New Zealand Book Council

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Writing at the edge of the universe?
Aotearoa New Zealand authors share their perspectives
By Rachel O'Neill

In the introduction to VUP's excellent 2009 anthology, Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets, editors Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack suggest that New Zealand poets, living as they do 'at the edge of the universe', feel a particular freedom in their writing ‒ 'to experiment always, in the spirit of discovery and invention'. Testing this thought, I asked five authors whether they write, don’t write, or write on occasion at the edge of the universe. What are the edges and centres, middles and outsides that preoccupy, challenge and inspire them?

Playwright, and Commonwealth Writers Prize shortlisted novelist, Whiti Hereaka (Ngati Tuwharetoa, Te Arawa), reflected on the place where her stories are from. ‘I have never felt as if I am at the edge of the universe.’ She said. ‘Like an over-grown two year old, I’ve regarded us as the centre of the universe. Not in a cringingly patriotic way. I’m not one of those people who are dismayed that the world’s attention is not squarely on a small nation in the South Pacific. I think of New Zealand as the centre of my universe because this is where my stories are from, this is where I am from.’

Poet, academic and anthologist Harry Ricketts reflected on the idea that ‘the edge is both geographical place and state of mind.' He continued, 'New Zealand is an edge and full of edges; so too are the UK, the US, Chile, Sri Lanka... Many, perhaps most, writers see themselves as living and writing at the edge though that may not be how others perceive them, or come to perceive them. For the writer, I think it comes down to preserving the personal myth, which makes the edge at once overcrowded and pretty empty.’

Novelist, poet, academic and artist, Albert Wendt, spoke of what it means to write the ‘universe’ into existence from within it. He said, ‘I do not live or write at the ‘edge of the universe’. I write from within one of the most culturally diverse regions of our planet, Le Vasa Loloa, the Pacific, and from within a ‘universe’ which I’ve written into existence over the stretch of my life and which I’ll continue to reshape until I stop reading, writing, painting and imagining. I never intended that universe. It came into being because I couldn’t and can’t stop writing. I no longer feel unsafe among its often terrifying inhabitants, locations, climates, and future, and it helps me understand and forgive the so-called ‘real world’.’

Poet and biology teacher Airini Beautrais pondered the word 'universe' itself. ‘I think the word 'universe' is a convenient, multi-purpose blanket term for a variety of things we don't fully understand,’ she said, ‘from the scientific universe to all the smaller universes we inhabit in our daily lives. So I think that writing 'at the edge of the universe' means being at the limits of our personal understanding and exploring that with language. I tend not to write about things that I've thought about many times, but rather things that have just crossed my mind. I might utilise clichés or familiar motifs to describe people and events, I might sometimes be silly rather than serious, irreverent or profane rather than profound. The important thing for me is that there's some sense of newness, or expansion of thinking.’

The possibility of the universe being both here and over there was evoked by fiction writer and founder of 'literary slash art journal' Hue & Cry, Chloe Lane. She responded with a creative anecdote, ‘I stand on my parents’ front lawn, the sun on my face, and look across the sea to the point where it meets the sky. There’s nothing there, for two thousand kilometres. But I’m absolutely convinced I can see land. Any day I can look and see the jagged ascension of land from sea. I think about how long it will take me to swim there. I’m optimistic. It’s just over there, I say. Really, they say? Yes. They know better, but still they come and stand with me. And optimistically we look, together.’
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You can read this feature article with writers bio’s in the Readers section of our website. See the giveaways section of this newsletter to be in to win two copies of Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets, courtesy of VUP. Bill Manhire's poem 'Milky Way Bar', from which the line 'I live at the edge of the universe, like everybody else' is taken, appears in his 1987 collection of the same name.

Five Easy Questions with Hamish Clayton

We ask novelist Hamish Clayton five easy questions about his first novel Wulf. Set in early nineteenth-century New Zealand, Wulf tells of the great chief Te Rauparaha who has conquered tiny Kapiti Island, from which Ngati Toa launches brutal attacks on its southern enemies, travelling by sail on the Elizabeth.

