Trendy But Casual

War & Peace: beginning

I read War & Peace when I was a teenager, but recall almost nothing of it. I dashed through it, finishing it in the waiting room of Accident and Emergency in Auckland Hospital. (I can’t remember why I was there – hand, foot, one of the many injuries in my accident-prone life. Now I’m re-reading it again, slowly. I’ve read the first hundred pages so far, and need three bookmarks: one for my place, one for the references at the end, and one for the cast list at the beginning.

When I started, I wrote a close reading of the first page, as an exercise and to make myself linger.

The novel begins in French, and with dialogue – someone is addressing a person of stature (mon prince), and talking politics. There’s mention of Genoa and Lucca, of the Bonaparte family, of the Antichrist – implicitly Napoleon. So we begin with talk of la guerre in the first paragraph. But the conversation is informal, among intimates. The first words of the novel are Eh bien – or ‘well now’ – and by the end of the paragraph the speaker is using Russian rather than French to wish the prince ‘good evening, good evening’, and asking him to ‘sit down’. This is talk of war rather than war itself, and the news is about places far away, in Italy rather than Russia. But a novel that has announced its interest in war in its own title has begun the way it means to go on.

This is drawing room talk, as we learn in the next paragraph. The speaker is Annette (Anna Pavlovna) Scherer, host of a soirée. The person to whom she’s speaking is the first guest to arrive, Prince Vassily. It’s July 1805, we’re told directly. So we know, from the perspective of history, that there’s still ten years of Napoleon ahead.

We also know that we’re hearing from members of the aristocracy. Characterisation of the two relates largely to status. Annette is ‘maid of honour and intimate of the empress’. She’s coughing because she has the grippe – ‘a new word then, used only by rare people.’ Not used rarely, but ‘by rare people’, again suggesting elite status. She’s invited guests by sending notes ‘with a red-liveried footman’. Red is a regal colour, an imperial colour; it’s bold and hard to miss. She employs footmen in livery, so she is wealthy. The notes only went out that morning, but there seems no doubt that guests will come. So she’s high-status enough to summon people like Prince Vassily. He is described in this paragraph as ‘important and high-ranking’.

We’re given the note she sent in full. It’s in French, the language of society people. The notes are to Monsieur le comte (or mon prince), only high-ranking people like Prince Vassily. It’s casual to the point of being disingenuous. Annette tells the guests to come if they have nothing better to do, and calls herself une pauvre malade – a poor sick woman, asking for their pity and indulgence.

The note tells is that the soirée is scheduled between seven and 10. I don’t know if that’s after dinner, or if guests are expected to come before or after their dinner. It’s July, so it’s summer and light outside. What time did ‘high-ranking’ people eat dinner or supper then?

I look at Tolstoy’s diaries online to see if I can get a clue, and I’m instantly distracted by lines like ‘Got up late. Turgenev is a bore’ and ‘Spent all evening chasing after wenches.’ It’s also confusing because dinner sounds as though it was a late lunch, followed by tea and supper. So maybe everyone has eaten their big meal of the day, and a tea or supper can be fitted in around a soirée.  Elsewhere in his diaries I read that Tolstoy goes out for supper at nine PM. On another day he says it’s 10 PM and he plans to have supper then go to bed.

Annette and Prince Vassily are invented characters, but the empress Maria Feodorovna is not. She is the former Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, second wife of Tsar Paul I. She married Paul the month before her 17^th birthday, chosen as his bride by her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great. Paul was still the crown prince then, and had only been a widower for six months. In July 1805 Maria Feodorovna is 44 years old and a dowager empress. Her husband, Tsar for only four years, was assassinated in 1801. Her son, Tsar Alexander I, is 27 years old, and she insists on taking precedence over his wife, so Maria Feodorovna is the most important and powerful woman in Russia.

Prince Vassily is unfazed by Annette’s welcoming diatribe. Dieu, quelle virulente sortie! he says. ‘God, what a violent outburst!’ For him we get no colours, just the most basic description. ‘He was wearing an embroidered court uniform, stockings, shoes and stars’. Are the stars medals? I’m guessing that the mention of stockings and shoes means Prince Vassily is wearing dress clothes rather than boots, or that those items are part of formal court attire. He’s come over in his work clothes, as it were, and perhaps he’s a man who never stops working, or working the room.

The status of the Prince is emphasised again: he is ‘a significant man who has grown old in society and at court’. We also learn a little of his character. He is ‘not ruffled in the least’ by Annette’s heated greeting. He speaks in ‘quiet, patronising intonations’, suggesting a superiority or arrogance of manner and attitude. And he speaks ‘refined French’ and the narrator tells us that this generation – ‘our grandparents’ – ‘not only spoke but thought’ in refined French. At this time, in this society, French is the status language, the natural language for people of power and influence. French culture is superior to Russian. What implications does this have for a country about to go to war with France? Are the Russian nobility clinging to the culture of pre-Revolutionary France, when aristocrats ruled – as they still do in Russia in 1805 – and the rise of a man like Napoleon would be unthinkable?

So, that’s my close reading of page one. Now I’ve read on, I’m interested to see how Tolstoy keeps expanding the circles, from these initial two people to the larger number that attend the soirée, and then to other locations – initially just in St Petersburg, the Imperial capital, then in Moscow, the old capital, and then in estates in the countryside. More and more people are drawn in, and distinctions are made between those Russians who speak French more fluently than their native language (like Prince Ippolit) and those who don’t understand French at all (his footman).

I’m also taken with the Russian aristocracy’s horrified discussions of the French revolution, a recent memory in 1805, because Tolstoy is writing this in the 1860s, just after the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II (and before Alexander’s assassination by a bomber in 1881). Russia’s own revolution, which will have much larger consequences for the world than the French revolution, is only 50 years away – closer to Tolstoy in time than the French Revolution.

He lived long enough to see the first attempt at revolution in Russia, in 1905 – a century after the setting of War and Peace’s opening chapter. But Tolstoy died in 1910, so he didn’t live to see the destruction of Imperial Russia, and of the world of ‘our grandparents’. By then he was a supporter of pacifist anarchist thought, an opponent of the Tsar’s regime, and determined to renounce his own inheritance of feudal privilege. A ‘landlord obsessed with Christ,’ Lenin said of him in 1908, because Tolstoy preferred peace to war.

 More on the novel as I read on.

 

 

 

 

On Māori writing

Below is the unedited version of my essay published on the Spinoff in July, with some additions written after its publication. It was commissioned as a review but – inspired by Witi Ihimaera’s discursive approach in his memoir, Māori Boy - I approached it as an essay in which I could continue the kōrero begun by Tina Makereti in her excellent Auckland Writers Festival lecture about what kind of house our literature inhabits, and by Kelly Ana Morey in her plaintive essay last month on being a Māori writer who defies expectations, and how you can never really go home - or leave home.

Nobody likes a Māori writer.

First of all, nobody knows who we are. Nobody knows the names of any writers, apart from the ones with movies [see: Frame, Ihimaera, Duff, Wendt]. This is really our fault. We have written books that no one has made into a movie.

Second: we have disguised ourselves with Pākehā names. Just look at Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, James George, Robert Sullivan, Kelly Ana Morey, Nic Low, David Geary. Some Pacific Island writers do this as well (Albert Wendt, Gina Cole, Victor Rodger). Some indigenous writers from Australia do it (Anita Heiss, Alexis Wright, Bruce Pascoe); so do some indigenous writers from North America (Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Drew Hayden Taylor). Nobody knows that surnames tend to be a colonial construct. Witi Ihimaera’s family name is Smiler, which is a transliteration of Ihimaera, which is a translation of Ishmael, as in the Biblical figure.

My nom de Pākehā is Paula Morris. Morris is my paternal great-grandfather’s name. He was a ship’s cook who spent about a decade in Auckland around the turn of the twentieth-century. He said he was from London. He married my great-grandmother, Sarah Annie Wyatt, had two sons with her, then seems to have left the country, never to be seen again. I wrote about this in an essay called “Greys Avenue” published in Thom Conroy’s Home anthology, and more recently in Metro magazine.

On the other side of my father’s family, my great-grandfather didn’t have a last name. He was Kiri, son of Rahui Te Kiri and Tenetahi, grandson of Ngāti Wai rangatira Te Kiri. By the 1890s, Kiri had adopted a surname: Paraone, a transliteration of Brown. So my grandmother was Heni Te Kiri Paraone, known to some people as Jane Brown, though my grandfather, Alf Morris, always called her Heni.

The important name in our family is Kiri. This was my late father’s first name, and the middle name of my aunt, brother and numerous cousins. I’m Paula Jane Kiri, named for my grandmother. She was the mātāmua (oldest child), and grew up in Rahui and Tenetahi’s house – now the site of our marae –  singing, playing the piano, riding horses. My father, her only son and the oldest boy of his generation, got special treatment on Christmas visits to Pākiri (where he was born), because of his name.

I’m telling you this because too many people in New Zealand still don’t understand that there’s much, much more to a writer’s name – stories, histories, alliances, whakapapa – than meets the eye. When these people read something we’ve published on the Internet (never in a book, because nobody reads these: see above), they roar with outrage.

Although they appear to have access to the Internet, they don’t know how to use a search engine. The last time I published an essay on the Spinoff, the first wave of roaring-with-outragers, I’m told, denounced me for being a Pākehā of unknown provenance and skills. If they had typed my name into a search engine, they would have seen my own web site, my bio on the University of Auckland site, my bio on the NZ Book Council site, and then my Wikipedia entry.

But nobody reads us, or reads about us. They do not waste time looking us up online. They do not buy our books unless we’ve been shortlisted for prizes overseas. Even then, they’d rather wait for the movie, or for the next flurry of self-righteous rage on social media. They would rather see us as Pākehā, because it’s easier – to read us, to misread us, to dismiss us.

*

It’s unsurprising that nobody likes us. We stake a claim in a country that prefers to believe that our history started in the nineteenth century, and that our literature began and ended with Katherine Mansfield. These days, our faces are too pale and our names are too Pākehā.

Kei Miller, the Jamaican-born poet and novelist, says that “racism’s most enduring success is widespread belief in a category called ‘race’.” This is true in New Zealand. To far too many people, being Māori isn’t about heritage and whakapapa. It’s about racial make-up: a half this, a quarter that, a percentage of ‘blood’. In the past in the US, terms were devised to express this blood mix: mulatto, quadroon, octoroon. Percentages mattered, because they defined who was white or black under the law, and therefore who could use a certain water fountain or bus seat, who could marry a person of a different race.

When you denigrate us as “only an eighth Māori”, say, you strip away our history and family, a vast cultural inheritance unique to this country, and see us simply as diluted racial cocktails. We’re just not Māori enough to have any claim on our pasts, because you see the past as gone. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” It’s certainly not dead in traditional Māori culture, where the ancestors wait ahead of us, not just behind us.

This notion, by the way, informed the structure of my first novel, Queen of Beauty, in which the past and present speak to each other, sections out of chronological order juxtaposed to position ancestors ahead as well as behind the protagonist and the novel’s present action. No reviewer mentioned this. In New Zealand Books, David Cohen reviewed my long essay On Coming Home (BWB 2015) without once mentioning the word Māori or discussing the Māori heritage explored in the book. His only points of comparison for my work were white men, George Orwell and Martin Edmond. Although by 2015 I’d published four novels – one of which, Rangatira, won the fiction prizes at both the NZ Post Book Awards and the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards – and a collection of short stories, as well as four YA novels, Cohen had not read any of them.

