Trendy But Casual

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.”

 

 

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.

My Three Dots

This is a picture taken around 1893. It’s my great-great-grandmother, Rahui Te Kiri, with Ngapeka, the daughter of her first marriage, to Te Roa. My great-grandfather, Kiri Tenetahi Brown (Paraone) was a child of her second marriage, to Tenetahi.

In 1893 Rahui was probably in her 60s. She died in 1930, outliving Tenetahi and two of her sons, including my great-grandfather. I was looking at her will the other day and saw my grandmother’s name listed there, Hene Te Kiri Paraone. Grandma was in her late 20s when Rahui died, and already married to my grandfather. I wish I’d asked them more questions.

Rahui’s will is signed with her mark, a shaky X. It’s hard to see in the photograph above, but Rahui had a signature of a different kind, the moko (tattoo) on her face. The grooves in her skin were made with various plain and serrated chisels, either made of bone or metal.

My great-grandmother, Grace Tihoi Amos, didn’t have a moko; neither did my grandmother or any of her sisters. For them, its visual language no longer held the same currency. My grandmother, Jane (Hene), and her sisters Bella (Pera), Tottie (Rihi Paea), Roto (Rotorua) and Grace (Kerehi) attended school in Pakiri and learned how to write their names in English.

The only tattoo I saw I up close when I was a child belonged to my grandfather, Alf. He had a bird on his forearm: a sea bird, I think, blue and not very detailed. When I was small I liked to look at it and trace my fingers across it, but he was shy about it; maybe he didn’t want to give me any ideas.

I’m not keen on contemporary moko that turns what was a language, a precise series of signals about status and kinship and particular skills, into decorative gibberish. But then, I never thought I’d get a tattoo at all.

This month I got three tattoos – blue dots, made with a needle rather than a chisel. (“You’ll feel a  sharp scratch,” the radiographer said, because this is now the medical euphemism for something piercing and painful.) These dots are there to guide the green lines beaming down onto what one of my friends calls the sun bed. It’s like Braille for a machine, I guess, a language of a different kind.

My three dots seem so pathetic compared with the marks on Rahui’s chin, something that implied great pride and great pain. She had a moko; I have an ellipsis. Every morning I go to Weston Park Hospital for the machine to read the dots, and to zap between the lines. (I’m using top medical terminology here; after all, I AM a doctor.) Unlike a moko, my dots can be hidden away; they’re a secret that thousands of us carry around, written on the body, along with a strange rectangle of tan. Though this must go on all over the world, it feels like a peculiarly British thing to me at the moment – the polite tattoo, discreet and easily hidden, whispering its coded language every morning on a hard table, in a cold room.

When the radiotherapy ends at the end of February, I get to keep the three dots. Hopefully, unlike Cheryl Cole, I won’t become addicted to the “sharp scratch” and decide to add a few dozen roses. I hope I’ll never come to think of tattoo as decoration. I hope that the three dots will be my only souvenir.

 

 

 

Resolution

New year, new intentions. Or old intentions (get more work, do more work, earn more money) dressed up in optimistic spring shades, swishing their skirts. Plus some abandoned intentions from last year, of course. My short-story-a-day promise collided with my post-surgery indolence, and that was that. I managed to scrape to 236:

226: ‘Music in the Bone’ by Tomas Mac Siomoin
227: ‘The Colonel’s Daughter’ by Robert Coover (2013)
228: ‘A Few Problems in the Day Case Unit’ by Georgina Hammick (1986)
229: ‘My Heart’ by Semezdin Mehmedinovic (2011)
230: ‘Crazy in the Stir’ by Chester B. Himes (1934)
231: ‘Before the Breakup’ by Balla (2005)
232: ‘The End of the Party’ by Graham Greene (1929)
233: ‘When the Glasses are Lost’ by Zrko Kujundziski (2011)
234: ‘The Face’ by Dragan Radulovic (2007)
235: ‘Sugar Cane’ by Derek Palacio (2013)
236:  ‘Last Summer in Marienbad’ by Kirill Kobrin (2011)

Not quite the 365 I intended, but 236 new stories isn't too bad.