1. When did the Anglo-Saxon poem Wulf and Eadwacer become integral to your retelling of Te Rauparaha’s advance south?
The initial spark for the novel was the sudden idea that some lines of the poem seemed to correlate with aspects of what I knew about Te Rauparaha’s history. Even though the echoes between the history and the poem were faint – the idea of a warrior upon an island, an evocation of inevitable slaughter – to me they were compelling. I read a lot about Te Rauparaha to find how many more resonances there might be. When I stumbled upon the episode involving the trade with a ship, the Elizabeth, the suggestion of infanticide at the conclusion of the poem became something real and tangible, and gave the whole exercise purchase; importantly it decided which episode from Te Raupraha’s history would provide the stage for the novel. Once I knew what the end point of the novel would be, then the idea that as the sailors moved south they would hear about Te Rauparaha’s movement along the same coast in the years before seemed a nice resonance, another riff on the novel’s central idea of histories and cultures echoing one another.

2. Wulf and Eadwacer has a reputation as a bit of a riddle poem. Did this inform the way you chose to write about historic events in Wulf?
Yes. The idea that the poem’s ultimate, settled, meaning withholds itself appealed to my sense of the difficulty in rendering a historicised subject matter. I love the sense of elusive meaning which permeates the poem. There is something happening in that poem, surely, but it sits just out of clear focus. It’s that sense that spoke to the way I imagined how a sailor from early 19th-century England might have felt about encountering a new country for the first time. In turn, I tried to recreate that shifting, fleeting grasp of meaning, in the novel’s dénouement.

3. Do you think the role of novelist is markedly different from that of historian in terms of working with varied interpretations of historical events?
I’m not an historian so perhaps I can’t really say with any authority. I would say that I’m not particularly excited by novels that seem to render a certain historical time and place without any thought to the politics of representation that accompanies the act of recreation. The kinds of historical re-imaginings I go in for are ones like Lloyd Jones’s Book of Fame

, or Michael Ondaatje’s pair: Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. These are novels that render a living, breathing reality on the page, but their mood of historical fidelity is ingeniously – paradoxically, even – wrought through aesthetics that feel utterly contemporary, and hence vital. Because of that they become historical novels which actually dare to suggest something about the way we receive history. They acknowledge that theirs is a contemporary take on what has been. You’d have to ask an historian if that’s what they try to do.

4. What are you working on at the moment?
Ostensibly a PhD. This is about, among other things, David Ballantyne’s 1968 novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down. I am also doing some editing work through a company I’ve started with a friend and colleague. I’m thinking about a couple of reviews I’ve got to write: one for New Zealand Books and another for Art New Zealand. And I’m underway on another novel. Whenever I can, I love to shut the door and disappear into that for a few hours.

5. What’s on your bedside table at the moment?
Some CDs (Bob Dylan; Radiohead; DJ Shadow; and Miles Davis). A card from some friends who came to the launch of Wulf. My cricket cap. A glass of water. The paw-prints of the cat who keeps drinking the water while I’m asleep.
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Hamish Clayton was born in Hawke's Bay. He holds degrees in Art History and English Literature and he is currently working on a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington. Wulf is his first novel.

Book Council News

Remembering Yvonne du Fresne

The Book Council joins the family and friends of Yvonne du Fresne, and the wider writing community, in expressing great sadness at her death in Wellington on Sunday 13 March 2011, aged 81.

Yvonne du Fresne was a fiction writer whose work was often set in the Danish-French Huguenot community and finely examined non-British European cultures in New Zealand. She was a music teacher and scriptwriter, and three of du Fresne’s radio plays were broadcast on National Radio. Her first collection of short fiction won the PEN Best First Book Award and subsequent books won several literary prizes. While on a 1999 Writers Residency at Aarhus University Jutland, Denmark, du Fresne established future residencies there for New Zealand writers.

A service to celebrate the life of Yvonne was held at the Cockburn Street Chapel in Wellington on Thursday, 17 March. To read more about the life and work of Yvonne du Fresne visit her Book Council Writers file here.

Join in New Zealand Book Month

New Zealand Book Month will be extended to 31 May in Christchurch. Due to overwhelming support, New Zealand Book Month is sharing information about which bookstores are open during this special extension for Christchurch on their website. This means people in Christchurch can redeem $5 Book Month vouchers until 31 May. The vouchers have been on hold until now due to the earthquake.

