stranger and symbolises - to me - the generosity of my fellow book lovers. The story is tosh in my wee opinion but it is not here for its literary merit anyway. The reason it is here originated thus. I was reading in my car. In a car park - well, cars need to have fun too - and a chap and his missus asked me what I was reading and we got to chatting and it just so happened that the chap was more than a little fond of books himself and - even more coincidental - had a book or two with him. Actually he had a boot load full. And he picked out this said copy to give to me. I hasten to clarify that this was not my over romanticising a car boot sale. He was just "an ordinary fella" - like Alan Bates turning out not to be Jesus in Whistle Down the Wind).

Will post picures soon. Soon as I find someone else to hold my things for me. At last.

Hair today...

2010-02-17T15:53:00.000-08:00

This photograph was taken two years ago.

The last week has been one of ups and downs. One might say it has been like a day at the park - a ride on the swing, the exhilaration of the slide and the odd tumble thrown in.

I didn't get the agent I wanted but I got a piece of flash accepted for the April edition of Eclectic Flash.

My daughter is about to turn nine. She has never had her hair cut. Lately she hasn't wanted me to brush it and has complained of kids at school tugging it - even though it's against school rules to touch another person without their permission - she doesn't tell on people though so she decided to take matters into her own hands.

The result is in a bag in the bathroom. I cried all night. Not for the hair - you wouldn't think the tangle in that bag could have looked so beautiful - but because brushing it was one of the last things my daughter needed me for.

She was sad for a while, too, but now she feels lighter. I am still weighed to the ground and can only watch her soar. I had spent so much time making wings for my novel I hadn't even noticed my daughter was trying out a pair of her own.

Stuff IT

2010-02-14T14:58:00.000-08:00

Some stuff that did and didn't happen.

S. IT trouble.

My laptop broke. My button was wobbly. I thought, for a while, it might fall off but it didn't: it jammed. I had to send my laptop off to be fixed. It's all mended now though.

T. I had a request from an agent to read one of my novels.

I sent an email and had a positive response, then my laptop broke. After much perspiring and use of pen drives I was able to send the requested MS. I am crossing my fingers and hoping said agent likes my story. I'll report back as and when.

U. I had a new blog post all done but for a few pictures.

My laptop broke. I have to do it all again. And I will. Soon. There were three things I wanted to do but Valentine's day is like the world's fastest cake and I am going to spend this week's writing time catching up on all of your blogs and making a list of questions instead of worrying about what's gone (scone).

F. Serendipity.

I posted a letter. I received a lovely reply and I'm meeting a lady on Saturday who grew up in the town I am writing about and is the granddaughter of the man who is the central character of my triptych. The really interesting thing is, she lives just five minutes drive from me - but the best bit: my laptop could not impede good old fashioned post and I have an actual little bit of paper history all of my own to tie me to the lives of those I am writing about. Am I writing myself into fiction or bringing my fiction to life?

F. I thought about using numbers to mark these bullet points but numbers only add up to more numbers and I don't want numbers, I want words. That was my stuff for today. More and less of the same coming soon.

Swedeness

2010-02-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

Would a rose carved from any other vegetable smell as swede?

Do you ever make a random observation and find yourself desperate to use it in a story?

Here's mine:

I sipped tea from a thermos cup which emitted an odour from the rim not dissimilar to cooked swede.

Not blown it slid

2010-01-30T12:51:00.000-08:00

Sun dog at Bradwell, 2007. If you look closely at things which seem, on first glance, to be too expansive - such as this sky - you can be surprised by the most beautiful details. All you have to do is look for them, then stay focussed.

At times it can be difficult to visualise. Stacks of books which have slid into chaos and are peppered with notebooks may not look like they have purpose. Stapled gatherings of academic papers, theories wild and tame, weighed down. Sprigs of plants and pressed flowers. Pencils marking pages and more post-it notes than it takes to feather a notice board. Sometimes I look at it and am overwhelmed. Frustrated. This is my novel.