Maybe that was the story of 2013 for me: not quite, but not too bad. We got to travel to Hamburg and Berlin and Rome again, to Monterrey for my nephew's wedding, and to Spain for Tom's birthday. I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, courtesy of a Carnegie Grant, to research Jean Rhys for a play I want to write. In May I went home to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and we spent Christmas in Tom's hometown of St Louis. I attended the Man Booker Prize in London. We visited friends there, and in Wales, York, and the Cotswolds; we met up with my English cousins in Newcastle, Sheffield, York. With Tom's mother we went back to Whitby and to the Lake District. The Devlin sisters stayed with us (without parents) for the first time. Other firsts: Rievaulx Abbey, Fountains Abbey, Haddon Hall, Bakewell, the top of the Shard. We spent our anniversary in Liverpool, one of our favourite places.

In 2013 we flirted with insolvency; I flirted with cancer; we both got very cosy with the NHS. I escaped the worst colleague ever and a job that pushed me to the edge. We made the happy move to a new job in Sheffield and a flat in an old cutlery factory alongside a noisy little river. In Glasgow I hosted a baby shower for my friend Doris; in Auckland I co-hosted a bridal shower for Martha, now married to my nephew. At the University of Sheffield, Tom took (and survived) a CELTA course in a long, hot July, and I studied Spanish this autumn. We saw more plays than movies. We watched almost all of BREAKING BAD. (The last few episodes have been saved as a new year's treat.)

Two new books published: a YA novel and my first children's book. Two stories commissioned, and a few poems published. A little manuscript fixing and ghostwriting. Too many false starts, conference calls and proposals that went nowhere in particular. Rejections and acceptances. Literary festivals, school visits, and talks via Skype. Interviews with Donna Tartt (phone) and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in person). Self-doubt, despair, bursts of enthusiasm. Stories and schemes jostling in my head.

Two sparkling friends no longer here: Sarah Mohl and Sarah Doerries. It still feels implausible and wrong to write those words. They're ahead of me now, with my cousin (and godfather) Laly Haddon, and my mother's dear friend Cron Crosby, two towering men who didn't see out 2013.

This year I wasn't planning to make any new resolutions, but today a name swirled into mind: Graham Greene. I'd like to read more of his work, and I'd like to try my hand at writing every day, as he did - though I won't stop mid-sentence when I've reached 500, his usual goal.

So that's my 2014 resolution: Graham Greene. It's all I can manage, given that ongoing resolution - write, work, earn - mentioned above.

Tom Moody and I ended 2013 by getting very dressed up in Mexico. We may not look so well-groomed in 2014, and I will almost certainly not be wearing false eyelashes again at any point. But we'll keep on being happy, and trying to make something of ourselves, in our own haphazard way.

 

The Glamour of International Travel

TMiddy and I are jetsetters. You all know this. Sometimes I wish that this involved things like being invited to someone's villa in Ibiza, or onto someone's yacht anywhere, but it does not. Usually it means that I travel back and forth to Auckland, and TM travels back and forth to St Louis; sometimes, when other people are paying, we go to Germany. And that's about it. True, we were recently in Spain for another category of trip, known as The Holiday We Cannot Afford. But that was for TM's biggest-ever birthday, and absolutely brilliant and worth it in every way, not least because lots of other people came as well, and we got to laugh and eat and drink a lot, and play charades with categories like Tudor Women and Books By Hitler.

Today is a jetsetting day, by which I mean we woke up this morning in Sheffield and now, about seventeen hours later, we're in Dulles airport in Washington DC. We missed our connection to St Louis so we'll be here for some time.

Here are some things I observed along the way today. On the walk from our place to the train station in Sheffield, we saw a smashed wine bottle, a scattering of squashed chips and a shop coathanger (size 14), all strewn in close proximity. The coathanger was broken. A crime scene?

In Manchester airport, without any cash, we dusted off my United Club card and attempted to infiltrate every possible executive club in search of a free breakfast. This was unsuccessful until, after overhearing my plaintive call to the United helpdesk (confirming that we have no access to anything anywhere in the UK other than Heathrow), the desk guy at one club took pity on us and let us in. This was a lesson I learned living in the US. (Thanks, America!) Be polite but be persistent: you may wear someone down. The reward, in Manchester at least, will be free cereal and tea.

