Writers and Readers 2012

Kim Scott, Juan Gabriel Vásquez: Social and Political Histories

Reviewed by Pip Adam

I’ve often contemplated the idea of imaginative or creative writing as political act. With this set of glasses on I’ve been interested to hear Denise Mina’s description of her move from academic feminist to crime writer and challenged by Jo Nesbo’s declaration that he has no political agenda.

This session explores the work of Kim Scott and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, or perhaps the writers themselves and their process, in relation to political and social histories. Tina Makereti begins her discussion with a question about how the writers see the relationship between their work and politics and social history. Vásquez says he has been obsessed with the place where individual destiny intersects with events. Traditionally this has been the place of capital ‘H’ history but he explains that it is different when a writer writes fiction. He says the sole reason for a novel is to tell the things that only that novel can tell. For a novel to be worthwhile, he believes, it must tell the reader things that can only thereafter be found in that novel. He says this is what makes the intersect between politics and fiction tricky to navigate because political diction is as opposed as you can get from the purpose of a novel. Political diction is incapable of illuminating because its sole aim is to tell you what you already know or to simplify what you don’t. There are no lessons in political language only a motivation to convince you – that is all that matters in political language.
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Writers and Readers 2012

Bill Manhire’s Poetry Masterclass: Convened By Chris Price

Reviewed by Pip Adam

I email my Jenny Erpenbeck post at about eight o’clock on Monday night. Then at three am I wake up – I forgot to spell check it. Now Helen, our editor, will know I don’t know how to spell ‘allegory’ and will think I think ‘Holocaust’ has two l’s. I get up and with a click of an icon all the things that made me look stupid and un-savy are gone. Tada! It’s so easy these days to make things look finished, done and kind of casually done, like they came out that way. The word processor has changed writing – or maybe re-writing. We don’t often share our common mistakes, our always can’ts or our works in progress. That’s why this session is so appealing. Not only would the three poets share unpublished work (the only writers I’ve seen do this at Writers and Readers Week so far) but they would offer it up for criticism, in front of 200 people none of whom were showing any of their work in return (this always seems like part of the contract in a workshop, ‘You show me yours, I’ll show you mine’). And in a move I see as equally courageous Bill Manhire would offer his feedback to the poems again, in front of people and then invite the audience to also have their say. It has something of the competitive cooking about, or maybe some kind of literary X-Factor.

There are plenty of Modern Letters alumni in the queue outside the session (there’s a queue for the session, it’s very popular). I have several conversations about why we’ve come and why some people feel a bit odd about being here. Voyeurism comes up but more than one person says how they really want to see the mechanics of it from a distance. When you’re in the workshop, it’s often hard to see what’s going on; you’re so ‘in the workshop’. For me, there’s the added benefit of reading Alistair Galbraith’s work and seeing him speak and read. I find his musical work really inspiring, I can’t wait to read his poetry.
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Writers and Readers 2012

Robert Shearman: Doctor Who and the Daleks

Reviewed by Bill Nelson

This scene is a bit rubbish Robert Shearman says, half-joking in the way that all jokes are only half-joking. He’s talking about a character scene he had to add to ‘Dalek’ to fit the overall story arc of the series, one where a new companion of the Doctor, Bruno Langley, is introduced. The most pathetic Doctor’s companion ever, Shearman says, most people don’t ever remember he existed. People around me laugh.

I suddenly realise I’ve never heard of Bruno Langley and have barely watched more than a handful of Doctor Who episodes since I was twelve. Why didn’t I think of this before? I’m not qualified to be here. I should at least know more of the actors who have played the Doctor, other than Tom Baker and that old guy with long white hair. What if someone asks me who’s the best or wants to talk about the different models of the Tardis? For the record Shearman’s favourite Doctor is Patrick Troughton which is greeted with nods of approval and one young guy who claps excitedly.

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Writers and Readers 2012

Juan Gabriel Vásquez: When Private Lives Meet Public Events

Reviewed by Lynn Davidson

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a critically acclaimed Colombian writer and translator with a heavyweight literary reputation and several significant awards to his name. He is charming, erudite, intelligent and politically aware and he does have lovely eyes but he’s not, for want of a better word, slick. He is focused and engaging when talking about Colombia, which he describes as an ‘amnesiac country’, and about the importance of novels that resist this tendency to give in to the ‘forces of forgetfulness’. His subject, he says, is the effect on private lives of public historical events. He is interested in that ‘crossroads’ moment when private lives meet public events. Vásquez has lived away from Colombia for many years, not just because of the violence (also called The Violence) and its drug wars fuelled by drug-consuming countries, but because ‘We Latin Americans believe we have to leave to write about our own country.’ He cites Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera written in Mexico as one example of this tradition. He lived in France, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris – as you do – and Belgium before moving to Spain.
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Writers and Readers 2012

Kelly Link: Fantasy & Magic Realism

Reviewed by Courtney Johnston

Kelly Link – bookseller, publisher, short story writer – has the most composed voice you have ever heard. Many of her short stories have a sardonic or headlong narrator, but on the stage, Link exudes calm. In conversation with the more spikily energetic Elizabeth Knox, Link comes across as thoughtful, friendly, quietly humorous; the kind of person you’d like to sit with at a table on the fringes of a big fancy event, spinning ridiculous back-stories for the diners at the tables around you.