I imagine it like a small aviator.

You can't see it?

Currently it's over feathered, over fed, and has too much unneccessary weight.

I am going to lift away the extra layers.

When I have finished it will have a strong and powerful core with two beautiful sleek wings to carry it all the way to publication.

I can do this. Sometimes I have to remind myself.

On words

2010-01-23T21:28:00.000-08:00

Imagine they are your children; your family -do what you have to do to feel for them. Start small - one thing at a time - and see what we can do.

You start again. You sit there and you write. You write even if it is utter drivel. Then you sit and write some more.

You cannot change everything. You can change some things. Accept what you cannot change. Learn to live with the possible.
Catdownunder

You are a published writer: you have a blog. Now your readers must think their own thoughts about what you have reported.Several consciousnesses focussed on the same theme. Better than nothing.
Patteran

But you can't change the world....Do as much as you can with the constraints that are placed upon us; you can do no more.
Donna Hosie

I think writers could make a difference. But many of us only want to entertain.
Lori

The Telling IS the doing.

Through our blogs, we're gathering in a circle around a fire, talking and crying, laughing and cheering, trying to make sense of this crazy, mixed-up world. And if, in the end, it makes us feel less odd, less lonely and less pessimistic, maybe we won't go out and slap someone.
Kass

...you do what you can do... hug and love your children, hug and love your friends, hug and love yourself, and know that...

A man walking down the beach came upon a man who stood among countless washed up sea stars. He was picking them up one at a time trying to throw them into the sea. The walking man hollered, "You know you can't save them all." The other man stopped for just a minute with a sea star in his hand and replied, "I know, but I can save this one." And he threw the sea star back into the sea.

"We're all looking for heaven, which is later and elsewhere. Actually everything in front of us right now is a miracle, here and then gone, forever. What's the nature of that miracle? I don't know: no one does, and that's it's nature. You can't even really say that: but you have to keep on asking the question. That's what makes us human."
Annotated Margins quoting Norman Fischer

Most of us just use our blogs for preening. So that's one small difference You've already made.
Thomas Taylor

...trying to accept being human...guess it's no harder or easier than being anything else...depends where you live..
Rachel Fenton

There are way too many hard, harsh, hideous, cruel things in the world.

I think that I write to try to communicate and interpret the world. Sometimes just writing for me helps to work through some of the unfathomable worldly tangles.

Individually we can be the best friends/neighbours/people we can be. We can shine goodness as best we can.
Sara Crowley

If we didn’t have journalists and their photographers out in places like Haiti then the world would never know how bad things are. Individually I have no doubt that they do their bit when there but even if they never lifted a hand other than to click a shutter that would be enough. Like many I have the photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl running down a road near Trang Bang after a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack, embedded in my mind. The same goes for the young man shot in front of our eyes during the '68 Tet Offensive. The sad thing is that over thirty years on I’m still seeing images like this and they don’t affect me like they once did. That doesn’t mean they have lost their power and for some the photos from Haiti will be the first images of a disaster like this that they will have seen and they will be the ones that will become a part of them.

Do you know what I remember about Live Aid? Bob Geldof. Now, why him? Because of the state he worked himself into. You could see how frustrated he was. He didn’t have the words. What words were there? But then we have this wee, scruffy, Irishman getting all worked up at swearing at the British public before the watershed: "Fuck the address, let's get the numbers!" After the outburst, giving increased to £300 per second. He reminded us, the generation who’d cracked jokes in the playground about starving Biafrans, that these were real people; you’d think it was his family that was dying out there and, of course, we’re all related if you go back far enough.