When we jetsetted off to Spain last month, we flew with Lufthansa and Swissair. On these airlines, the crew are polite, professional and friendly, and they speak several languages. Today we flew with United. The crew members dealing with those of us in the cheap seats did not smile. Not once. Actually, I was impressed at how resolutely unsmiling they could be for almost nine hours, thrusting polystyrene cup of teas at us, and barking "beef, chicken or vegetarian?" when serving our one meal. No free drinks, of course, or menus, or pleasantries. It could make sense if United were a budget airline, and politeness was one of the dispensed-with frills, but it isn't. This trip cost us a fortune. I'd rather deal with the bare-bones Ryanair: at least they're jolly.

Today's jetsetting highlight, though: a very clear view of Greenland. I've never seen it before. We were passing the southeast corner, I think, so all we could see was a great tumble of rocks, everything jagged and icy, various inlets dotted with trawlers. No towns or houses or rivers in view. I tried to take pictures with my phone, but the clouds and the ice and the frosty sea blurred into one on the screen - Greenland defying technology. A part of me hoped we would have to make some unscheduled stop there, and possibly spend the night.

Here at Dulles we had an hour to make the connection, and most of that was spent queuing in Immigration, or listening to desperate people shout and complain and beg in the security line. Still cash-free, we're spending the five hours until the next flight in the United lounge, watching football on TV, abusing the free house cabernet, and eating a tasty and nutritious free dinner: yoghurt-covered raisins, mini-carrots, greasy cheese squares in plastic wrapping, etc. I think I may have seen a commercial on TV for pizza made with cookie dough, but I may be hallucinating.

This is true jetsetting, FYI. The world of Sheffield - broken glass and coathangers, the pallid smear of cold chips - seems a universe away. By midnight we'll be in snowy St Louis, the home of toasted ravioli. If we're lucky, our bags will be there as well. In my carry-on I have three boxes of mince pies and all our American Christmas cards, and my mother's garnet ring, which I'll wear to my nephew's wedding in Mexico next week. In Tom's carry-on is a copy of The Economist, just pilfered from the United lounge. Please don't judge us because of our glamorous life. 

 

What Not to Wear

TMiddy usually knows things - for example, what time the football is starting, or that there's no such word as "refrigidation." I know I can always ask him, say, what day of the week is it? and he'll have a definitive answer.

But very occasionally he is uncertain. When we received the invitation for my nephew's upcoming wedding in Monterrey, Mexico, we were both a little confused. Firstly, it's in Spanish, and I'm not starting Spanish classes until next week. (All I can manage right now is an order for patatas bravas, and an impersonation of my Puerto Rican doctor back in New York.)

Secondly, it uses the word FORMAL. Formal in New Zealand and formal everywhere else - except southern California, maybe - is quite different. Formal in New Zealand means you've remembered to put on some shoes, though you may not be planning to keep them on for long.

Formal at a wedding in Monterrey, we understand, means black tie and ball gowns. It means red-carpet wear. This should be no problem for TMiddy, as he has a smart Armani tux from back in the olden days, before the Internet was invented, when he was known as Tom Moody and went to the Oscars. (He ran the marketing campaign for A ROOM WITH A VIEW.)

But still, TM was unsure. We are Godparents of the Rings at this wedding, and have to stand up during the church service to be seen by all. Important, he said, to make a sartorial splash.

His first thought was this: although he's from El Norte, maybe TM should take the opportunity to represent/promote New Zealand?

Or maybe not. Then he thought: Monterrey isn't that far from New Orleans, and might be warm in December. Maybe roll out some Jazz Fest gear?

I vetoed this. One day, all of TM's Jazz Fest T-shirts will meet with some terrible accident e.g. burning. It will be a sad day for tie-dye.

At the very least, I suggested, he should wear his tux jacket.

Though maybe not with the yellow Beatles T-shirt, even if it does have my birthday printed on it.

Seeing that T-shirt reminded us of the lovely yellow bow that my sister hid in my luggage this May. She'd been trying to fob it off as a "prize" at Martha's bridal shower, and I'd told her it was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. Imagine my surprise when I unpacked back in the UK, and found it stuffed into one of my boots.

TM has taken quite a shine to this yellow bow, arguing that it can make any outfit dressy, even if the weather is warm.

And if the weather is cold, all he needs to do is throw on some jeans, a pair of slippers, and my velvet evening coat:

See? Instantly formal.