The conversation gets started where good conversations so often do: a remembrance of influential childhood books. Link recalls being six or seven, and having her father reading her ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ while (perhaps simultaneously) her mother reads her C.S. Lewis. She came to love ghost stories, reading and reading into the night and becoming more and more scared, until she had to into her parents’ room: eventually, her mother tells her that she either has to stop reading them, or stop waking them up. She chooses to stop waking her parents up: the story she and Elizabeth Knox decide to ‘sacrifice’ to the audience (they agreed to pick one story and share its spoilers, thus saving all the rest) is itself a ghost story, about an aspiring teenage poet who disinters his dead girlfriend, in order to rescue the poems that he short-sightedly buried with her.
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Writers and Readers 2012

Jenny Erpenbeck: Europe’s Ghosts

Reviewed by Pip Adam

The Prologue to Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Visitation begins 24 thousand years ago and ends well into the future, in the time of desertification. From the Ice Age to the Dry Age. It’s a long span for two pages and it’s perfect. Erpenbeck reads from the Prologue, in German, so we can hear the rhythm. She started out working in opera. She comes from a family of writers and says she wanted to do something different, something that wasn’t sitting at a desk because that looked boring. She laughs now because she knows that sitting at a desk can be ‘the most adventurous place on earth’. She has always kept a diary and read and wonders if perhaps writing seemed too close in those days for her to consider it as a career. But opera needs more people than writing, more compromise, more money. So, when her opera studies were over she began to write what would become The Old Child. A book Karen Leeder describes as an allegory or fairytale about an awkward ugly girl who arrives in a town with a bucket claiming amnesia. The only thing she can say about herself is that she is 14 years old. Leeder explains that even in this first slim book you can see the resonant cartography of language no longer intact which returns again and again in Erpenbeck’s writing. Erpenbeck says when she has a question that can’t be answered by others she will sit down and write it. This is the difference she sees between her theatre writing process and her prose writing process.
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Writers and Readers 2012

Are We The Last Book Readers? Tilly Lloyd, Fergus Barrowman, Denise Mina

Reviewed by Sarah Lang

It was lunchtime, and a long line of silver-haired seniors snaked its way down the stairs at Downstage Theatre, out the door, down the street and around the corner. It was a full house. Clearly many people are interested in the session’s question: Are we the last book readers?

To answer this, Kathryn Ryan – her dulcet tones instantly recognisable from National Radio – chaired a panel that consists of a bookseller (Tilly Lloyd), a publisher (Fergus Barrowman) and a writer (Denise Mina).

It was part intellectual debate about the future of the book, part ode to the book itself. The speakers reminded us of why they – and we – like books. Paper books, that is. The texture. The smell. The coffee-stained, dog-eared pages. The spine. The heft. The inscriptions. The bendability. The clues to the personality of the reader. That feeling of satisfaction you get from looking at a shelf full of well-read books. The evidence of your story in the pages.
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Writers and Readers 2012

Fictional Life Stories and Biographies: Selina Hastings, Kate Grenville and Kim Scott

Reviewed by Sarah Lang

“I was born lazy,” said acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings as she told the story about the days she “dozed at the Sunday Telegraph” in newspaper’s halcyon era, with four writers (and a secretary) producing just one page of books copy each week. They worked only from 3-6pm – except on Mondays when they resented having to come in at 1pm.” “I’m one of the reasons Fleet St collapsed,” Hastings deadpanned with that trademark dry Brit wit. She got a lot of laughs, especially when she told the story of her up-and-down friendship with demanding ‘biographee’ Rosamund Lehmann. On deciding she now wanted her biography published while she was alive, so she could get lots of attention like her arch-rival, Lehmann “began to pursue me as if I was an errant lover”.

Hastings’ inspired turns of phrase made nonsense of her comment that she has no creative imagination. I don’t believe for a moment that she’s lazy either. Having heard her fascinating talk on Saturday, too, it’s clear she’s an inordinately hard worker when it comes to her biographies of Lehmann, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and most recently Somerset Maugham – even chasing Maugham’s papers to Australia.
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Writers and Readers 2012

Patrick Evans: Gifted – Imagining Janet Frame & Frank Sargeson

Reviewed by Megan Doyle Corcoran

Patrick Evans came to talk about Gifted. It’s a work of fiction. It’s a body of criticism. It’s the culmination of 40 years of reading, writing and thought about Janet Frame and her time with Frank Sargeson and Evans, its author, thinks the book might have finally cured his addiction to two of New Zealand’s literary icons. Maybe. At the very least, the best-seller and almost win for the Southeast-Asia and Pacific section of the 2011 Commonwealth Prize has “dried the well.”

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Writers and Readers 2012

Margaret Mahy: A Magical, Wacky, Whimsical World

Reviewed by Sarah Jane Parton

I was so excited about going to see Margaret Mahy as part of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts Writers and Readers Week. Will she wear her rainbow wig? Which stories will she read? How old is she now anyway? Is this the last time I’ll ever get to see her talk? I decided it was really, really important that my children get to encounter this incredible woman, this amazing storyteller, this librarian, this single mother of two, this veritable dynamo of Governor’s Bay…

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