Island to Island

Five Days in Taipei

 

I am grateful to the Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ) and Creative New Zealand (CNZ) for making it possible for me to return to Taipei to promote Island to Island (Dala Publishing) at the Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE).

 I chose the title!

The book is the result of a collaboration between three artists from New Zealand and three from Taiwan: Ant Sang, Tim Gibson, Rachel Fenton (me), 61Chi, Ahn Zhe, and Sean Chuang, that began with the New Zealand Book Council's Graphic Novelists exchange Residency, in association with PANZ and TIBE, back in October 2014. 

As then, I kept a visual diary of each day, as well as a photo journal. My Five Days in Taipei begins at Auckland International Airport:

 

 

Day One

 

  

 Day Two

I recognise fans from last year. 

Intriguing messages appear on stands around the book fair.

 Upstairs, I am given my first copy of Island to Island in preparation for the workshop I'm about to take part in. I read as the room fills before me with graphic artists, cartoonists, art historians, university professors and students from all over Taiwan.

Sean Chuang's "gift" to me has me in tears.

 Then back to the Locus Publishing stand at the book fair for autographs.

 I'm not always comfortable having my photograph taken with fans.

 

But Aho is always nearby to make sure I honour my duties!

Day Three

  

Before catching a taxi to my next event, I wait for Aho, my publisher, at the Locus book stand and photograph people reading Island to Island.

 

Chinese New Year is just ending but no one seems in a hurry to end the celebrations.

A quick cab ride across the city has me and Aho in the part of town where he lives. The streets are narrow and the shops varied and of interest to the students who live here to be close to the university.

 Just before the event, Aho takes me for something to eat before we meet Yang Chia-Hsien, an acclaimed Taiwanese poet who is going to discuss graphic poetry with me and 61Chi.

I've read several of her works in translation - we exchanged poems - and I feel very honoured to have her praise of my poetry.

  

 

We talk about some of the differences between Chinese traditional poetry and Western poetry, and note some similarities between formal poetry and graphic poetry. Island to Island is an unusual collection because of its poetic nature.

61Chi's "gift" to me, for example, has no words. It is left to the reader to interpret the interplay between the non-sequential pictures and work out what they might mean.

As an example of my own graphic poetry, I have taken along posted sized pages of "Alchemy Hour".

 I make a new friend - Kevin is also a poet.

 

Then I take a taxi back to my hotel.

A van transports a box printed with the word "HEART".

The taxi passes The Grand Hyatt, the hotel where the NZ Guest of Honour delegation stayed last February. 

I promised Tina Makereti I'd Tweet a photograph for nostalgia purposes.











In the seating area, a young man has his head in his hands,
elbows on knees. He appears to be crying.

 I don't press send.

 

Day Four

I get up early, eat an extra large breakfast

  

  and head across town to deal with some unfinished business.

 

The city is pretty deserted at this time.

 It's only as I approach the mountains that I start to see signs of life.

 Hikers pause to appreciate one of the many temples on the route.

I watch a dog practicing yoga - early morning is the best time, for ying and yang - but I'm distracted by a man shouting "Foreigner". His name's Geoff and he wants to give me a tour of the temple.

 He tells me about the goddess, urges me to take pictures because, "You're a foreigner, you're ok."

 Stray dogs gather in front of the goddess.

 I ask Geoff the way to the mountain. He tells me to take the left every time the road forks.

 A dog wearing a coat runs to greet me.

I hop behind a couple, ask if they mind me walking with them. They laugh, tell me they have a child who lives in Canada. They say their English is very bad. I say it's better than my Mandarin. I'm very funny, apparently.

 I leave them when the road forks. Now the mountain talks to me.

 All the way up the mountain I hear dogs, their barks and howls mingled with the sound of singing from the temples.

Another temple. Each time I see one I pass a message to Buddha.

 

 

 I make it to the summit where there are "People, people, people".

 I'm so happy, I run part of the way down.

 

I meet 61Chi at the Metro station outside the Taipei 101 building and she takes me over town to have afternoon tea with Lawran, our translator from last year. In lieu of rose milk tea, I celebrate with hot chocolate and lemon pound cake.

Day Five

 

My final event is a group interview in Theme Square.

My room is on the 12th floor. Breakfast is on the 3rd. There is no 4th floor. The word four in Mandarin is similar to the word death.

  

 劉宜其 林嘉萱 關婷勻 張敏慧

After the event, we go for a last meal together: spicy hotpot.

 

Then 61Chi takes me to see her neighbourhood.

On my last night in Taipei, I eat cookies gifted to me by Lawran, and do not sleep. A couple sit together all night on a bench in the alley between the building site and my hotel. Mostly they talk, but at four am, one takes the other's face in their hands, tilts it to the left and kisses them.

My flight leaves  at one pm. I eat breakfast and go for one last walk.

I take a happy photo outside the Grand Hyatt. People are eating breakfast in the ground floor restaurant where I once watched a poet asking for an apple. They don't see me.

Beaut trees

 

 

Beautiful Trees is Nik Perring’s much anticipated follow-up to Beautiful Words, in which Alexander and Lucy’s story was told, and the second book in the genre-pushing trilogy ending with A Book of Beautiful Shapes.  

“There are many reasons to love [Beautiful Trees]. We are in a relationship with them for a start, […] like some sort of involuntary symbiotic love affair.”

There are many reasons to love Beautiful Trees. We get to find out what happens to Alexander when he meets Lily, for a start, “[a]fter Lucy went away”. Only, there are reminders of Lucy everywhere, little echoes, so that no matter how different trees may seem on the surface, the reader cannot help but notice how beautiful the words of the twenty-three stories in Beautiful Trees are, too.