I don’t know the people in Haiti. But I know you. I should feel for them but what I feel is for you. You have become a proxy. I should feel the way you do. We all should. We’ve forgotten how. That’s why we need writers, to hold our hands and lead us into scary places we'd rather not go.
Jim Murdoch

I have that photograph, Jim, along with one of a man being beheaded in a public square - before and after the blade came down - in a highschool text book I didn't return. And others. And for the most part I, too, amble through life with little daily thought about such matters because I am too caught up in my immediate sphere of existence to give them the time of consideration...I remember kids in my class laughing at these images...I remember leaving the room to be sick after looking at the beheading one...I remember Live Aid, the swearing and the pot-bellied kids with big heads and spindle limbs and all the bloody flies, the colour of the dust and the richness of contrast where a droplet of saliva or a tear escaped and the flies going in and out of gawping mouths and feeding on those tears, and how for years afterwards all people remembered was the godawful song...I remember the start to Isherwood's "Goodbye Berlin"..."I am a camera.." and there are dozens of others who have used that same line in one way or another but there's one fundamental problem with that idea...a camera cannot feel, it cannot move of its own accord...we can, I can...there's a difference between passivity and ignorance...observing and ignoring...thank you for reading and for taking the time to make a difference to me...
Rachel Fenton

...while art can seem trivial when compared to the pain and suffering some people go through on a daily basis, I think that it can give some kind of a hope - I think of how listening to music helped me during admittedly much less tougher times - perhaps the frailty and shortcomings of art can be what makes it powerful in a way.
Andrea

I love the idea that you and I and all other writers - and I add here artists of all types who represent humankind and life - join hands to speak about things that would otherwise not be said or heard.
Elisabeth

...it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the horror of it all, the tragedy, the unnecessary unfairness of care/aid/finance. I've certainly been feeling that. And then my daughter comes home all excited about money they've raised at school...and what do you say? 'It's all hopeless, the world is unfair?' No, I didn't say that. At 9 I'm still keeping some of that from her...when I can.

At times like this writing can seem like a bloody stupid thing to be doing. We see nurses on TV and think 'look at them, they can DO something!' But we can't all be nurses. We just can't.
Rachel Fox

we can't change a world, but we can change our small part of it. I do my best to be decent to other people: I may not be able to love, help or change them, but I can be decent to them. And decency involves truth, sharing thoughts, and listening.
Titus

Right then...I'll do what I can...my son's filled his nappy and the sun is shining...onwards...
Rachel Fenton

Vanessa Gebbie's got news on what writers can do to help Haiti over at her blog.

No thing

2010-01-21T12:55:00.000-08:00

You know what, I sit here wondering what pile of utter dross to write next when there are kids being shot in the head for nicking a couple of pictures in the name of law and order -what's that? Oh, we call this democracy, this view that we know what's right and what's not. Who are you if you can kill a child? No thing is worth killing anyone for. Well what is the point of being a writer? What do we do? We watch and listen and write what we feel and nothing happens. If you're a published writer you get your thoughts published. If you're a nobody like me you go on as usual. Nothing.

Feel write

2010-01-20T00:13:00.000-08:00

This was in my file of "Phone Photos". I have no idea when, where, what it is - looks like a very blurry view - it seemed fitting.

Today is Wednesday - evening for me, morning for some of you, and some other unfathomable time differences for others. I hadn't planned on posting anything new until Friday but I'm such a rebel!

I've been stuck with my WIP for weeks now, or thought I was, until I realised I was only snagged on that chapter. My novel is in three parts and I have the first and the final parts planned out to such sphincter toning precision that when I came to planning the central section (for which I have been researching for months) I found I was somewhat constricted - creatively constipated one might say.

The research has been intriguing, fascinating and moving and I have learnt a phenomenal amount. I wish I could tell you some of the wonderfully random and amazing things I now know but I'm hanging on in case I can or need to use them in my narrative. However, the research has posited a huge burden on my narrative frame. I have acquired some very special information but with it comes a responsibility. I cannot simply write what I feel like writing because I have not only the facts to bear in mind (not to mention all the dates which are driving me out of my innumerate mind) but also the feelings and integrity of real people.