Remember: nobody knows who we are.

Remember: we have disguised ourselves with Pākehā names.

Remember: they would rather see us as Pākeha, because it’s easier.

In 2008, in the same journal, Laura Kroestch – a Canadian who now directs the writers’ festival in Adelaide – reviewed Speaking for Themselves: Ex-pats Have Their Say, a book of interviews by Jan Morgan. She had this to say about Māori heritage:

“All of the writers talk about how New Zealand has changed, and one of the more interesting aspects of that change is the wish to be associated in some way with the tangata whenua, an association which represents a somehow more New Zealand way of being a New Zealander. For instance, I now know that Peter Gordon is 1/36 Maori, Paula Morris’ father was part-Maori, Rena Owen is half, and Alannah Currie had a Maori family next door. Teddy Tahu Rhodes sports a Maori tattoo because ‘Maori and Pacific Islander culture is so beautiful’, and Temuera Morrison is ‘brown white’ (part Irish/Scottish and part Maori), ‘but the Maori side gets Tem’s full attention.’

“Wanting to be Maori is great, but in the context of this book it seems yet another way to idealise a place that – unless I’ve missed a major cultural shift – is still busy trying to sort out its race relations.”

Where to begin with this? I know that 2008 is almost a decade ago, and maybe such derogatory comments wouldn’t be written – or published – now. But I remember reading it at the time and feeling horrified. By definition, tangata whenua are, indeed, the most ‘New Zealand’ of New Zealanders. Alannah Currie could learn from the Māori family next door the way I learned from the Dutch family across the road: it doesn’t mean we were aspiring to or idealising something we’re not. Teddy Tahu Rhodes can have a Māori tattoo without ‘wanting to be Māori’: maybe he just wants the design to be indigenous rather than imported.

I don’t call my father part-Māori, and I don’t call myself that either. Our heritage is Māori and English, with the persistent rumour of Portuguese in the whakapapa as well. We never talked percentages – just as the Queen, I imagine, doesn’t interrogate her own percentage of German ‘blood’ – because we don’t observe Blood Quantum policies in New Zealand or the UK.

Remember: “wanting to be Māori is great, but …”

Remember: we may not be Māori enough.

Implicit in Kroetsch’s review is the Pākehā reader. The playwright Victor Rodger has complained about this:

“I remember one of the first moments I put my hands on my hips was when I read a review of Witi Ihimaera’s book The Matriarch. The Pākehā reviewer was saying: ‘We lose so much because we don’t understand the language.’ And I was like: ‘Well, who is this we? This we does not include me. Who are you talking to?’”

Reviewers like Kroestch and Cohen would rather see us as Pākehā. The Māori stuff is a distraction. After reading my Spinoff essay, Cohen wrote this on social media: “The brief [of the review in New Zealand Books] was not to read your other work. Or indeed to focus on ethnicity as such. Everybody’s ‘ethnic,’ when you get down to it, and that wasn’t the over-riding theme of the essay of yours that I was invited to offer a few thoughts on.”

Everybody is ethnic. Or, who do you Māori think you are? 

In a further comment he added: “Perhaps if you weren’t so thin-skinned, you would see that the piece attempted to be fair. And perhaps if you hadn’t spent most of your adult life away from New Zealand--doing fine things, no doubt--you wouldn’t be so insistent on waving the identity flag around in order to establish your local bona fides.”

Waving the identity flag. Let that sink in for a moment.

Actually, I don’t need to ‘establish … local bona fides’. I was born and raised in Auckland. I whakapapa back to the Tainui and Moekaraka waka. I’m tangata whenua and this is my turangawaewae: I don’t need a flag of any kind.

Junot Diaz discusses attitudes like Cohen’s in a piece on his experience in an MFA workshop: “Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.” He talks about a “lack of awareness of the lens of race, the vast silence on these matters.”

Not a flag, but a lens. Not waving, seeing.

*

Some people read my Spinoff essay and were affronted. Affront is why the Internet was invented, but anyway: they countered that they loved Māori writers.

Do they?

Of course, this essay’s opening is both hyperbolic and facetious. (Trigger warning: this essay may contain irony.) But even many professed supporters of Māori writers only support certain kaupapa, certain mahi. I’ve been interviewed about my work with the not-Māori-enough books omitted from the conversation. The supporters of Māori writing are not always supportive of Māori writers themselves if they stray from approved subject matter.

An example: the review of Ngā Hau e Wha: Stories on the Four Winds for the Landfall Review Online.

Ngā Hau e Wha is a short-story anthology edited by Huia founders Robyn and Brian Bargh and published in 2016. It featured work by contemporary Māori writers associated with the publisher, including some – like me – helped along the way by Huia’s anthologies. The book also featured work by Albert Wendt, an important figure in Huia history. Reviewer Vaughan Rapatahana writes that he “initially struggled to find an overarching thread to this compilation, given that the collection is of Huia-mandated tall-tale-tellers. There is a vast array of styles and content among these 20 anecdotes authored by 18 writers.”

I don’t know about the other writers, but I didn’t write an “anecdote” or a “tall tale”. I wrote a 3500-word short story. (It’s re-printed in my new collection of stories and essays, False River.) And in an anthology that brings together the four winds – i.e. writers of different backgrounds, experiences, styles – within contemporary Māori fiction, shouldn’t readers expect a “vast array”?

One of Rapatahana’s objections was about how far those winds seem to blow. “Many tales,” he wrote, “actually have little to do with te ao Māori anyway – indeed three are European fairy tales, as in being set in Europe: Tina Makereti’s ‘Frau Amsel’s Cupboard’, Paula Morris’s ‘Three Princesses’, and the more contemporary ‘Trust’ by Mark Sweet.”

While it’s true that these three stories are set in Europe, none of us wrote European fairy tales. My story’s protagonist is a Māori man who lives in Herne Bay and is on business in Estonia. The story-within-the-story is about a Māori traveller turning up – and turning heads – in medieval Estonia. Mark Sweet’s story ‘Trust’ begins with a Māori guy getting beaten up – and derided as a “Paki queer” – by police in Glasgow.

Tina Makereti’s story explores cross-cultural resonances when a compromised and desperate German woman in wartime encounters hidden treasures purloined from New Guinea in a museum. This work of fiction was written during, and responding to, Makereti’s 2012 residency in the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt.

Nothing “to do with te ao Māori”, I guess, in the sense of tikanga and te reo, but stories by Māori writers, who may or may not understand the finer points of tikanga or be fluent in te reo. We should have stayed home, apparently; we should have stuck to the tale or the anecdote or the yarn, forms that emerge from an oral tradition.

Later in the review Rapatahana praises two other stories because:

they are Māori in ethos; that is, they inculcate a specifically Māori Weltanschauung or Worldview – which, as noted earlier, is conspicuously lacking in several other stories. This last point is not a criticism, by the way. It is just that in a collection of work predominantly by Māori, one would think there would be he atu arotahi i runga i Māori ora, nē rā? [more focus on Māori lives, eh?]

Even stories like mine or Mark Sweet’s, with Māori protagonists, are not Māori enough: our Māori characters are not living ‘Māori lives’. And Tina Makereti’s subtle and moving story, in which a European woman experiences a moment of kinship with Melanesian women, gaining insight into how history and culture, the heritage of a family, sings in its household objects, is profoundly Māori in its take on whakapapa and taonga.

Not Māori enough for Pākehā, not Māori enough for Māori. This may be why writers like Kelly Ana Morey declares: “I can’t be the ‘Māori’ writer people want me to be, all I can be is myself. Mining the Māori world for material would somehow feel like an act of theft because my knowledge and connection feel so slight and arbitrary. This is why I don’t write from the Māori perspective all that often in my fiction, and if I do those characters tend to be quarter-cast who are like me a little disconnected. They operate as individuals rather than cultural representatives.”

We frighten away our own; we tell them they are “quarter-cast”, not a whole within any culture, any heritage. We accuse them of theft, as though they’re holding up a dairy. We’re at the sad point in New Zealand literature where a writer feels she has to apologise that her fictional characters “operate as individuals”.

*

Nobody likes a Māori writer with too pale a face and too culturally unrepresentative a book, but this didn’t stop Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti – defiant, insolent, gleeful? – waving a [black] identity flag, as some would see it, or maybe re-training the lens in a different direction.

Black Marks on the White Page is an “Oceanic” anthology: “the glorious, painful, sharp and funny stories of Māori and Pasifika writers from all over the world, and one guest Aboriginal writer whose presence asks us to rethink the boundaries we have set up between ourselves and our neighbours, literal and figurative”. In ‘Whakapapa of a Wallpaper’, Ihimaera’s ‘chimerical fiction’ about Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected], he laments the colonisation and division of the Pacific, and the way colonisers “variously named our dismembered parts Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Austronesia.”

This new anthology is an act of re-assembly, and of re-orientation. Here Māori writers are not token ‘exotic’ inclusions in a NZ-lit book; nor are we shuffled together in a mainly Māori pack, to be scrutinised for sufficient levels of tikanga. In Black Marks we join the other Pacific pieces, the part this-and-thats, the colonised, the diasporic, the bearers of misleading names and addresses; we join the writers who explore mythic pasts, and those who voyage into the future, imagining new worlds. The Pacific is not a rim: it’s a continent fervid with creativity, a brilliant blue planet.

Ihimaera and Makereti contend that the work in Black Marks “embodies the disruptive act that Māori, Pasifika and Aboriginal writing constitutes in the worldwide literary landscape – still the page is white, and still the marks we make upon it are radical acts of transgression, of forcing others to see us in all our complexity and wonder.”

If you doubt that the page is still white, read the text of Makereti’s Auckland Writers Festival lecture and the statistics she cites on how few books by Māori and Pasifika writers are published.

Their introduction to Black Marks is a gauntlet thrown to the “Māori in ethos” crowd. There are too many preconceptions, the editors argue, about writers from the Pacific, as there are for writers of colour and Indigenous writers: who we should be and how we should write are too prescribed.

“Even though we sometimes bemoan the scarcity of an Oceanic fiction that looks like us, smells like us, walks like us and therefore must be us, none of us should be constrained by any sense of what we’re supposed to look or sound like. Creativity doesn’t live there. There must be no compulsion to write in any particular way about any particular topics, outside of the writer’s own creative project.”

Does this need to be said – here, now, in 2017? Yes, while we still have reviewers – and readers – who are only comfortable reading in one world, and can’t make the imaginative leap into other contexts and experiences. Reviewers who see a flag rather than a lens.

Ihimaera and Makereti present the anthology as a talanoa, which is a storytelling as well as a conversation. Its original kaupapa, as a collection of short fiction, broadened and transformed as work flowed in: there are novel excerpts here, published or in-progress, from Tusiata Avia, Alexis Wright, Sia Figiel, Déwé Gorodé, and Anya Ngawhare; an extract from Albert Wendt’s novel-in-verse The Adventures of Vela; a black-out poem from Selina Tusitala Marsh; and an essay of mine – on a trip to Mississippi, the death of Robert Johnson and the murder of Emmett Till – that poses as a story. The line-break marks on Courtney Sina Meredith’s winsome, sly story ‘The Coconut King’ suggests it could be read as a prose poem.

