On the page

I didn't stop to think how my friend would feel to be the subject of a book of poetry about friendship. I got so caught up in wanting to show her how much I appreciate and love her. I trusted she'd be OK with me being me. But I should have asked. In her own words, Lori wrote about how it feels to be put on the
page.

Beerstorming

 

 

It's publication day - my debut poetry chapbook is here! 

My grandest thanks go to my brilliant publisher Sara Lefsyk of The Ethel Zine and Micro Press for making this dream of mine come true! Sitting up all night on the settee with a two month old on my breast when I submitted my poems, publication seemed as elusive as sleep. I'm forever grateful to Sara for bringing my chapbook into the world.

Blog her award

Thanks very much, Teresa Stenson, for presenting me with this blog award and giving me something to post in February! 

- Where do you usually write/create?

In writing terms, the creating and the writing often occur at different times, though not always. Often an idea will present itself to me when I’m out and about, or when reading or listening to other people’s conversations – I am a dreadful earwigger! In that sense, the creating part happens anywhere. But the writing gets done during school hours, and evenings after the kids are in bed, and at weekends, usually at a table I bagged at a charity shop for this very purpose, though I used to have to write on my bed (which is far more uncomfortable that one would imagine if one hadn’t spent all day there). I carry a notebook with me everywhere I go, too, so I do take notes and jot lines to add to story drafts-in-progress as I potter around Auckland and its environs. Comic creating gets done, predominantly in my car, outside the house of my daughter’s guitar tutor or on the settee of an evening, and the painting part I do at the aforementioned desk. I should have just written “Anywhere,” ay?

- Describe your ideal writing/making day.

I wake naturally, it’s still very early, I have clarity of thought, my eyes aren't sore and the kids are out with their dad for the day and miraculously my neighbours are not felling trees or using petrol mowers or leaf blowers. I open my laptop and the next thing I notice is the kids opening the door, they’ve had a great day and are asking why I haven’t put the lights on. 

- What are you really enjoying working on at the moment?

A short story about food and cross-cultural social etiquette, and a comic/graphic interview with a writer whose work I am in awe of.

- What, if anything, stops you from writing?

Insects. And biscuits. Insects in my biscuits would be a definite game ender, unless they were dead fly biscuits, which would only cause a temporary hiatus. 

- If you could choose a writer to be your mentor (share work with, chat about the process) who would it be? 

I have to choose just one? I was lucky when I won the AUT Graphic Fiction Competition that part of my prize was mentoring from Dylan Horrocks, who is revered as something of a comics Buddha, though I doubt he would be keen on followers rubbing his tummy for luck. Writing wise, I love everything I’ve read of Nuala Ní Chonchúir, David Constantine and Adnan Mahmutovic, they can do no wrong in my eyes, and I’d love to natter with Alison Moore, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and Audrey Niffenegger, ask them about structure. 

- Do you believe in writer's block? If you get it, how do you overcome it?

I think it’s very real for a lot of writers, I don’t doubt it when they say they have it, but I haven’t experienced it. The nearest to it I can imagine is when I spend too much time on my opening paragraph and I find I put a disproportionate amount of pressure on myself to have the following sentences perfect in a first draft. I think something like writer’s block can also happen, conversely, when the opening is all wrong and I haven’t thought something out as well as I should have before writing, in which case the writing bumps me out and I find it difficult to press on until I’ve resolved the issue. 

- Tell us a good thing that happened to you today.

I got this blog award!

- What's the first thing you do in the morning?

Pretend to be asleep.

- What's your most listened to song?

Today it’s “Birds” by The Veils (Finn Andrews and his younger brother were at a recent literary gathering I attended, apparently I wasn’t the first person to mistake the latter for the former and my mention of the younger being the spit of my kid brother did little to redeem me). Previous obsessive plays include “Animal Life” by Shearwater; Rokia Traoré’s “Laidu”; Christine McVie’s “Songbird”; “Have You Got It In You?” by Imogen Heap; Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut”; “Yes” by McAlmont and Butler; “Tonight Will Be Fine” by Leonard Cohen (I was lucky enough that Mr Cohen gave me permission to use his lyrics in my fiction, and my fave cover of this track is Teddy Thompson’s); “The Witch of Pittenweem” by Emily Barker; and of course, Jamez Chang’s “Fifteen Years” which features a sample of my voice (who doesn’t like the sound of it?)!

- Who would play you in the movie of your life? 

Vickie Bak Laursen, better known as Pernille Lindegaard from The Bridge – Danish is a lot like Barnsley dialect: en kop te, tak – sorted. But if I wanted a blockbuster, Rachel Weisz, because a) then people would flock to watch it, and b) I think Rachel doing a northern English accent is a feather she cannot omit from her acting cap and can only improve relations with him indoors, from whom she can take lessons, and c) she’s already called Rachel – bonus. Kate Winslet might be good, too, for the upside-down smile ability. Ideally, if you get all three of them in the Brundle-pod and splice them, without accidentally including a fly in the mix, I think a good me-alike would be the result.

- What would the title of your autobiography be?

I’m slowly cobbling together a comic memoir currently and that’s called New Shoes, but a written autobiography could be called Alter Thy Face – you read it here first, folks.

Apparently I have to pass this on, and the nominees are:

Lori Tiron-Pandit

Catherine McNamara

Andrea Quinlan

Penny Graham-Jones

Helen Caldwell 

Nominees - if you choose to accept the award, here's what you need to do:

    Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.

    Display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)

    Answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.