Last weekend - with some assistance from my fellow tinternetters with their bloggy bludgeons - I forced myself to write the first chapter of the central section. It took me all of Saturday to get the basic shape of the thing, with the relevant historical detail (that was the real difficulty - I have all this wonderful information and I cannot use ninety percent of it - no that's not an actual figure, I have no idea of an actual figure but it seems like the shape of ninety percent - but I want to), and the plotting just so.

Usually I would leave it at this stage and move on to the next chapter and then revise after a few to make sure it wasn't getting too out of shape or that elements or characters weren't deviating too far from my plans. Small mistakes early on can devastate the plot evolution later on and it's letting the plot spin a few wheel burns later that's the fun part so I don't want to curb my fun by not being careful early on. Only I haven't got any plans, not in my sense of the word plans, for this central section yet. Or so I thought.

I'd been hung up on this section for so long - rummaging through masses of notes and documents to try to piece together a plot - that I'd forgotten about the thing I could do. Therefore (note absence of "so" to start this sentence), on Saturday I put the research to one side and I just wrote. I stopped worrying about the dates and the facts and all the other details that have been escalating in my easily overawed leetle brain and I wrote. And it was wonderful. I have a thousand post-it notes stuck all over to remind me of details to follow up on or add later but I let the words flow and didn't stall them with sense or reason and I got a first draft of a chapter. I was so relieved that I sent it to some people who have a very vested interest in this section of the novel and they were thrilled - the protagonist is, they said, just how they - his family - have always thought of him. PHEWSH!

And I am light. I can write without the weight of responsibility holding down my wrists. And now I can't wait to see where the words will take me next. I had been hopping into my planned sections and writing the odd bits but I really find those easy and I want to save them until the last. The central part had become the Brussels sprout, the part I must get out of the way first, but now I'm developing an acquired taste for it. I'm still not comfortable about not having it all planned out to precision for this section but I have a brief outline and now I have a start....and I'm going to go with the flow and see what happens. I'm going to let myself feel what to write. So far it feels right.

Using my bottle

2010-01-15T01:14:00.000-08:00

I think this is possibly the ugliest piece of work I've ever created. It's a self portrait of a seventeen year old me.

I don't need compliments, I need advice.

When I was seventeen I kept a diary. Ten years later I read it back and wanted to exterminate my seventeen year old self. Luckily I didn't have to - she was trapped. Another four and no doubt I'll laugh, if I can find the diary to read it that is. I hadn't thought about it at all until I trawled through some old pictures for inspiration.

I like getting older. From sixteen to thirty I looked nineteen, it was a blessing and a curse. Now I look my age (thanks to the NZ sun), feel it (thanks to relocating across the globe and extending my family), and all I need is for the sense to kick in (?).

What's the best piece of writing (or other) advice you've ever received, what's the worst, and do you like avocados?

Oh, and, if you see a familiar looking bottle at the beach don't uncork it! Some things are better left forgotten.

I doll

2010-01-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

I made this doll for the daughter of a friend. It isn't perfect but I like that. I think she did too. It was supposed to resemble her her but she doesn't know her self yet, doesn't have an "I", and when she does it may be nothing like her.

I make a lot of things - I can't sit still - when I'm not writing I'm thinking about writing but I still need to occupy my hands. Kids help fill most of my time, in fairness, and they are a much needed constant in my life. However, when they are tucked up in bed my mind is still very busy, even if my bones are tired.

Often my idleness is elbowed aside by painting, other times I make stuff, rarely I clean house. My creations aren't always as enthusiastically received as this doll was. Sometimes I get cold feet and don't give the thing I made away at all, like a pamphlet of poems recently, and I try to keep in mind that not everyone digs pressed flowers. I'm something of an oldy worldy scatterbrain when it comes to gifts. Don't expect anything cool from me! I'm with the give what you'd like to receive brigade but what I'd like seldom corresponds with what others like to receive.

Where's all this going I hear you ask? (Actually I just asked myself as I had no idea when I started this post!)