I don't know. He may just have to settle for a tux, white shirt, black tie, cufflinks ensemble. He doesn't want anyone to be distracted from his planned Godfather of the Rings dance, the choreography for which remains top-secret.

Don't forget to check in over at Everybody Needs Two or Three Friends, and to read my Tweets from the Man Booker Prize ceremony on October 15th - I'll be tweeting that night as @nzlistener. I've just found out that my alter ego, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, will be there as well. The two of us in the same room? Watch that space.

New Zealand in Berlin

TM and I are just back from Berlin, where I was taking part in an event called the Berlin Sofa at the English Theatre. Peter Rider, the New Zealand ambassador to Germany, invited me to join him so we could present a short program on NZ lit, with lots of readings and chat.

We divided our presentation into four sections - The Edge of the Universe; This Sporting Life; Islanders; and Flying Kiwi.

The Edge of the Universe - our unique place in the world

‘New Zealand begins with sea and ends with sea. Understand this and you begin to comprehend New Zealand and the New Zealander.’ Maurice Shadbolt

 Poems by Bill Manhire (‘Milky Way Bar’); Allen Curnow (‘House and Land’), and Denis Glover ('Home Thoughts'); part of the story ‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield; the final page of Making Peoples by historian James Belich; and two novel excerpts: The Matriarch by Witi Ihimaera and Tu by Patricia Grace.

This Sporting Life - our national obsession

‘Apart from history, there are only two spheres in which New Zealand has been a world superpower. One is the export of protein. The other is sport.’ James Belich

 Excerpts from two novels - The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones and Lovelock by James McNeish, and my father's favourite poem,  ‘Referee’ by Hinemoana Baker.

Islanders - voices from the edge

“In a country inhabited for a mere one thousand years, everyone is an immigrant or the descendent of an immigrant.” Michael King

An excerpt from the novel Going West by Maurice Gee, and poems by Selina Tusitala March (‘Guys Like Gauguin’); Sonja Yelich (‘talking to a brick wall’); Tusiata Avia (‘Aunty Lapo’a calls Nafanua and talks about her holiday’); Alison Wong (‘Chinese Settlement, Arrowtown’ and ‘One Hundred Pounds’); and Karlo Mila ('Sacred Pulu').

Flying Kiwi - writers (and books) that roam

“The islands are moving.” Dylan Horrocks

Excerpts from two novels - The Conductor by Sarah Quigley and Rangatira (by me) and from the essay ‘NZ Return’ by the late, great Nigel Cox.

In addition to the readings, we showed various clips, beginning with clip of the All Blacks' haka (there was method to this madness - believe me: we wanted to talk about oral traditions, and also about exploring NZ BEYOND the All Blacks), then a short film about our books and writers made when New Zealand was invited to be 2012 Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. At the end of the second section, just before the break - for a good deal of NZ wine - we showed an amazing clip of Jack Lovelock winning the 1500 metres and breaking the world record at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, with a commentary by Harold Abrahams. At the medal ceremony, by the way, the anthem played was God Save the King ...

During the 'pause' we played some footage from the Diversity Stage at Polyfest, so people could see the range of cultures and languages represented in Auckland high schools. You can see the 2012 performances here. At the very end of the programme, after we talked about possible futures for NZ lit, and emerging new voices. So of course we couldn't resist ending with a clip of Joshua Iosefo's 'Brown Brother' speech. You can see the original and the TV3 version on YouTube.

The event was quite a success, I think, with a good-sized audience of both native English- and German-speakers. Peter Rider was an excellent reader, and I hammed it up, as ever. Lots of audience members wanted to hang around and talk afterwards. We wanted to include more excerpts, but time was limited, of course. The audience especially liked the third section, even though there were numerous cultural references (and words from various languages) that were new to them. People were willing to make the imaginative leap, and to immerse themselves in the unexpected, the unfamiliar ... Unlike a certain profoundly ignorant Danish politician.

I loved being in Berlin. I like the way cities jolt me out of routine, the way they swarm over me with their new noises and sights and smells. (And tastes, too: let's not forget currywurst.) The picture above is us in the dome of the Reichstag. Below are a few more Berlin pictures - random, of course, as I can't seem to manage anything orderly these days.