David Geary’s #WATCHLIST reflects his background as a dramatist: much of the piece would work as a play, with its other elements as visual counterpoint; Serie Barford’s ‘After the Tsunami’ also works as a short dramatic monologue. Readers seeking yarns, anecdotes or tall tales may be perplexed by formal experimentation like Geary’s, or Cassandra Barnett’s ‘Pitter, patter, Papatūānuku’.

Admirers of realism will swoon at the understated, elegant story telling of Patricia Grace (‘Matariki All-Stars) and Kelly Ana Morey (‘Poor Man’s Orange’); they may read Mary Rokonadravu’s ‘Famished Eels’ and ‘Sepia’ and wonder why her work is only available in journals and anthologies rather than her own collection – though ‘Famished Eels’, like Tina Makereti’s ‘Black Milk’, also included here, were both finalists in the Commonwealth Writers story prize. Some names – Grace, Ihimaera, Wendt – are well-known to New Zealand readers, but the selection here isn’t predictable, and includes new voices like Gina Cole, and newish ones like Nic Low.

Remember: nobody knows who we are.

Black Marks is handsome in hardback, dressed in the splendour of James Ormsby’s bold cover illustration (the symbolism explained on the inner sleeve), and features four-colour art by Pati Solomona Tyrell, Shane Hansen, Rosanna Raymond, Robert Jahnke, Cerisse Palalagi, Lisa Reihana and Yuki Kihara.

Despite the book’s flash production: it’s no glib marketing exercise. It’s an intelligent and lively anthology that explores the formal possibilities of story, its slippery nature, its nerve. “I am five the year my father tells me how to tell a story,” says the narrator of ‘Famished Eels’. “Always make room for uncertainty, he says. Don’t say someone said this or said that. Don’t ever be sure. Just walking from this kitchen to the backyard you will lose what I have just told you. Make room for that.”

Black Marks on a White Page is a roomy and discursive book, diverse in style and subject matter, big on ambition and scope. Maybe it’s the most subversive coffee table book of the year. Maybe it’s the beginning of a new way of framing and reading Māori writers, in a larger context that allows us to escape the confines of other people’s preconceptions and percentages.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country,” declared Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” He vowed “to try to fly by those nets”. We should try as well.

*

I’ll finish with a plea – no, a challenge. I sit in lots of meetings where people – writers, students, lit-biz professionals, institutional reps, policy makers, hui organisers – lament the fact that so few Māori writers are published and that sales figures for Māori writers, like many New Zealand authors, are small.

My question: how many books by Māori writers have you bought this year? Did you buy Apirana Taylor’s novel? Did you buy Black Marks on the White Page? Did you buy Ngā Hau e Wha: Stories on the Four Winds? Did you buy Sleeps Standing/Moētu by Witi Ihimaera with a superb side-by-side te reo translation by Hemi Kelly? Did you buy the new issue of the Māori literary journal Ora Nui? Did you buy the Te Kaihanga Māpere picture book by Sacha Cotter, translated by Kawata Teepa and illustrated by Josh Morgan, winner of Te Kura Pounamu Award at this year’s CYA Book Awards?

If you can’t afford to buy books, did you take one of these titles out of the library, or ask for it to be ordered? Would you ask someone to buy you a copy for Christmas? Would you ask someone to buy a copy and donate it to a school library?

If you’re a writer whose work was featured in one of the anthologies, did you attend one of the launches? Did you bring along friends and whanau to help celebrate the sheer force of will that goes into producing these books? Did you promote the book on social media or to your networks? Did you tell your local school about it so the book might be bought as a resource for students?

If you think of yourself as someone who likes Māori writers, will you buy one of these books at your local book shop and give it to someone else, to help develop new audiences?

Spread the word, spread the love, spread the like. As Tina Makereti said in her lecture, we get the House of Literature we deserve, the one we care enough to build.

 

Heroics

 

Tomorrow (Sunday 10th September) I'm going to be interviewing Witi Ihimaera, Tina Makereti and Hemi Kelly at the Going West Festival in Auckland: we're talking about their recent collaborations on Black Marks on The White Page and Sleeps Standing. The latter is a novella - written in English by Ihimaera and translated into te reo Māori by Hemi Kelly - about the battle of Orakau in 1864, and the book includes historical testimony from some of the Māori who fought there.

Yesterday I realised that my story 'Heroics' - the first short story I published in New Zealand, back in 2000 - includes a section on Orakau. It was published in the journal JAAM. I didn't include it in my collection, Forbidden Cities, so these days it's even more obscure than the rest of my early work.

So here it is - very short, and in three parts. 

HEROICS

by Paula Morris

I

At Orakau we built a pa on a low hill surrounded by peach trees and fields dusty with maize. We raised high walls and dug deep trenches. Rewi led us there, and promised to lead us out.

The soldiers came before we were finished and bombarded us with their cannons and grenades. The air was filled with smoke and the sound of women wailing. The guns roared for two days, but the fortifications stood. Soldiers poured into our trenches and we picked them off like fish washed onto the beach in a storm. But they were ten times our strength and the pa was encircled.

By the third day, the water was gone. There was nothing to eat but raw kumara. We had no ammunition for our rifles except for peach-stones and pellets made of wood.

The General stopped the shooting and sent a man forward to speak to us. He sounded hoarse from the smoke and the noise of the guns. He shouted over the ramparts, telling us that the women could leave. The women chose to stay.

The General called on us all to surrender. The voice of his interpreter rose up, saying we could leave with dignity.

We chose to stay.

Rewi shouted back to him: Ka whawhai tonu ki a koe - Ake! Ake! Ake!

The General’s interpreter told the soldiers that we would fight on forever, forever, forever.

There was a lull, because we had no more bullets and the soldiers had lost spirit. They didn’t want to keep fighting because they thought the battle was won. They didn’t want to lie in the dirt for another night, or scramble into our trenches to be clubbed to death or pelted with rocks by our children.

Rewi summoned us together. He told us to leave as we had arrived, free and united. In one surge we poured through a breach in the pa and down the hill, three tribes moving as one wave to where the soldiers lay dribbled around the edge of the swamp. They watched us with open mouths before lifting their guns, as though they couldn’t believe their eyes.

Half of our people were mowed down in the fire. Shots toppled many of the women face first into the buffalo grass, their howls still swirling in the air. People fell like sticks around me. Those of us still running waded into the swamp where thickets of mangroves blocked the bullets. The spirits of the dead journeyed north to the Cape, where the oceans meet, and sprang light-hearted into the other world. The living crossed the Puniu River with Rewi and found cover in the hills.

This is how we gave up the fight without surrender. This is how we left them nothing but an empty fort and dead bodies scattered like rushes drying in the hot sun. The last thing those soldiers saw were our buttocks, black with mud, slipping from their grasp like eels through the mangroves.

II

Passengers on the ferry Kawau witnessed a daring rescue one December afternoon in 1922, when young Mr. Frank Cummings, of Mt Eden, dived overboard to save a drowning man. The incident occurred around tea time on a Friday, when the ferry, headed for Warkworth and Leigh, was packed with people returning home from Christmas shopping in Auckland.

The Leigh Scout Troop, on its way back from camp, took credit for raising the alarm when a fellow passenger, later identified as Mr. Jack Renwick, of Whangarei, plummeted into the Hauraki Gulf three hours out from Auckland.

“I heard the boys shouting and told them to put a sock in it,” said scout leader Edward Clay. “They’d been carrying on all day.”

Responding to the shout of “Man overboard,” Mr. Cummings stripped off his jacket and shoes and, with no thought for personal safety, executed a perfect dive from the Kawau’s crowded deck. He reached Mr. Renwick in half a dozen strokes and dragged him back to the ferry, where the drowning man was hauled to safety by members of the crew.

Miss Virginia Hepa, a visitor from Te Awamutu, and her cousin Tahupotiki Andrews, of no fixed abode, were riding horses down to the dock at Leigh Harbor when the Kawau pulled in.

“Didn’t see it,” she said, pulling her cardigan tight around slim shoulders. “That water must have been pretty chilly.”

Captain Jim Sinclair, skipper of the Kawau, shook Mr. Cummings’ hand after the boat docked at Leigh. “Very brave,” he said, lighting his eighteenth cigarette of the day. “I would’ve let the bugger drown.”

A rumored shark sighting near Little Barrier Island, alleged by Mrs. Beryl Gloucester, whose son Vincent recently dissected a baby hammerhead washed up on Matakana beach, was later discredited.

Mr. Renwick was neither relieved nor grateful to be saved, and was led from the scene by the Wellsford police screaming his intention of flinging himself from the nearest bluff the following Saturday. Miss Hepa, by contrast, thought Mr. Cummings looked quite dashing in his wet shirt and turn-ups, and offered him a drink from her cousin’s hip flask. Mr. Cummings declined, but boldly invited Miss Hepa to the tennis club dance next weekend, an offer she accepted with alacrity.

After three cheers and a round of “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” from onlookers, Mr. Cummings was handed his jacket and shoes, and given a ride home in the greengrocer’s van. It was only after he had a hot bath and a cup of tea that Mr. Cummings checked his jacket pockets and discovered that, at some point during the watery rescue, his wallet had been stolen.

 

III

When I was a kid, I spent every summer at my auntie’s farm. There were three cousins who lived there all year round, and the rest of us traveled up from the city in the holidays. All the boys slept in one room. The rule was first up, best dressed.

Auntie’s real husband had run off to the Waikato with a fruitpicker, but we called the man who lived there Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben had a vegetable patch, which he said was a Victory Garden, even though he only grew kumara and tomatoes. The tomato plants were always getting smashed during our cricket games. He’d chase us off into the next paddock, but we liked the back garden best for cricket; the grass was shortest, and the fence stopped the balls from bouncing into cow pats.

When he wasn’t bent double over his garden, Uncle Ben’s job was to kill chickens for meals. Tama, my eldest cousin, had to catch the chicken first. He was a rugby player and took this responsibility pretty seriously, like he was facing a scrum of Springboks instead of a yard of twittering chooks.

After Uncle Ben swung the chicken onto a pine stump and whacked off its head with an ax, he’d lose his grip on it. The chicken would slither off the block and sprint away, spurting blood and flailing its wings. Someone had to catch the chicken before it ripped itself to shreds on the fence or got so bruised it was inedible. The first summer I spent there I was only six, too small to run after it. But the next year my turn came.

“One of you boys—get a move on!” Uncle Ben shouted, wiping his ax off with a tea towel. Tama stood smirking, arms folded, propped up against the outhouse.

“Eru,” he said, gesturing towards me with his head. “If he’s not a chicken himself.”

Everyone snickered, and I felt my face sizzle. Tama thought he was pretty smart, just because he was starting grammar school after the holidays. But I wasn’t afraid of a chicken, even if it spouted blood like a killer whale. I took off after that chook as fast as I could.

Some chickens get confused and eddy around in circles; this one raced off in a straight line. It ran smack into the shed and bounced off again. The other boys howled from the back steps, telling me to head the chicken off on the far side of the shed. I panted around the back and saw the chicken slam off a fence post. One of its wings was hanging off, and it had left a bloody trail of feathers all along the barbed wire fence.