Not such a big deal? Now I'm making a novel it is. I don't want to get thousands of words in and have written something nobody wants to read. Having written ten thousand words of notes I want to get this novel right for as many readers as possible.

And I wondered....what was the nicest gift you ever received and what do you most want/look for in a novel?

Wring out the old

2010-01-01T15:19:00.001-08:00

Sorry this is a long one, I usually like to keep things snappy! Note the vicar - he was on the news recently. Google St Matthew's in the City! - Andrea at Rainbow notebook, I'll try and get a front shot in another time!

2009 was a whirlwind of a year for me, both personally, privately and for my writing. You could say I've been through the wringer! Done a brief inventory and discovered something pretty unbelievable - I wrote (this does not mean they are "finished") fifty poems in 2009, thirty poems in the month of December alone! Would love to post them up here but I'm going to overcome my submission fear and send them out to some ezines and journals etc when they are right.

As well as the poetry there was the flash and short fiction (and some of my flash merges with my poetry but I keep it separate): I wrote fifty stories and gathered together what I hope can become my first collection - no news is good news, right? Plus, I sent a couple of things to competitions. I even managed to make myself cry with a couple of stories!

I also wrote a novel. Back in May/June I wrote a novel set in my old home town - to exorcise it I suppose and allow me to move on. It's a good story and an easy read with a linear narrative and a lyrical style and a funny protagonist. It's also an allegory. It took me four weeks to write 80,000 words (and no, it isn't a load of hits) and almost killed me! The bones of the story had been with me for some time and allowed me to do a chapter by chapter breakdown of the plot and, essentially, write a chapter per night. At weekends I would work on it for twelve hours per day and it was both the easiest and hardest thing I have accomplished. It served it's purpose. I no longer have any urge to revisit any aspect or elements of my home town in a novel! I am cleansed! What it also "taught" me, however, was that I want to write more complex novels. My first novel was/is quite complex and I think my lack of success with that had put me off a little, made me think I should go more mainstream, but you know what, I am who I am and I write what I write and so I'm back to writing just for me: and it feels good. It feels very good.

As soon as I decided that a stack of books lifted off my shoulders and left me with a spanky new dust jacket.

I'm going to take my time with my latest WIP - not because I think I've earned it (incidentally, I do think I should have some sort of holiday - offers on a postcard!) - but because I want to savour it. I want the words I commit to it to be the very best I can for the words' sake as well as the narrative's. It's proving to be a challenge, in every sense, to me. I am struggling with a lot of numbers on a weekly basis and I, as I've blogged before, am not bedfellows with numbers. And that brings me to another point...

...For the past year I have been writing on my bed! Since my son became active I haven't been able to leave my writing laying about all over the place and have had to decamp to my bedroom (oh, to have a bigger house - come on agents, make those publishers buy my books!). It's not ideal: it's not even comfortable (really, you should try it: the sheer perversity of being on your bed and not sleeping....), and my back aches and my bottom gets nins and peedles far too frequently.

I wanted to go into 2010 with a more balanced approach to writing, less like a learner driver - gas/breaks/gas/breaks ... - I may not be able to change my personality but I have got more defined and realistic goals, ones which don't put so much pressure on me to be a writing machine, don't need so much grease or un-clogging, and allow the words to sparkle.

Part of me will always talk to that kid who was kicked, spat on, followed home and pushed in the gutter and had her clothes drawn on, and part of me will listen to her telling them, the kids that did that to her "thanks - you made me", but there's another part developing, one who doesn't need the mother of the past. In 2009 I cut the umbilicus.

I started blogging in May to present myself to the world as a writer. I felt like a bit of a fraud, after all I had nothing published. Looking back at how much I have written, however, I think I can call myself a writer now.

Nothing is as it was at the beginning of 2009 but for one thing; last year my resolution was to find an agent and get published. This year it's the same. You still up for a ride?