Residency, funding and competition applications

Please note this is only a sample of literary opportunities from the news page on our website:

Unleash your inner poet – hold an event on National Poetry Day 2011

Proposals are now being sought from Kiwis around the country who love poetry, and would like to hold a special event on Friday 22 July in celebration of National Poetry Day 2011. Established in 1998, National Poetry Day has grown to become one of the most anticipated events on the arts calendar, with a unique and eclectic range of rap artists, performance poets and poetry slams on offer.

To register and request a Funding Application Pack please contact Siobhan Harvey, who will be on hand between now and July 22, 2011 to help any interested parties with advice on organising a National Poetry Day 2011 event. Funding is limited but available. If you would like to apply for funding, you can do so by emailing Siobhan Harvey to request a funding application pack at siobhanhrvy@gmail.com or in writing to Siobhan Harvey, Coordinator National Poetry Day 2011, PO Box 125 135, St. Heliers Post Office, Auckland 1740.

The deadline for completed funding application forms is Friday May 27, 2011.

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Call for applications - Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency

Fulbright New Zealand and Creative New Zealand invite applications for the 2011 Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency, an award which offers a New Zealand writer of Pacific heritage the opportunity to work for three months on a creative writing project exploring Pacific identity, culture or history at the University of Hawai'i.

The project may be in any genre, but priority is given to works that focus on developing New Zealand literature in the genres of fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction (including biography, history, arts-related and cultural topics) and playwriting. The residency is valued at NZ$30,000, and this year's Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency is available from August to November 2011. The deadline for applications is 5:00pm, Friday 1 April. For more information please visit the Creative New Zealand website.

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The National Schools Poetry Award

The search is on for the best and most original poems from New Zealand’s young writers with the return of the National Schools Poetry Award. Year 12 and 13 secondary school students are being urged to express themselves, during a time that for some has been one of grief and trauma. Ten talented writers will win prizes for their poems, including the opportunity to attend a master class with leading New Zealand poets at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington on 20 August.

The first prize winner will receive $500 cash, as well as $500 for their school library. The entry deadline is 15 June 2011, and entry forms, guidelines and writing tips for the Poetry Award are online here. The winner and shortlisted poets will be announced on National Poetry Day, 22 July. Judge for the 2011 Award is New Zealand Poet Laureate and recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement, Cilla McQueen.

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PANZ Book Design Awards

PANZ are now calling for entries for the 2011 PANZ Book Design Awards with a closing date of Friday 29 April 2011. A shortlist will be announced early in June, and the PANZ Book Design Awards event will be held in Auckland on Thursday 25 August 2011. Download entry criteria and entry form on the PANZ website. All enquiries to Anne de Lautour: anne@publishers.org.nz

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The New Zealand Book Council receives core funding from Creative New Zealand. We are extremely grateful to our funding partners, who enable us to deliver our programmes. We also value your membership, which supports our work in schools and communities throughout New Zealand.

Writing at the edge of the universe?
Five easy questions with Hamish Clayton
Book Council News
New Zealand Book Month
Residency, funding and competition applications
Watch out for
Literary Prizes
What's on

Congratulations to Bronwen Wall (Wellington), Michael Stace (Raumati South) and Marrion Clark (Roxburgh), who have each won a set of two novels by Bernard Beckett, Genesis and August. Courtesy of Text Publishing.

This month we are giving away two copies of Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets: An Anthology, edited by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack (2009) courtesy of Victoria University Press.

We also have two copies of Annie Proulx's memoir Bird Cloud (2011) to give away, courtesy of HarperCollins NZ.

And to celebrate our Five Easy Questions interview with Hamish Clayton we have two copies of his novel Wulf to give away, courtesy of Penguin NZ.

Enter by emailing reception@bookcouncil.org.nz with the name of the book in the subject line, and your New Zealand postal address in the body of the email. Entries must be received by 12 noon on Friday 8th of April.

Each month an industry specialist tells us about three books they're looking forward to seeing in the bookshops in the weeks ahead.

Following Felicity O'Driscoll's recommendations in last month's e-newsletter, we ask Lynne Jones, David Thorp and Michael Bryne from McLeods Booksellers in Rotorua, to each give us their top book pick. McLeods was established in Rotorua’s Tutanekai Street 90 years ago, and is owned and operated by David Thorp and his wife Lynne Jones.