I threw myself onto it with all my might, grabbing its twitching wings with both hands. The chicken’s blood squirted up into the air. I opened my mouth to yell for Uncle Ben and got a gullet full of gore.

“Not bad,” said Tama, and helped me wash off my hands and face with the garden hose.

Nowadays I spend summer holidays in Australia, over on the Gold Coast. A few years ago, I was flying there with my family for a few weeks after Christmas. Everyone else on the plane was served Chicken Kiev for dinner, but I haven’t touched chicken for years. I’d ordered a special meal, and knew it was the right one when the steward put the tray down in front of me. On the paper someone had scrawled: “No Chook.”

 

 

About my father

This is a slightly expanded version of the eulogy for my father that I gave at the Pākehā (European) funeral on Saturday morning in Auckland, before we drove him to Omaha marae in Leigh for the Māori rituals. We spent Saturday night at the marae alongside him, surrounded by cousins, telling stories and singing songs and receiving visitors. At six on Sunday morning Matthew, my nephew, and my brother, Stephen, got up to help dig the grave, part of a group led by our cousin Ben Haddon. It took them more than three hours. It was a sunny morning. Out in Leigh harbour, fishermen were pulling up crayfish pots.

After the service in the marae it was established that the six men carrying the coffin – Matthew; Stephen; Stephen Hill, my brother-in-law; Tom; and our friends Tony Pigou and Owen Scott – would not be able to carry the big tree that was my father all the way down the long rocky road to the urupā. So we put him in the back of a ute. My sister sat in the front and my brother and I rode in the back, hanging on to the coffin in case it slid around. (It did a little, and we were powerless to stop it.) ‘Kiri’s gun carriage,’ one of my cousins said, and we all knew he would have liked that. My brother and I felt like kids again, riding with the hay bales on Guy Fawkes night, out by the fireworks factory on McLeod Road.

After the coffin was lowered into the fern-lined grave, we threw in sand from Pakiri beach, brought up that morning by our Gossage cousins. Then we left my father there in the urupā, near our grandparents, Jane Te Kiri and Alf; our great-grandparents, Te Kiri and Tihoi (Grace); and our great-great- grandparents, Rahui Te Kiri and Tenetahi. Across Leigh harbour there’s another old cemetery, the Pākehā one, where many of my father’s Wyatt relatives are buried. Although he lived most of his life in Auckland, in death he returned home.

Eulogy:

I’m Paula Jane Kiri Morris, or – as my father used to call me when I was a child – Paula Jane Kiri Frederick Morris. He had a very silly sense of humour. In the car he would burst into song with ‘Can I Canoe You Up the River’ or ‘Abba Dabba Honeymoon.’ He would watch Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones with me and my brother. He would even watch some of Radio With Pictures with us, but mainly that was so he could say ‘what a load of rubbish.’

He was funny and he was kind. When we were small, he let us climb all over him. He’d swing us high in the air. He’d let me stand on his feet so we could dance together. In the sea, on summer holidays, he’d take my hand, and Stephen’s hand, and lift us high above the waves, so we felt as though we were flying. In the Winter Gardens, he’d take the short cut path so he could rush out shouting ‘I am the wolf!’ He taught us how to swim, how to row in the sea, and how to drive. He’d take us out in yachts whenever he could, especially the two-person catamarans you could hire on Takapuna Beach. We’d speed towards Rangitoto at an acute angle, getting soaking wet, and invariably capsize. I knew not to be scared when this happened, because he was there, and always knew what to do.

[Lynn-Elisabeth, her water wings, me and Daddy on Pakiri beach, summer 1966]

 

At some point there was a discussion of my brother, at least, calling him Dad, but we never did. We all still call him Daddy. We’re still his three little ones, for whom he had endless patience and affection. He was a constant in our lives, steady and true, and he loved us all very, very much.

I asked Tom to read the poem ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden because I’ve been thinking a lot this week about ‘love’s austere and lonely offices.’ I think of all the small things Daddy did for us. Polishing our school shoes in the garage, every Sunday night. Heating up hot cross buns in the oven so we could have them for breakfast before school. Making us Milo when he got us up in the middle of the night to watch a rugby test or the FA Cup. Every school morning he knocked on my bedroom door and said ‘Bathroom’s ready’.

When we had school holidays, he’d take the day off work so we could go to the movies with him, to see things like Herbie Rides Again or one of the Pink Panther films. He took me to see Fantasia at the Civic when I was five. At the cinema or at the Easter Show he’d buy me and Stephen ice creams, because – unlike my mother – he always let us eat between meals.

When I washed my hair, which was long and thick, he would be the one who combed it out, because he was gentle and he was patient. When I woke up with a bad dream, it was Daddy I called for. He would come in, always comforting, never grumpy about being woken up, and then he would get me a cup of water from the bathroom. This was the miracle cure for all my psychic ills, just as Vicks VapoRub was the antidote for all my physical ones. Then he would sit holding my hand until I drifted back into sleep.

When we were older, Daddy would get up at any time of the night to pick us up, no matter how late it was or how far he had to drive. At the age of 20 I moved to England, to attend the University of York. Because I’m accident-prone, I managed to fall down some stairs in Manchester and sprain my ankle. I was on crutches, I needed to get back to York, sixty miles away, and the trains in those days had steep steps up to every carriage. But my father wasn’t there to come and get me. I realised that day what it meant to be so far from home, so far from him.

I also missed the constant flow of stationery supplies. Daddy was a printer, and through his network of cronies could supply any kind, shape and colour of writing book, pen or paper we desired. We had cupboards stuffed with wrapping paper and with envelopes of every size. We had hundreds of what my mother called ‘scribbling pads’ – and there are still dozens of them in my parents’ garage. He got me beautiful sets of Derwent coloured pencils, a brand to which I remain loyal. On Fridays he brought home magazines like the Woman’s Weekly and the Listener. He would also bring home boxes of books that were about to be pulped, picked up at some factory he was visiting. This is the reason I’m so familiar with the works of Barbara Cartland.

There were good and bad aspects to being the children of a printer. He brought home a big hardcover art book for me when I started studying Art History. But more often he’d bring home collating rush jobs, so my sister and I became the world’s fastest collators. The thing we both longed for and dreaded was tags – information tags that needed to be folded and strung (and kept in numerical order) so they could be attached to vast machine parts in Kinleith whenever there was some kind of malfunction. Daddy took me down to Kinleith once, in a six-seater plane, and I saw the machines that were the sizes of warehouses, tags we may have folded dangling from them. Lynn-Elisabeth and I longed for the tags because we got paid by the hundred, and grew to be expert, speedy stringers. But we also dreaded tags because thousands of them were needed at any given time, and they tended to ruin a weekend.

There was another good aspect to working for New Zealand Forest Products that I didn’t realise at first. When I was eleven or so, I begged Daddy to build me a dolls’ house. I guess I’d read somewhere that this was the kind of thing fathers did, especially those who were supposed to have technical jobs. I measured up and drew him a plan of a six-room box and waited, suspecting the dolls’ house would be like our tree house, something much discussed but never realised. But then, one day, he came home with a beautiful dolls’ house built to my specifications, but with an added pitched roof and attic, painted pink and blue. It was fantastic and I couldn’t believe he’d built it. Of course, he hadn’t built it, as he readily admitted. He’d got the carpenter at work to do it.

It’s almost two years since I returned home to New Zealand, mainly to be close to him – in what I thought were the many, many years we had left. None of us realised that time was quite so short – even earlier this month, when we went out for mussels and chips to celebrate his 83rd birthday, or last Monday, when Tom and I wheeled him around Waitakere Gardens so he could say hello to friends there, see the podiatrist (against his will), and visit the rose bush planted in the gardens in honour of my mother. None of us thought we would lose him this quickly.

It’s hard not to feel this is the end of an era. My father was born in Pakiri in 1933. He was supposed to be born in Auckland, at a nursing home, but Grandma got the dates wrong, and Granddad had to deliver him, just as he’d delivered our Auntie Dawn. Anyone who remembers Jane, my grandmother, will know this was pretty typical.

He was born just three years after Rahui Te Kiri died, and was the oldest grandson of Te Kiri Brown and Grace Tihoi Amos. He was named Kiri after Grandma’s father, and Frederick after Granddad’s stepfather. Granddad’s side of the family were the Wyatts from Leigh, so all Daddy’s extended family and whanau lived close by. Granddad’s occupation was listed on Daddy’s birth certificate as ‘farmer’ but it wasn’t so long since he’d been listed on the electoral role as a ‘cinema operator.’ What this meant was that Granddad and Grandma drove over Pakiri Hill in their Model T Ford to Matakana, where he was the movie projectionist and she played the piano during the films.

Pakiri remained an important place for Daddy even after the Depression forced a move to Auckland, where Grandad got a series of jobs, as a timber worker, as a traffic conductor, as a storeman at the Herald. Pakiri was the place of hot holidays and sport, of endless uncles and aunties and cousins, of Ratana services (which he didn’t like) and bacon sandwiches on the beach (which he did).

[With Brown, Haddon and Paki uncles, and Grandad, probably at Whangateau]

He was born so long ago that he remembered the pataka in Granny Brown’s garden, which he had to climb up to retrieve supplies. He remembered when party-line phones came to the valley, and how all the aunties spent their time listening in on other people’s conversations. He was the one who left his giant footprints in the wet concrete around Uncle Ray’s cowshed. His favourite Pakiri memories were of during the war, when the American soldiers set up camp, and he and Laly could ride around on the back of their trucks. He was the oldest and ‘had the name’, one of my cousins said, so he was the favoured grandson when he went up to Pakiri with Grandma, the mātāmua, at Christmas.

He grew up to be handsome and tall – taller than everyone else. He’s easy to spot in pictures of his cousins, towering above them all. The phrase most people used when describing my father, this past week, was ‘gentle giant.’

[With Tilly and Myra at Pakiri]

 

In Auckland they lived in Ponsonby – first on Anglesea Street, near Uncle Bob and Auntie Alice, and then, from 1949, at 164 Ponsonby Road, on the corner of Douglas Street. There was a picture theatre on the other corner, and what was to become Ivan’s restaurant was still a scrap metal shop. There were plenty of rooms in that big villa for all the Pakiri relatives to visit, to go shopping or to the races.

Auntie Dawn started her long retail career selling gloves in George Court on Karangahape Road. Daddy delivered the Herald down Franklin Road and up Wellington Street. During the polio epidemic of the late 40s, when children had to stay home, Granddad and his friend Clive White delivered the papers every day so Daddy wouldn’t lose the money. This is probably because Daddy still owed Granddad money for his bike. We come from a long line of frugal men.

[Daddy at Auntie Dawn's 21st with Grandad, Frederick Willetts, Uncle Len and Uncle Bob in the back row, and Grandma, Dawn, and Aunties Alice, Rona and Violet in the front]

 

He attended kindergarten in Victoria Park, then Beresford Street Primary, and finally Seddon Tech in town. He told us that the Seddon Tech pupils weren’t allowed to crowd onto the trams on Queen Street – they had to walk all the way up to Hobson Street before they were allowed to get on. During the war American soldiers had their barracks at Victoria Park, and Daddy and various other urchins were dedicated in their hunt for souvenirs – chewing gum, coins, even coat buttons. When the war ended, he and some friends wriggled through the wire fence and went scavenging for left-behind comic books. They were removed from the premises by the police, and taken to the station on College Hill for a reprimand.