Gorgeously illustrated by Miranda Sofroniou and published by Roast Books, Beautiful Trees is a visual treat of originality. Each page is printed and patterned with images that build on the symbolism revealed about the trees featured in the stories and add to the mythology of Alexander and Lily. The overall effect is one of opening a dictionary and finding that every definition not only has a map but also pinpoints another stop in the journey of a love story. 

But nothing is ever as simple as it first appears. Beautiful Trees is much more than a series of jigsaw pieces about trees and their relevance to the lives of Alexander and Lily. The book makes a much broader commentary on the significance of nature on all our lives. Not only the nature we are surrounded by, but the nature within us. 

Beautiful Trees makes us question what it is to be human, our mythology, to be connected to something greater than individual selves, and to think ahead to what may be. It’s really a book about choices, if we have them, or if we are in a bigger story arc, one where trees are the main characters, perhaps, and we are merely players, on repeat. 

“[…] without their leaves. Their bark was silver. ‘Like glowing bone,’ you said, and I knew then that we were the same.”

Nik Perring is a member of The Society of Authors, National Centre for Language and Literacy

"Nik Perring's stories are gems, every one of them" - 3 :AM Magazine

Follow him on Twitter: @nikperring

 

Textual tennis

 

Introduction from Sexual Textual Tennis,

Copyright © 2015 by Carolyn Gage and Rachel J. Fenton

 

 

Back in January, I connected with playwright Carolyn Gage on LinkedIn. A few years previously, I'd asked Carolyn for permission to quote from her play The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and use her as a character in one of my stories, which she agreed to, so I was pleased when she messaged me the following:

"If you're ever looking to illustrate a graphic novel, esp. a lesbian one... I've got some!"

Although I was too busy with the NZ Book Council's Graphic Exchange Residency, and the subsequent graphic work that went into Island to Island, and Three Words, and I wasn't able to take on a large unpaid project, I still wanted to collaborate, so I suggested we take the text from one of the essays on her blog and turn it into a comic. Sexual Textual Tennis is the result. Also available in paperback and as downloadable pdf.

New shoes

I am utterly chuffed for Peadar and Collette O' Donoghue whose labour of love The Poetry Bus is finally receiving some long overdue recognition with a terrific review of The Money Issue in The Irish Times. And my "New Shoes, Another Brick" gets generously mentioned, too - many thanks to Martina Evans, The Poetry Bus and The Irish Times.

Trees, words

Much gratitude to Nik Perring, author of Beautiful Trees (Roast Books), for inviting me on to his blog to talk about Three Words, which Nik had this to say about:

"It’s because the whole thing just drips with goodness – it’s the sort of thing that anyone and everyone should be excited about. It’s an excited thing". 

You can read the whole post here.

Threes fame

 

Click on cover to pre-order

You can now pre-order your copy of Three Words: An Anthology of Aotearoa / NZ Women's Comics at a special pre-order price of $45! Estimated delivery date: 3rd of March, 2016.

"A brilliant, collaborative, manifold project, 'Three Words' features all kinds of comics from all kinds of Kiwi women, a vast and varied representation of the beautiful diversity that makes up women's comics in New Zealand – a completely unprecedented collection." Beatnik

With comics by Adele Jackson, Alex McCrone, Alex Wild, Alice Tumblescribbleson, Alie Macpherson, Andra Jenkin, Bek Coogan, Anna Crichton, Beth Duckingmonster, Beth Sometimes, Carolyn Anderson, Celia Allison, Claire Harris, Dawn Tuffery, Demarnia Lloyd, Diane Rimmer, Elsie Joliffe, Emma Blackett, Erin Fae, Debra Boyask, Giselle Clarkson, Indira Neville, The Rabbid, Jem Yoshioka, Jessica Dew, Jessica Hansell, Joanna Anderson, Judy Darragh, Kayla Oliver, Kerry Ann Lee, Lauren Marriott, Margaret Silverwood, Olga Krause, Linda Lew, Lisa Noble, Liz Mathews, Loux McLellen, Lucy Meyle, Maiangi Waitai, Marina Williams, Mary Tamblyn, Mengzhu Fu, Mirranda Burton, Miriam Harris, Pritika Lal, Rachel Benefield, Rachel Shearer, Rae Joyce, Raewyn Alexander, Rebecca Hawkes, Renee Jones, Rosemary McLeod, Warsaw, Sally Bollinger, Sarah Laing, Sarah Lund, Sharon Murdoch, Sophie McMillan, Sophie Oiseau, Stella Corkery, Susan Rugg, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Suzanne Claessen and Zoe Colling.

And essays by Robyn Keneally, Ruth Boyask, Jem Yoshioka, Miriam Sapphira and Rae Joyce.

 

Please pre-order Three Words and support us making history!

Et al knowing

There's currently a really interesting and important display on level 2 of Auckland Central City Library, giving a detailed and engaging summary of Aotearoa/New Zealand's contraception history and abortion debate.

It's a subject area I covered in my Dundee International Book Prize finalist novel Some Things the English, so I was very interested to read about the developments, and lack of them, in the law and archives.

I was pleased to see the reproduction of some of the Broadsheet magazine illustrations, having only become aware of this amazing and influential publication during my co-editorship on the Three Words Aotearoa/NZ women's comics and cartoons anthology (to be published by Beatnik very soon).

There's also an accompanying blog - the most comprehensive and readable research resource I've seen on this topic - at Auckland Libraries' Heritage & Research site "Heritage et AL".

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