    Provide 11 random facts about yourself. (I've omitted this part as I feel it's beyond the call of duty)

    Nominate 5 – 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, who have a less than 1000 followers. (Note that you can always ask the blog owner this since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know this information!)

    Create a new list of questions for the blogger to answer.

    List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to:

    Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of it!)

The new questions are (I couldn't think of eleven and wanted to get this posted today!):

~Who or what motivates you?

~If you weren’t doing what you do, what would you do?

~You’re on a desert island, what have you taken with you?

~Describe in one sentence your work area.

~What are the barriers to your creativity?

~What’s your definition of success?

 

 

In sight

My friend Lori Tiron-Pandit has written a book and I got first dibs to interview her about it.

Thank you, and welcome to the blog, Lori.
Your book, Spell of Blindness, is the story of Ana, a woman whose spiritual journey is told retrospectively through her journal entries. What inspired you to write this story?

It is a story that had been growing in my head for a very long time. I always knew that when I start writing my first book, that will be it. When I finally started writing it a few years ago (before my daughter, who is now seven, was born) it took a different turn and then another, and it turned into a story I hadn’t really envisioned from the start, but which had the essence of my initial idea. But the main character and her journey in search of love and spirituality remained true to my original thought.

I love the atmosphere of the book, it's very dreamy, but the story is grounded, I think, by the beautiful descriptions of Romania. I've never been there but feel like I have. Tell me a little about the location and why the book is set in Romania.

I belong to the school of thought that says it is best to write about what you know. I grew up in Romania, I was molded by that land and the memory of those places will always move me, a feeling that I am trying to share with my readers. I am especially fond of Bucharest, a beautiful and ugly, dear and hated city, like all big cities, and the landscapes surrounding the villages where my grandparents lived and my parents grew up, somewhere in the southern part of Moldavia, where I used to spend all my summer vacations.  

Talk to me about themes. One of the first things I commented to you when I read your novel was how you write about the cold - it's practically a character in its own right in the book. Is the cold a metaphor in the book, or is it always cold in Romania? 

I was actually surprised when I realized how cold it was everywhere in the book. That was completely unintentional and it came from the main character’s sense of struggle, unsettlement, pain and discomfort in her own skin. It’s one of those things that although unplanned are essential to understanding the inner life of the character.

Interiors are another theme that can be traced throughout the entire novel. The houses in which the characters live are representative of their states of mind and are important elements in decoding these characters.

The diary fragments are just that; some characters appear then disappear without much introduction, though Anna really anchors them in the narrative. How does the fragmentation fit in with your vision for the novel? Are you a fan of epistolary novels in general? 

I don’t feel compelled to follow a linear development of a story when I write. Linearity feels too cerebral and unnatural to me. I think that real stories are always made up of fragments that we put together over time to create an image of someone’s life and experiences. I like the idea of disjoint pieces that don’t perfectly fit together but need the audience, the readers in this case, to glue them together and fill in the small spaces that remain uncovered with material brought from their own similar experiences.

Tell me about your use of allegory. Ana's friends represent different spiritual paths and choices, don't they? Could you talk a little bit about Amon?

Ana’s closest friends represent different facets of the same journey. In my construct of “blindness,” Ana stands in for the concept of “love is blind,” Ella for “fate is blind” and Laura for “faith is blind.” It feels like they are all struggling through darkness, but I tried to envision a way out in the end.

Amon is the ideal of love that Ana searches for. He represents the surrealistic part of the novel, which is important for conveying the whole sense of an inner world that is rich, magical and disturbing at times. Spell of Blindness happens in Ana’s head, and our minds are the most complex, treacherous, and often untrustworthy parts of us.  Amon might be a creation of Ana’s mind, but he might as well be a real, breathing human being. We don’t exactly get a straight answer in the book, but there are many hints as to what the truth might be.

There are many women in your novel - all different, all vivid. You write wonderfully of friendship. How do you think Spell of Blindness fits into the literary canon of Romania? Are strong women a feature of Romanian fiction?

I have been rather disconnected from the current literary world in Romania, since I moved to US almost ten years now. One of the reasons I wrote the book in English was that I wanted it to be perceived as a rendition of universal struggles of women, not particularly of Romanian women. I can say that although there are many women writers of a new generation being published now in Romania, classic Romanian literature, as well as the majority of what is considered “high” literature today is represented by men writers. I do not see women, even strong ones, if they are written by men as significant in bringing to life the universe of womanhood. I think that Romanian women writers are trying as hard over there as we are trying over here to break all barriers and bring to light a literature of our own.

What inspires you to write? 

Well, this is a question that I have to ask myself daily when I sit in front of my computer to write. I prefer to look at inspiration as a mystery. That is my approach and I know it is not shared by everyone. Each writer is different. I know I have a message (to shed light on women’s lives in the social context of our times) and from there it is all magic. Magic is not a very productive approach to writing, but somehow it lends itself to use as a reliable tool. I summon the magic every morning and most times it shows up to help me.

Do you have plans for another novel/what are you working on now?

I am working on a second book right now. It is different from Spell of Blindness and yet very similar. I think the readers will find an already known universe that will be populated by different characters with different visions. It tells the story of a community of women that preserves old ways of life and of faith with respect for women’s values and peaceful co-living. It’s a story about women who are healers of the mind, body and soul, who have faith in who they are, and who connect in nourishing their powers to enhance them and use them to help themselves and help others. I hope to be able to get it ready for publication by the end of this year.

Your new project sounds fascinating, Lori, and I wish you lots of luck with it.