Daddy played hockey for Seddon Tech, and loved many other sports, especially yachting and archery. He has photo albums packed with pictures of boats. He took part in the Auckland to Fiji yacht race and numerous other races in the gulf and ocean. Boats and trains remained a passion all his life.

After my brother started playing soccer, my father became a soccer referee, rising up to national certification and then becoming an assessor. He was secretary of the Auckland Soccer Referees Association for nine years; later he was VP and then president. We watched Big League Soccer while we ate our Sunday roast lunch, and learned the finer points of the game by watching referee training videos narrated by John Motson. Once a week I rode with him to the old Central Post Office to collect match incident reports, and entertained him on the way back by reading out the most comical.

My father was an accomplished ballroom dancer and, to hear him talk, a hardened soldier after his ten weeks of military service in 1953. My mother liked dancing with him, but was always disparaging about his military service, because, she alleged, he was allowed to bring his washing home every weekend.

Auntie Dawn had a beautiful singing voice and was always appearing in musicals and operettas. All the family enjoyed singing, and Daddy spent Sunday evenings with Granddad’s parents in Mt Eden, having a sing-song. (My mother told me once that Grandma would start the dusting, reach the piano, and spend the rest of the morning playing and singing rather than doing housework.)

Daddy loved reading, particularly thrillers and mysteries. When we were young, if he had a good book on the go (say, something by Wilbur Smith), he would be in bed before we were, propped up with pillows, reading away. Recently, when it was too hard for him to read anymore, he binge-watched box-set crime series. He could even watch the Scandinavian ones we loved after he bought his massive new TV, and could read the subtitles.

There was no game or sport too insignificant that it couldn’t become an ongoing family competition, especially (but not limited to) mini-golf, 10-pin bowling, table tennis, snooker, pool volleyball, and Scrabble. My mother was banned from all of these, because Daddy didn’t think she took them seriously enough.

Back in the 50s Daddy spent five years as an apprentice at the Herald, and then – because he wanted a change, he said – became a driver for St John Ambulance. This is one reason he knew the back roads of Auckland so well. He must have wanted a real change after that, because in 1959 he sailed overseas with friends, and didn’t come back for five years.

He and his friend Norman Gebbie drove all over Britain, Ireland and most of western Europe. They saw a bull fight in Spain and the Passion plays in Oberammergau. When money was low, they returned to London. Daddy worked as a security guard for a while, and got a part playing a soldier, one of hundreds, in the movie Cleopatra. He’s the only person we know who’s appeared as an extra in both Cleopatra and the TV series Hercules.

My mother’s family in England loved him. ‘Our Deborah’s bringing Kiri over for tea,’ Auntie Edie would say, and send our cousin Brenda to get out the best white cloth. They thought the world of him, Brenda told us.

That was the thing about my father: he was genuine, open and good-natured, and could fit in anywhere. He was so hospitable to visiting referees that wherever he and my mother went in the world, referees wanted to take them out to dinner and to games. This led to my mother attending her first (and only) Chinese banquet in Singapore, and me getting fantastic seats at football games at White Hart Lane and St James’ Park.

England was too cold and damp for my father, so in 1964 he came home on the Oriana, bringing my mother and sister with him, and went back to work at the Herald. At first they lived with my grandparents on Ponsonby Road, then they built the house on Tiroroa Avenue in Te Atatu South.

[Stephen's christening in 1967, wearing the gown made by our great-grandmother in 1897. I spent all day pouting and clinging to my father. I was wearing borrowed shoes, because I'd hidden my own.]

 

He and my mother always loved to travel, and they roamed the world on cruises and cross-continental train trips, my father taking hours of Super-8 films and (later) videos, and thousands of photographs. They sailed around the Yasawa Islands with us, and down the Nile and the Mississippi without us. They took the train across Canada, through Australia, all around Europe, and once from New York to New Orleans. I asked my mother what that trip was like, and she said it was the most boring two days of her life. I asked my father, and he said it was the best trip ever.

[On our way to the NZ Post Book Awards in 2012: Stephens Hill and Morris, my sister, me and Daddy.]

 

His last big journey was three years ago, to Martha and Matthew’s wedding in Mexico. After that, when flying and sailing were no longer possible, he loved to hear from all of us when we went away, checking every day for emailed reports and pictures. It’s only a few weeks since he came to our flat for what turned out to be the last time, to see my pictures from Kenya. For years he’d print out our emails and photos and keep them in plastic-paged folders, ready to entrap unsuspecting visitors.

In the final years of Daddy’s life, we did whatever we could for him – the small things, the things that make up a life and express our love for each other. Christine, one of his carers, made sure his pyjamas were always freshly ironed. My sister took away his sweaters to wash. My brother drove him everywhere. We bought or made food to tempt him, from Rebecca’s chocolate cakes to lamb shanks from Nosh to meat pies from the Fridge in Kingsland to the single poached egg Tom made him for dinner last Sunday.

When he wasn’t really eating much anymore, we made up batches of his chocolate protein drink in the blender and made sure he had a constant supply of lemon barley water. We mashed up his fruit salad. We gave him his breakfast yoghurt, and his liquid morphine. In the end, this is all we can do for the ones we love. We perform love’s ‘austere and lonely offices’, remembering all the small things they did for us, all the small moments that made us feel loved.

A week ago, on the last day of Daddy’s life, I sat with him for almost ten hours in Waitakere Hospital. I remembered him sitting with me at Auckland Hospital the night I broke my leg in 1978 – just sitting there, in the dark, so I wouldn’t be alone. We all spent time with him that day. We made sure he was never alone.When he died that evening, my niece was with him, and the two Stephens, his son and son-in-law.

Earlier in the day a kind nurse named Kevin gave my father a shower and washed his hair. Daddy let me rub moisturiser on his hands, usually something he protested. Later, when he was sitting up, Kevin and I rubbed moisturiser all over his back and shoulders. I combed my father’s hair. Then I sat holding his hand until he drifted back into sleep.

 

 

Letters to Each Other

On Sunday November 13^th, Tom Moody and I took part in an event called People of Letters, part of Wellington’s LitCrawl 2016. (The earthquake would happen just after midnight, when we were back in our sturdy hotel.)

On stage we read aloud an email correspondence that took place between Wednesday November 9^th to about ten minutes before we were due at the venue – San Fran on Cuba Street – that Sunday.

This, more or less, is what we said.

 

Paula:

Dear Tom Moody,

I have to call you by your full name, because I would never begin a letter to you with ‘Dear Tom’. I hardly ever call you ‘Tom’. Usually it’s ‘my love’, and other people find that either sickening or sweet. What they don’t know is that when you’ve had more than one husband, it’s useful to have a generic term rather than risk saying the wrong name.

We write to each other a lot because we’re often in different countries. Right now we’re just in different rooms, because I can’t stand listening to another second of US election coverage. I don’t want to know anything anymore, because the truth is so ugly. I’m wondering about disappearing, the way Agatha Christie did in 1926. She wandered off for 11 days, apparently in a ‘fugue state’ brought about by stress. She gave herself a new name and took up residence at a hotel in Harrogate. These days she’d need a credit card to check in. She’d be found in an instant.

I often dream of disappearing, but I’d rather take you with me.

 

Tom:

Dear P,

In all our correspondence of various kinds over the years, I only remember once when I wrote ‘Dear Paula’, and that was when I inscribed an Edward Gorey book (‘N is for Neville, who died of ennui’). That was in 1998, at the very beginning of our relationship. Since then, I’ve addressed you as P, or with one of the many other names I have for you, which will not be mentioned here. I’ve used these terms of endearment in emails, texts, cards, and even on post-it notes I sometimes leave around to remind you to do things, like ‘P — Remember to love your husband today’.

Speaking of things we call one another, I’m wondering who wrote the online bios for this event. I’m described as an ‘acclaimed writer and academic’. Now I do write reviews from time to time, and I do teach, but I wouldn’t call myself either of those things. That phrase has proven to be very hurtful, in fact. When you first brought it to my attention, you were laughing. When we mentioned it to several friends – at different times, in various settings – every one of them, to a person, laughed. You brought it up at dinner with your nephew and his wife – they laughed and laughed; they may still be laughing. Even my mother, when I told her about it on the phone, laughed. Although I think she was laughing about the acclaimed part.

Anyway, I’m glad that, right now, we’re writing to one another from different rooms rather than different cities or countries. I’ll never completely get over feeling somewhat alien here in your home country; but, in this moment, I don’t even recognize my own home country. Maybe you and I can just pretend we’ve disappeared — the main thing is that we’ll be together.

T.

 

Paula:

I’m on a news blackout right now. Even before they called the election, I was no longer watching TV or listening to the radio. The news disgusts and enrages me. I believed that a woman would be elected president, but instead the worst possible man won. Our fellow U.S. citizens voted for the worst possible man.

So I’m in exile from most of the Internet, fiddling while Rome burns. The only web site I can look at is Pinterest. Pinterest thinks it know what really concerns me in life: small houses, vintage Dior, Spanish castles, glitter Christmas cards, Moroccan tiles, and austere Scandinavian interiors. I feel as though Pinterest has a narrow view of me, and that this definition gets more narrow with each visit, just as the houses it shows me get smaller and smaller. I don’t want to live in a tiny house. I’m too tall. Our book cases are too tall. I have too many glitter Christmas cards and Moroccan tiles.

Right now I can’t even bring myself to ‘pin’ an American recipe. I’ve been a US citizen since 2008, so I could campaign and vote for Obama. The George Bush video they showed at my citizenship ceremony asked: what will you do with your freedom? I went to Smoothie King. And I voted for Obama.

I was very happy living there, and if I hadn’t lived there, we would never have met. But we’re in exile from the US now, for real, and maybe forever. This week I said no to going back to teach in Iowa this summer, as I usually do.

We’re not the only ones lost at the moment, I guess.

 

Tom:

P,

I’ve been a news and political junkie since way before we met, so it’s difficult for me to not seek out news, even now, when it’s all so dire. But I have to say, for the first time in my life, I’m shocked, sick, depressed, embarrassed enough that I have curtailed my news reading.

Pinterest offers no refuge for me. At your insistence months ago, I opened a Pinterest account and stumbled through the first steps of setting up my board; I think I selected a few categories, including architecture, art and fighter planes. After I pinned a picture of a dollar bill folded into a P-51 Mustang, I was deluged with origami pins of all sorts. I guess I have zero interest in Pinterest. And anyway, by still reading selected news, I learned the somewhat consoling news that Hillary did actually win the popular vote, and that rats are ticklish, and enjoy being tickled.

I’ve been thinking more about disappearing, being lost, getting lost on purpose. When we get home, and I finally finish reading some overly long books and write the reviews that are already late, and finish my semester teaching Narrative Structure and Analysis – a class where I’ve maintained a one-sleep lead on my students in terms of material – I’m going to lose myself reading books I want to read or reread.