PS I can't swim and I failed my driving test six times! I can also hum the theme to Black Beauty whilst tongue galloping! - Bet you thought I'd forgotten - or maybe you had?
PPS - why did no one tell me I had missed the "a" out of beauty? Some critics you lot are! Ha! Changed it now. Must remember to spell check more!

Elf issues

2009-12-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

Tis the season for typos - click on the picture to enlarge. Shame they've since corrected it!

Happy New Year to all my bloggers - thank you to everyone who has offered advice, support and encouragement in all its myriad forms - wishing you and yours a very elfy 2010!

Christmas eve's special

2009-12-23T21:58:00.000-08:00

Image coordinated by blogger, TFE.

It's Christmas Eve and I have a very special visitor: a visitor with a smashing red vehicle - perfect for the festivities - what's that - a sleigh? Neigh.

This visitor is coming about a portrait. Now, my studio is all decked out with canvas and more canvas and all I need is -

- Oh, before I forget: do you remember the last portrait I painted? It was of Nude - the collection of achingly good short fiction by Nuala Ní Chonchúir.

Well, this portrait is of the artist: Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car. It's just pulled up. Hang on a mo -

-Yep, park it right there!

Picture copyright of Nuala Ní Chonchúir.

Surprise! Nuala's here again! Yippee!

Come on in and have a mince pie! Actually, have several - I made way too many this year - don't they look cute with the little stars on top? Yes, I brushed them with a little milk and a sprinkle of sugar to brown them. Please, stop, you're too generous with your compliments! Eggnog?

Right, have a sit down, I've got lots I want to ask you about your winning poetry collection, Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car.

It's great to have you back after your last virtual book tour, that time it was your short fiction collection Nude doing the posing. I'm thrilled you've returned with your poetry. And I have to say that Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car feels like a very natural progression from Nude, a poetic sequel almost. There are a lot of themes, motifs, (what would you call them?) shared by the two collections and I wondered which came first or were they simultaneous, were you even conscious of the connections as you wrote them or were they indicative of a series of long standing obsessions? (Sorry – bit of a cluster bomb of a question that!)

Hey Rachel – thanks for having me back again. It’s odd to have two books come out back to back but they are from two different publishers. The poems are actually all rather recent. The pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car in its entirety was my (winning) entry into Templar Poetry’s pamphlet competition. I had entered in 2008 too so I decided to enter a completely new set of poems this year.

I think poetry like short fiction is about the personal obsessions of the writer and so there are themes and motifs that re-occur a lot in all my writing: fertility, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, children, sex, relationships, the break-up of relationships, art. These are all things that occupy me and fascinate me, so inevitably that spills over into my writing.

So, to answer your question about timing, the stories were written first (2005 – 2008/9) and the poems came after, (2008 – 2009) but the same themes are with me even now.

In “When You Are Ready” you begin with a line about Narcissus:

"You are no ordinary Narcissus.

There is no pool that could

reflect back all you are

and keep you there, gazing."

They are key lines, I think, to understanding how the poems are so successful, especially when one considers the title of this collection. Portrait of the Artist With a Red Car, a nod to Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reads as both an intimate portrait of you – the poet (the artist), and a mirror: you leave the reader enough looking space to find themselves between your lines. Reading your poems had me a Narcissus, only, instead of staring at a pool, my reflection was on the surface of a glass slide, under a microscope, and as I read I was dissecting myself. And I remember when you toured here with Nude I asked you how much you considered the readers of your fiction as being participants within the fiction, not merely readers, and I wondered how much you think that your poetry in this collection is open to reader projection, how much is poetic persona and how much is you?

To be honest, it’s mostly me. My poetry tends to come from a personal place. Some people talk about ‘confessional poetry’ as if it’s a disease or something. For me, as a poetry reader, I’d rather read a personal, moving poem than an impersonal treatise. Some of my poems are persona poems (I’ve never danced with poet Paul Durcan, for example!) but mostly the poems come from my life and the lives of women I am curious about. I’m a feminist and that can’t help but spill over into all my work. Readers can – and will – take what they like from a poem; once it’s out there people will put their own spin on what a writer means by a poem.