I’m thinking of a few of my favourite books by American authors, to remind myself that America has, in fact, produced some great things. I want to reread The Great Gatsby, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. I want to reread every Deborah Eisenberg short story — that should keep my busy for a while. Mark Twain, Philip Roth, Nabokov (he became a U.S. citizen in 1945), my Library of America collection of Abraham Lincoln’s writings. Elizabeth McCracken and Joan Didion. This is certainly enough to get me past the inauguration in January.

Maybe we can form our own two-person reading group. Let’s discuss.

T.

 

Paula:

A reading group sounds suspiciously like a book club, and you know I can’t go down that dark road again.

At the moment I’m reading David Lodge’s novel about H.G. Wells, A Man of Parts – less a novel, I think, than a plodding biography with added dialogue and lurid conjecture. Wells is short and unattractive, but young women line up to have sex with him. He cranks out books and tries to take over the Fabian Society from George Bernard Shaw. While his wife looks after the house and kids, he nips off to Venice for a few weeks to get some work done, or to France to have sex. I’m finding it both gossipy and depressing.

It’s a distraction, at least, this week. Bad news for your family, bad news for mine, more time for me lying in a hospital bed, and then the election. I was sure we would win Lotto to make up for it all, but apparently not.

At the beginning of A Man in Parts, Wells is dying. Like my father right now, except Wells was in a grand house with whispering servants and nurses, and my father is in a retirement village in West Auckland, with a borrowed hospital bed, and carers one hour a day from Vision West.

You and I don’t have any children. We may never own our own house. When we get old, who will look after us? My niece and nephew? Matthew has just bought a house in Tawa. I’m telling you now, I’m not dying in Tawa. 

You have a better attitude than me. You’re planning a summer of reading. I want to finish work on my novel this summer. Here’s my promise to you: I’m going to finish my novel this summer. My characters are all lost, so maybe it’s a good thing I am as well. We can all be lost together. I hope the noise of my typing doesn’t distract you from your reading.

 

Tom:

P,

It has certainly been a bad week. Last week, when you were just recovering from your surgery and not drinking because of your medication, you quoted me on Facebook: I’d said your not drinking had thrown the whole universe out of balance — the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series since 1908, and Trump remained very close in the polling days before election day. I had no idea how much darker things would get.

People who know you’ve had surgery recently offer you encouragement, and remind me — unhelpfully — that I need to take care of you. Some people know of your dad’s health, and offer their best wishes. Everyone knows about the election, and some want to know my feelings about it — some, even more unhelpfully — explain to me how it happened. At least it’s not as bad as in 2001, when we lived in Wellington, and many people felt the need to inform me that I shouldn’t be surprised, that America got what it deserved on September 11, after the way it had behaved on the world stage for so many decades.

Anyway, this week, I haven’t really had the heart or the energy to mention to any of these people that my Aunt Pat, who was a confidant and inspiration and the greatest second mom imaginable to all of us Moody kids growing up, died last Sunday. I know William Wordsworth was referring to something else entirely when he wrote ‘The world is too much with us’, but that’s how I feel right now.

Wordsworth reminds me, right now, of the Lake District. We’ve talked about this a lot, and I know we agree that, of all the incredible and beautiful places we’ve been in the world, the Lake District is one of our favourite spots.

Your typing, by the way, never distracts me from anything, although it does prevent me from listening to my Who marathons at the volume I’d prefer.

T.

 

Paula:

I dreamed the other night that we decided to go to the Lake District for our honeymoon, even though we’ve been there many times before, and even though our honeymoon was 16 years ago (and we went to France). Maybe my subconscious wants more honeymoons. Maybe my subconscious wants to turn back time.

One of my favourite memories of Aunt Pat was when she brought up from her basement a space project you’d made back in the early 60s, when you wanted to be an astronaut: it was that chart of hand-drawn rockets where you’d had to attach an extra piece of paper because you ran out of room for the tallest rockets. She’d kept it all those years. She was so proud of you. Maybe you can add ‘rockets’ as a Pinterest board?

Pinterest, by the way, has just told me that the colour of 2017 is called Poised Beige. That is what I intend to be by the time the summer is over. Poised Beige. 

I worry that we have to read this correspondence aloud. Everyone will find out how silly we are. On Friday, at a mentoring session I was doing with Maori fiction writers for Huia, I asked everyone to write down three words that described them at 17, three words that described them now, and three words they thought would describe them at the age of 80. I did the exercise as well, and the one consistent word across all three eras was ‘silly’. The silliness keeps me sane, I think, or perhaps helps mask the insanity. One of the other words for me at the age of 80, by the way, was drunk.

Three words for you at the age of 80?

 

Tom:

P,

It’s difficult enough to think of words that describe myself now, never mind at the age of 80. I hope three words that would apply are active, inquisitive and aware, but those seem to me to be sort of a baseline for a meaningful life at any age. Maybe sporty, sentient and, probably, silly. I think our mutual silliness is one thing we enjoy about each other — the fact that we’re willing to say or do many things in certain situations just to make the other person laugh.

When studies are done of why our relationship is so successful, one of the things they’ll find, I’m sure, is our ability to amuse each other. Whether I’m running like the Monkey Man (copyright, trademark) along crowded pavements; or doing the robot or miming pulling on the rope in busy shops; or barking like a dog from our terrace until you turn around, often after five other people walking on the footpath have already looked at me in confusion and/or fear – these are all done to get a few seconds of a smile. It’s inevitable, in even the very best relationships, that one person is the funnier of the two – and in ours, that’s me, of course – but you do make me laugh every day.

A sense of humour is such a personal thing, not only how much of one someone has, but also, the specific kinds of things someone finds funny. I love how we find so many of the same things funny; that really is something, I think, that you can only learn about each other over time. I’m sure there are still a lot of things out there in the world –  images, turns of phrases, situations – that we will both find amusing. I’m looking forward to those.

T.

 

Paula:

This morning we argued about whether ‘Strangers in the Night’ was a good song, and if you are, in fact, my Sherpa rather than husband - this after I handed over everything I didn’t want to carry for you to lug in your backpack. If these are our most serious arguments, then we’re in good shape.

H.G. Wells was a believer in Free Love, which meant he was free to have sex with lots of woman, and his wife was free to stay at home pretending not to mind. You and I don’t practice free love, or even cheap love. I place a very high value on it. Our love is pricey.

 

Tom:

P,

I don’t know what to say about H.G. Wells. I read him only as a kid, and I certainly didn’t know the details of the writer’s life then. It’s disheartening, though, that so little has changed in the world. In Wells’ time, was there a female equivalent? A successful, professional woman, admired by her peers, acclaimed by the public, who openly slept around? And are things that different now? How much of a double standard is there still? I’m afraid I might be veering close to election talk again, so I’ll stop.

T.

 

Paula:

I’m tired again now, and in need of pain meds – the kind where the label reads: ‘May Be Habit-Forming.’ The kind that lets me enter a fugue state, so my mind can escape even while my body is prone on the bed.

This has been a long, sad week. And now here we are, disclosing things about ourselves in public in a way we never do. Someone told me once that there’s nothing so strange as other people’s marriages, and I think that’s true. Every marriage is strange in its own way. Every marriage has its peculiar habits, its in-jokes, its sworn secrets. Not every marriage has its own circus, of course – we’re special in that way. Every time I’m walking by myself and hear a dog bark, I think: is that Tom Moody?

I know that in reading this correspondence aloud we’re revealing more than we would normally choose. For someone who talks as much as I do, I’m really quite secretive. Years ago, back in New York, someone told me that I was a hard person to be friends with. Perhaps she sensed the lack of true openness in my character. I’m guarded with almost everyone. Everyone but you.

Writing to each other this week, we could have been glib, because that’s easier than being honest. We haven’t been too bad, I think, overall, though I think for us that laughing might be a way through the darkness. As Robert Creeley said in ‘I know a man’ –  ‘the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it’. His solution, in that poem, was ‘shall we, and why not, buy a goddamn big car.’

We don’t have a car. But at some point, I know, I have to get off my sick bed and we have to do something, together, against the darkness.

You have the last word, my love.

 

Tom:

P,

I have much more to say, but not now, not here, not in front of everyone, and not with our 16-minute time limit looming.

But I will say these words:

 

‘I know a man’

As I sd to my   

friend, because I am   

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his   

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for   

christ’s sake, look   

out where yr going.

 

Do New Zealand books need special treatment?

On Saturday night, at the first National Writers’ Forum (organised by the NZSA and held in Auckland), I was a speaker in the debate, arguing whether New Zealand books need special treatment. Te Radar was the moderator. Arguing for: Toby Manhire (Poldark lookalike) and Michele A’Court (funny, complicated name). Arguing against: me and Leilani Tamu (poet, woman of world). Leilani and I won, mainly because the room was loaded with my students, who are both loyal and loud.

Leilani and I had concentrated on one issue: the controversial ‘New Zealand table’ in book shops here. (Toby and Michele tried to make it much broader, so they could accuse us of being Trump acolytes, ACT party members, and/or the soft drink L&P, trying to take away everyone’s grants and fellowships, and destroying NZ lit. This played well with about half the room.)

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Catherine Robertson and I were being chastised online – which is the contemporary version of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with hypocrisy and manufactured outrage, except with ‘comments’ instead of bonfires – for daring to be women who ran focus groups of (mainly) women asking about their book-buying habits. We were sure, being women and all, to have done it wrong; we were sure to have had no experience running focus groups; we were sure to loaded the groups with women over 35, just because they buy books; we were sure to have asked leading questions, and goaded people into trashing Important New Zealand writers; we were sure to have excluded genre fiction, and tried to further our Industrial Literary Complex agenda; we were sure to have locked men out, and ignored library statistics, and to have kept the sample wilfully small, and proclaimed an end to all further research ever – even though our report explicitly addresses the next step, and that our key finding was about visibility rather than boringness, and so on.

Yawn. Catherine’s done a good job of responding.

So, back to that New Zealand table. Charlotte Grimshaw, top New Zealand authoress, emailed me on Monday with the following:

I see there've been a couple of articles about no one liking NZ novels, and booksellers having trouble selling them. My question re this is: Why do booksellers insist on having a separate NZ Fiction section in bookshops? 

In the same way, there used to be a Gay Fiction section, before Alan Hollinghurst, say, which suggested it was something other than just "fiction".

If booksellers struggle to sell NZ fiction, why do they segregate it from other fiction, often in a small, distant shelf, as if it is a different thing from International fiction? It seems to me this must only make it harder to sell, and there's no logical reason to do it. 

Do you think this is an issue? 

Indeed I do. Here is an abbreviated version of my debate speech.

New Zealand books DO NOT need special treatment – not because our books aren’t special, but because they’re not basket cases.

Consider the situation we have now. Consider our poor, poor New Zealand books. There they lie, on their own little table in shops around the nation, too weak to stand up, too sensitive to be placed alongside their genre peers on the regular shelves. No wonder so many people think our literature is lame. Our books need to lie down!

In some shops, even more care is taken to ensure that New Zealand books get the special treatment the poor, feeble things need. The shop staff gather New Zealand books together and hide them away at the very back of the shop, in some dark corner, so the sun won’t fade their covers and no oafish customer can sully their pristine pages with impertinent fingers.