I am going to ask you about your reference to Paul Durcan (poet and author of “Golden Mothers Driving West”), your dance with him, and if the “three Polish boys” in the title poem of your collection are a nod to Durcan's own poignant tribute to motherhood?

The Durcan poem is a bit of whimsy. I invented the encounter with him in The Winding Stair, which is a favourite book shop of mine in Dublin. I’m a fan of the man and his work; I love his style of reading and the diverse and very Irish voices in his poetry. I’ve only met him once and I just gushed briefly about his general wonderfulness. He smiled and nodded sagely.

The Polish boys in the title poem were nothing to do with Durcan. There are a lot of Polish immigrants in Ireland and watching them with their crap car, as I sat in my own crap car, got me wishing for better cars for us all. That thought process led me in the poem to me and my first husband’s car crash and I had my poem. I didn’t know where the poem was going when it started. I never know where any of my writing is off to when I step into it; that’s the mystery and fun of it, I guess. And I love that. On a slight tangent, it struck me lately that writing is the one place where I allow myself to be chaotic – I’m intensely organised in all other parts of my life.

I can't help thinking back to Nude again and how after I had interviewed you I was struck by how odd it was (to me) that I hadn't asked you about the art references in there and I'm not going to this time either, but I am going to thank you for coming all the way over here - here's a box of shortbread I made earlier, car shaped and iced in red - I'll take a photo before...oh, they're tasty, eh?. Readers, you'll have to imagine what they looked like!

Rachel, thanks again for having me over. It’s always a pleasure and I’m delighted to be here again.

If people want to buy the pamphlet it costs €6 (about NZ $12) from Templar Poetry here: http://www.templarpoetry.co.uk/publications/portrait-of-the-artist-with-a-red-car.html

Thanks again, and thanks TFE for the great tour logo.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

--
www.nualanichonchuir.com
http://womenrulewriter.blogspot.com/

Just tin

2009-12-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

I have just had a loss of appetite having read this which has resulted in the following spontaneous burst of poetic criticism:

Carry On

Had they driven all this way
to come face to face
with the head
of a fat soaked
beast and a slick

of indeterminable
intestines whose hosts
were unidentifiable
in the thick of it.
Was this the Styx,

bloodied and carcass
strewn? Had they
crashed, head long, into
hell? Their own
bodies mingled with

the mangled
formless parts:
lungs, hooves,
limbs, livers or hearts:
none could determine

in the horror as they
clambered from the
wreck of it. Merged
by-products of human
nature; the wish

to consume slips over
the tarmac, the verge,
the wayside: wasted.
The road is closed,
only for now.

Two posts for you this week - I'm going AWOL from blogging for a couple of weeks as I need to sort out some issues I am having with my WIP so please be patient with me: I'll try and keep up to scratch with comments on my blog but I may not be as visible in the rest of blog land for a while. Thank you. Your comments are, as always, very much appreciated.

Dead tiered

2009-12-07T01:20:00.000-08:00

Bradwell Edge, Derbyshire Peak District, UK. 2007

Is it me, or is everyone blogging about death lately? Every blog I've read recently has mentioned it and, as I've mentioned before, I don't deal with it very well. Here's my take on it - I wrote it on the eleventh of the eleventh this year. I suppose it is customary to be miserable at this time of year.

Home

This is death: the slow shuttering up of the drive to achieve
or the need to be desired. When all of my lines
accumulate and can be read "I don't care","I'm tired",
this is death. A dry stone wall in disrepair
for want of the stonemason
who built me. A monument:
all that remains of me.
A cairn: the weight of
living upon me. Stone,
not carved: cast.
Marked
naturally;
deliberately.
This heap of me.
Ruins
in want of a roof,
a lifetime in want
of a shelter;
eternally.
This is
death:
take
me,
please,
piece
by
piece.