At the moment, in fact, our books are SO special that many of them have been stowed away for safe-keeping in warehouses in Australia, too special even to order. Think of it as a spa retreat, maybe, or some kind of sanitorium, where our ailing, limp, delicate books must spend months on end, away from the harsh glare of public commerce.

They’re so special that a print-on-demand request has to be flown by carrier pigeon across the Tasman before one single copy will consider venturing forth from this sanctuary, and only then after weeks of deliberation, in the hope that the customer will have lost interest and cancelled the order. Really, our books may never recover from so much special treatment. I’ve even heard rumours that increasing numbers of mercy killings are occurring in these Australian facilities. Books have to be pulped, just to protect them from the cruel world with its ‘shops’ and ‘readers’.

Fellow writers, is this what we want for our contemporary national literature? Segregation? Seclusion? Closed wards? Assisted suicide? I know we’re all very busy, squabbling on Facebook and writing ill-judged angry blog posts called I Am Not Famous and it’s all Creative New Zealand’s Fault. But pause a minute, and ask yourself: is this special treatment really in our interests?

Sure, for some of us readers it’s convenient to have a New Zealand table in a book shop, especially if it’s prominently positioned. We are champions of our local literature, keenly interested in local new releases, eager to browse new titles of whatever genre – fiction, poetry, essays, history, cookbooks, art books, biographies, books about trees and birds and gruelling, fly-plagued walks through the South Island, academic books about Treaty reparations or the 1951 Waterfront strike, collections and anthologies and journals, pamphlets and tomes, and those nostalgic photo books with pictures of dairies or old caravans on the cover – whatever it is, we’ll want to browse through it, as long as it’s from New Zealand.

Appraently, we are readers of catholic tastes and deeply patriotic feelings. We’re also quite lazy, so everything on the one table is really ideal. We don’t actually need a book shop – a book stall will do. Kind of like a cake stall at a school gala, with a similar amount of profit.

So, anyway, those of us who make a beeline for the New Zealand table in a book shop: that’s about 20 of us nationwide.

The rest of us shop normally. You like crime novels? You look in the crime section. You like fantasy? You look in the fantasy section. I’ve discovered, through extensive research, that books tend to be organised in alphabetical order. If I wanted to look for Pat Grace’s latest novel, say, I should be able to find it quite easily on the general fiction shelves somewhere between Nadine Gordimer and Günter Grass. And this is the company, I feel, that Pat should be keeping.

Hear about a new book on the radio or read about it in the Listener? Book shops have a new releases section to make the book easy to find. Then, when the book is no longer quite so new, the book can be found alongside its kind on the regular shelves. Pretty straightforward, yes? Not so for our ‘special’ New Zealand books. At some point the poor New Zealand table will start groaning under the weight of the 95 genres it must include at any given time, and older books will be sent to spend their twilight years in the retirement village of the New Zealand shelves. These are generally either close to the ground, so you have to get down on hands and knees, or very close to the ceiling, so you’ll need a ladder.

But wait: lots of bookshops are quite small. Time Out in Auckland, for example, is the size of an olden-days pantry. You see their problem? These shops already have a New Zealand table. Now they have to have New Zealand shelves as well. So much New Zealand! SO much special treatment!

And this is the problem. Most of their shelves are taken up by books that don’t need special treatment, books that can stand upright and jostle each other, brazenly staring the reader down at eye-level, spines turned in haughty unison.

So what happens is this: a few of our ‘special books’ get stuck on some hard-to-reach shelf, and the rest get sent away to a rest home. The euphemistic term is ‘returns’ but we all know what it really means. There’s no returning back to the book shop. Like greedy adult children desperate to get their hands on the family home so they can renovate and flip it, book shops have already filled the space with new books. Bye bye, special books! We gave you your chance on the 95-genre table! If only you were strong enough to hack it on the regular shelves, but no. We can’t risk it. Off to the rest home with you!

Those of us who write books don’t want to be THAT special. If we’re going to be shuffled into categories, then make them work for us and for our existing and potential readers. Nicky Pellegrino, for example, writes books that are set in Italy, their stories revolving (according to her web site) around friendship and food, passion and family secrets. Some people might call it chick lit, or woman’s fiction, or entertainment or escapism. I don’t think Nicky would mind any of that.

But I suspect she would much rather have her new book, Under Italian Skies, sitting alongside other books of that ilk rather than next to something like Peter Godfrey: Father of New Zealand Choral Music or Striking Gold: New Zealand Hockey’s Remarkable Victory at the 1976 Olympics. These are both actual recent books, and I mean no disrespect to them.

But I’m sure that Nicky’s potential market would find her books more readily if they came across them alongside, say, Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter or The Olive Tree by Lucinda Riley or The Italian Matchmaker by Santa Montefiore – rather than next to Moments of Truth: The New Zealand General Election of 2014.

Of course, it would be different if every book shop in the land could carry 20 copies of Nicky’s new book, and some could be shelved in general fiction, some in new releases, some in an end cap possibly dedicated to ‘women’s fiction’ or ‘great summer reading’, and some on the New Zealand books table. But most shops have taken a handful of copies. And they’re giving them the Special Treatment.

Special treatment, however well-intentioned, is killing us. Please, I beg you, hear our cry to stop this segregation, this separate-but-equal sham. We’re tired of cowering on the table. We’d like the chance to stand upright.

The New Zealand book table in a shop is not a tempting buffet table of local delicacies, but a bed in an extremely overcrowded hospital, piled with bodies. Don’t blame the customer if they suspect the bodies on the bed to be weak and pathetic.

It’s time we rejected this notion of specialness that condemns us to the isolation ward. Writers don’t need readers’ patriotic pity. Let us take our chances with the rest of our peers – and these peers are writers all over the world, dead and alive, writing now and in the past, writing in English and in translation. Salman Rushdie has talked about the ‘folly of trying to contain writers inside passports’ and here in New Zealand we take that folly one step further: we try to contain the vastness and diversity of our contemporary literature within one lumbering giant of a category, New Zealand books, and then cram it all onto one table.

Let us stand upright and clamber onto the shelves where we belong, alongside the other writers of the world. I know, I know – they’ll try to squeeze us out! They’ll jostle us for position. They’ll try to elbow us onto the floor. But to quote an Australian comedian, with apologies for his salty Australian language, it’s time to harden the fuck up, New Zealand. And if we truly care about the books we’re writing and publishing in this country, that’s exactly what we’ll do. We’ll kick the special-table habit and join the fray with all the other writers. We will fight them on the book shelves. We will fight them on the end caps. We will never, ever surrender.

Against Laziness

This weekend there’s a symposium going on in Auckland, the city where I live now, about the teaching of creative writing. I’m not attending, for various reasons: it clashes with the Going West Festival; next weekend will be consumed by the National Writers’ Forum and I don’t want to give up two weekends in a row; I have a substantial personal essay to finish before I go away to Kenya in ten days; I have reading to complete for a feature I’m writing – next week, apparently – about Katherine Mansfield.

Most pressing of all, I have two manuscripts of 20,000 words each to read and comment on before Wednesday. These are chapters of novels-in-progress by two writers on the Master of Creative Writing course. Each week this semester I read two or three manuscripts, add comments and notes and suggested edits, and write a letter to the author with a summary of my response and big-picture comments. Over the course of the year, the prose writers on the MCW submit 30,000 words for workshop; from September on, they submit an extra 10,000 words to me. This month the poets can submit 30 pages to me and to my colleague, Selina Tusitala Marsh, who co-supervises them.

During the month of October I will read the penultimate draft of everyone’s manuscripts – this year it’s nine novels, a memoir and two poetry collections – and give them my final comments. They submit on the first of November and then all we can do is wait for the examiners’ reports to come in. After that, the writers are on their own, revising and re-working, finishing incomplete manuscripts, deciding whether to continue or change course, whether to seek an agent overseas or look for a publisher here.

My job, the one the University of Auckland pays me to do, is to give the writers on the MCW as much as possible in terms of practical instruction, support, reading and writing advice, specific comments, encouragement and straight talk between the beginning of March and the end of October. This takes the form of weekly workshops, where writers submit the week before so everyone else has time to read, think and write letters to each other.

It also takes the form of weekly seminars, where we discuss aspects of technique, of art and craft, and discuss examples of published work. I try to bring in a wide range of reading, including excerpts, and find stellar examples from the genres in which the writers of the MCW are working. Sometimes we have master classes with visiting writers; sometimes industry professionals come to talk to us about publishing, festivals, adapting work for radio or screen, editing books or editing journals.

I hope that writers end the year with a broader understanding of our book culture, its issues and opportunities. From me I hope they get a notion of how obsessed, particular, and determined we must be as writers, how much we must demand of ourselves, and of our engagement in order to make good work – or to make good work better.

My undergraduate teaching is similar but on a different scale, with several workshop groups and one larger seminar built around close reading of published work in order to explore aspects of art and craft.

Some of you reading this are familiar with all of the above. Some of you teach or have taught creative writing, and none of what I’ve said so far will seem unusual. But over the past six years, while I’ve been teaching in the UK and New Zealand, I’ve encountered a number of creative writing teachers who seem to want to avoid the key part of the job – work. Some go to great lengths to avoid work. They eschew workshops because these involve too much in-depth weekly reading. They give as little as possible to students and whisper that ‘you can’t really teach creative writing’. (FYI: they still take these students’ money.)

They put students in groups of two or three and get them to ‘workshop’ each other, or to discuss published work among themselves, abrogating responsibility for managing and directing the discussion. They ask students to blog responses to each other, again abrogating responsibility for managing, directing and – when needed – defusing the discussion as it’s taking place. They share out the work of supervising among as many people as possible, even if it means that a poet is advising a novelist, or a playwright is advising a poet, or an academic is advising a creative writer, because the most important thing is their own workload, not the needs of the writers who are taking the course in good faith and often at considerable expense, financial and personal.

They tell students they aren’t allowed to write ‘identity poetry’, say, or speculative fiction, because they don’t like reading those things. When they choose published work for students to read, the work is often a piece that someone who attended a US college in the 70s might have studied, like 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' or 'Hills Like White Elephants', and their approach to the discussion is that of a literature teacher or critic rather than a writer. They don’t seek out a wide range of contemporary writers, or a range of ethnicities or nationalities or styles, because they don’t know enough about the different currents in contemporary literature. Worse, they don’t ask students to read published work at all, or just give them links and lists to explore in their own time, without guidance or follow-up.

Some people explain that criticism must be sandwiched with wedges of praise, because otherwise the writer will dissolve into a heap of brown sugar. Some ask me, voice trembling, if I use the dreaded Iowa Method, where (they believe) students get nothing but forty lashes and a crack around the ear, and are all forced to write in the manner of Raymond Carver.

I feel very strongly that teaching creative writing is teaching. You need to be an able and inventive teacher as well as an accomplished writer. You need to be a catholic reader with both a broad and deep knowledge of books and writers in the genres you teach. You need to be willing and able to work with writers whose work does not resemble your own, because you’re trying to help each writer take the next step in his or her work.

You need to be able to manage a workshop, to facilitate a discussion that’s useful to the author, and useful to the participants as well, because they’re being prodded to articulate responses to a piece of creative work, and because they’re grappling with many of the same issues. When you set exercises, do them as well, or at least know you can do them: exercises should be challenging, but not impossible.

You need to be generous in sharing your time, expertise and your imagination too – because in some ways you’ll be a creative collaborator with your writers, the way the best editors are.

You will stay home at the weekend reading manuscripts. To all the creative writing teachers who complain about the work, as though they’re being sent down a salt mine on a twelve-hour shift: there are worse ways to spend your time. Try to be of use – or give up and get a real job. Just don’t be lazy.

 

 

Elsewhere

It's a year since I moved back to New Zealand. People ask me, all the time, if I've come home for good. (I wrote a book about this, a long essay called On Coming Home.)

There are many good things about living in my home town, Auckland, again, after thirty years, especially being close to my family. My nephew drops off a piece of furniture for us and takes away another; my niece comes around to drink tea and watch something we've recorded for her; her flatmate arrives on Christmas Eve afternoon just to hang out while I cook for the evening. There's a constant flow of things - DVDs, wine, scarves, books, stuff each of us is trying to offload - between me and my sister. We find things in the supermarket to tempt my father, who isn't eating much these days (the key: must contain meat and gravy). My brother comes by to go to the movies with one of us, or to take a walk with us along Tamaki Drive. This is all ordinary life to many people, but I've never really had this kind of experience. I've always lived too far away.

I like Auckland as well, more and more. It's not half as cold and wet in the winter as other Aucklanders think; they should try a year or two in Glasgow. Because we live right in town, on the edge of Myers Park, we don't have to deal with traffic or parking; we walk to concerts and plays and movies. I walk to work, and because the hill up through Albert Park is very steep, it's officially deemed exercise. (This means my Olympic Dream is still alive, though a sitting-down sport remains my preference.) Last year I made a number of visits to Otahuhu Intermediate School over several months, to work with the students there on their writing. That school made me love Auckland, and feel both tremendous hope and despair, because of all the spark and potential there, and because of the increasingly divided city in which the kids are growing up.

Every six weeks or so we have a salon at the flat for writers and people in the writing/publishing world. We serve no food, in order to persuade people to leave at some point. This is the difference between New Zealanders and British people. New Zealanders will leave because they're hungry. Even if they hadn't eaten all day, the British wouldn't leave until all the alcohol was gone.

Much of my writing life has been consumed this past year by other demands, not surprising when a new job is involved, and even less surprising when that job includes supervising twelve fiction writers each working on a book. I've also been working on a new initiative, the Academy of New Zealand Literature, that will launch in April, and it's a massive undertaking.

So the ghost that's haunted me for much of the last year is my own work, and I try to appease that ghost whenever I can. Residencies are an escape for me, a chance to jar myself out of routines and duties, a chance to be surrounded by foreign languages and sights and ways of seeing. I like the feeling of an obligation to work, and new things around me that may open some windows in my head, or infect my subconscious. Sometimes I get lonely, but that's not a bad thing. ('I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so' - see William Carlos Williams.)

In the past year I've had two month-long residencies - the first in Ventspils, Latvia, and the second in Brussels. That's where I am now, writing in the soft grey light of late afternoon. (Actually, that's turned, with incredible speed, into just plain darkness, enlivened by drizzle and a whistling wind.) I've been quite lonely here - lonelier than I was in Latvia, where I had a room in a shared house of writers and translators. Though in Latvia I did have to spend some time in hospital, which was lonely, not to mention post-Soviet, in its own special way. I don't mind having long stretches alone, or eating by myself in cafes or restaurants. But sometimes my social nature rebels against all this imposed isolation, and I need to get out. Yesterday afternoon I went to some talks organised by the Bronte Society; tomorrow morning I teach a creative writing class for university students. On Thursday night the New Zealand ambassador has invited me to dinner. I've met quite a few friendly people here, from Belgium and other places; my dearest friend visited from Wales and we sampled numerous Belgian beers. So it's not exactly Siberia. It's not even that cold, though Aucklanders would be alarmed and despondent at these actual winter days.

The first pictures here are of the house in Ventspils where I stayed, then my room (where I slept and wrote), and then the name of the organisation that made my residency possible. The second group of pictures are of the building in Brussels where I've been given a flat for the month (owned by the writer David Van Reybrouck, whose book Congo I'm reading at the moment), then the room in which I write, then the organisation that offered me the residency.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm lucky to be lonely in such places.

In a week's time I'll be flying home, through Frankfurt and Shanghai, arriving just in time to start teaching. I need to keep writing as well, if I want to finish the stories I've started, and have my novel drafted by July, as I've planned. Perhaps I need to find a way to be lonely at home as well.

Not Real Life

On Friday night I attended an awards ceremony at the Stationers’ Hall in London. Earlier that day, I had a makeover at the NARS counter in John Lewis. I told the sales person that I wanted to look decent for the event that night. By “decent” I meant not like the red-faced harridan I’d seen reflected back at me in every shop window on Oxford Street.

“What kind of awards ceremony?” she asked me. Writing, I told her, and she said that her sister was “training” to become a writer; she’d just finished a creative writing degree in Winchester, and was planning to write fantasy novels. “Not real life,” the sales person said, meaning the novels, I think, rather than the ambition.

All day I felt sick with nerves, and ashamed of myself, too, for wanting to win a prize. The story, “False River,” is very dear to me, because I wrote it after Sarah Doerries died; I wrote it for her, and about her, and it has more personal resonance for me than much of my other work. And, of course, I wanted the money that the prize brought, so I could pay lots of people back, and buy Tom Moody a new phone. This was the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Awards, and the sponsors are extremely generous. Usually the only payment I get for a short story is a free copy of the journal in which it’s appeared, so the notion of winning £30,000 had turned my head. It’s much, much more than I earned the whole of last year, from teaching and royalties and all the bits of writing I do for other people. But all six of us on the shortlist would have liked the money, of course, and all six of us wrote good stories.

And awards for writing or any kind of art are not just about the money. They’re a moment in the sun for people who may feel they live an otherwise obscure and shadowy life. I’ve been working on a long personal essay called “On Coming Home,” and  came across this from Joseph Brodsky, in his speech “The Condition We Call Exile.” There are “too many writers around per reader,” said Brodsky. “And very few among those thousands [of writers] are … particularly good. But the public will read them, and not you, in spite of your halo, not because it is perverse or misguided but because statistically it is on the side of normalcy and trash. In other words, it wants to read about itself. On any street of any city in the world at any time of night or day there are more people who haven’t heard of you than those who have.”

 All of us – me, Elizabeth McCracken, Madeleine Thien, Scott O’Connor, Rebecca F. John and YiYun Li, who won the award on Friday night for her fantastic story “A Sheltered Woman” – had felt the peculiar exhilaration and queasiness of standing in the sun for the past few days, during two evenings of WordTheatre events at Foyles where well-known actors read our stories aloud. We sat together, twitching and grimacing when our own stories were read, dreading the moment when the story ended and we were summoned forward to hug the actor and blink, with embarrassed smiles, at the audience. True to authorial form, we knocked back free wine and grabbed so many free Sunday Times tote bags we could have set up a market stall. Then we went out together to drink more wine and gossip. The time spent in each other’s company, and listening to each other’s stories, was the great pleasure of the week. We were all outsiders in London: Rebecca had come down from Wales, and the rest of us from overseas – the US, Canada, New Zealand.

All week I’ve lurched from feeling outside to inside to outside again. It was hard sometimes not to feel like an interloper on the shortlist, with no London agent or editor at the readings, no books on the sales table. But at the awards dinner on Friday, I was flanked by Simon Prosser from Hamish Hamilton, who published my story in Five Dials, and my good friend Deborah Keyser. Also at our table: Lionel Shriver, and Gary Dourdan, the actor who’d performed my story at Foyles. I spent much of the mingling time abusing my on-the-shortlist status by accosting people I wanted to meet – Colin Thubron, Ian Hislop, Joanne Trollope, and Richard Eyre, among others. Just in case I was feeling too much of an insider, however, my name wasn’t read out when all the shortlisted authors were introduced. Lurch, lurch, lurch.

This is what C. S. Lewis talked about in ‘The Inner Ring,’ an address he gave in London in 1944. The desire to be an insider is toxic. Trying to be “inside the invisible line,” he said, is impossible, because there are always more lines. “As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want … Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”

His advice was to “make the work your end,” and I try to remember this. The work is the thing, not the events or the awards or the dinners, not the rejections or the acceptances, not the reviews or the royalties. Sometimes I have a version of this discussion with students, or with people at dinner parties, who tell me that only fame and fortune count; anything less than public success renders you a hobbyist, a second-rate writer. Once, at a party during the Auckland Writers Festival, a British author asked me to confirm that another novelist at the party was “the most important writer in New Zealand.” He didn’t want to waste his time talking to writers who didn’t share his status. It was the inner ring or nothing.

Yesterday I didn’t feel disappointed about not winning. Mainly I felt hungover. But there’s another feeling there, awoken by listening to everyone else’s stories this week – and by listening to my own story being read by someone else. The feeling is the desire to get on with my work. I love writing fiction, and I haven’t had much time to do that lately – starting a new teaching job in Auckland, moving into a new place, working on the essay. I have the novel starting to take shape, and five stories towards a second collection, which perhaps no one will want to publish, but that’s OK: the work is the thing. That’s the feeling I’ll take home with me, to my real life, after the turbulence and unreality of the past few days. That, and a suitcase crammed with Sunday Times tote bags.

 

 

Christmas 2014: An Apology

Usually, the Scudder Road Circus sends out a lot of Christmas cards – more than a hundred, I’d guess, to family and friends all over the world – and we start writing them in November. I really like getting cards (especially if said cards are glittery), and I’ve always been a big advocate of Christmas cards as a way of staying in touch with people who have shown you kindness or hospitality or generosity at some point in your life, people whose friendship made a difference in your life. Every year I urge my students to send at least one card to an elderly person of their acquaintance – a family friend, former teacher, relative, or neighbour. One of them asked me, last month, if I counted as sufficiently elderly.

I do not.

This year I’m letting the side down by sending just a handful of cards. It’s not been a ‘usual’ year in any way. We’ve had some fantastic and productive excursions to other places – to the Lakes, to Denmark, to Italy, to Berlin. (Even to Brussels.) But we’ve also had a lot of upheaval, like my radiotherapy earlier this year, and sadness. My mother died in August, and Tom’s younger brother died, quite suddenly, at the end of November. We didn’t have the heart to write cheery cards.

This year has been too strange, perhaps. On some days in Svendborg, I felt an almost perfect happiness, content with every simple pleasure, every small thing. In Bellagio we felt lucky – absolutely lucky – just to be there, every day. But there have been too many days this year rotten with sadness or tiredness, or a combination of both.

We have just a month or so left in Sheffield, then the Scudder Road Circus is on the move again. In February, we pitch our tent in Auckland, New Zealand, my home town, and I start teaching at the university in March. We have more travel planned next year, of course, including a stint teaching in Iowa City in July, and a month-long residency in Latvia starting in mid-November. But for much of the year we’ll be in the southern hemisphere, hoping to stay for a while.

Happy Christmas from me and Tom Moody. We’ll be back in Christmas-card action next year, I promise. The post offices of Latvia are bracing themselves for the onslaught.