New Zealand author Barbara Else obviously has young people in her life, keeping her on her toes. If the mark of a good book is the age range of its readership, The Travelling Restaurant (Gecko Press) is a very good book indeed. The central idea is how to trick toddlers into eating their dinner. Most of us can relate to that. Lots of energy, colour and local childlike imagery. The main character, Jasper, is a likeable twelve-year-old boy. Good humoured family stuff with warmth and wit. Lynne Jones.

Mini Modern Classics Box Set 2011 celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Penguin Modern Classic. To mark the occasion, Penguin are publishing a collection of fifty novellas by some of their greatest writers. Having just read The Outsider by Albert Camus, I am reminded of just how good original writing is. There is so much mediocrity – we are frequently being asked by frustrated customers, 'Can you recommend a really GOOD book?' I am looking forward to the Mini Modern Classics. David Thorp.

A Man of Parts by David Lodge (Random House). 'The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy...' Pretty much locates who the 'Man' of the title is. It's fitting then, that H. G. Wells, one of the co-founders of modern Sci-Fi, should be the subject of this fictional biography. David Lodge depicts a man as contradictory as he was talented. If you are interested in where modern science got many of its ideas from and how history is just the most believable lie, here is a tale well told. Michael Byrne.

Joy Cowley and Margaret Mahy have been nominated for The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which amounts to SEK 5 million (approx. 500 000 EUR). It is awarded annually to a single recipient or to several. Authors, illustrators, oral storytellers and promoters of reading may be nominated. The winner or winners of the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award will be announced on March 29.
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New Zealand poet, Johanna Emeney, is one of six finalists for the 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Last year’s winner was New Zealand poet C. K. Stead. Awards for 2011 will be announced 7th May 2011.
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The 2011 All Roads Film Project Seed Grant recipients are Himiona Grace and Briar Grace-Smith, for pre-production funding for their film The Pā Boys. The film will be directed by Himiona Grace, and produced by Briar Grace-Smith.
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Wellington writer Wes Lee has won the biannual Grist New Writing Prize 2011 judged by Helen Simpson in the UK. The winners and shortlisted stories will appear in the Grist Anthology of New Writing 2011.
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Auckland author Ian Robinson has won the top prize at the eighth annual Whitcoulls Travcom Travel Book of the Year Award for Tea with the Taliban – Travels in Afghanistan (David Bateman Publishing). Auckland writer Michael Field received runner up prize for Swimming with Sharks – Tales from the South Pacific Frontline (Penguin Group NZ). Third place went to Wellington-based Jo and Gareth Morgan with John McCrystal for their book Up the Andes (Public Interest Publishing).

The winner of the inaugural Whitcoulls Pictorial Travel Book of the Year Award was Grant Sheehan’s New Zealand Landscapes. The runner up was Rob Suisted’s Majestic New Zealand. The public voted online for their favourite book in the Readers’ Choice Award: Tara Arctic by Grant Redvers.

For the second year running, Auckland’s Steve Braunias won the Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year Award for his story ‘Trouble in Mosgiel’ published in North & South. The Cathay Pacific Travel Media and Whitcoulls Travel Book awards are organised by Travcom (New Zealand Travel Communicators) to celebrate excellence in travel writing and photography.

The winner of the AA Directions New Travel Writer of the Year Award was Bonnie Jay Etherington with her story ‘A Farewell to an Adopted Nation’.
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In a first for New Zealand publishing, Me’a Kai: The Food and Flavours of the South Pacific (Random House New Zealand) by Robert Oliver and Dr Tracy Berno was named Best Cookbook in the World for 2010 at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
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New Zealand writer Craig Cliff was the winner in the Best First Book category of the South East Asia and Pacific region Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his collection of short stories, A Man Melting. The prize is internationally recognised for promoting ground-breaking works of fiction from across the globe.
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The Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book has been awarded for 2011 to Tangaroa’s Gift: Te Koha a Tangaroa, a picture book written by Mere Whaanga and first published by Ashton Scholastic in 1990.
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Storylines is known for its advocacy for children’s literature, and for the awards offered to writers and illustrators of, and advocates for, children’s books. The awards that follow will be presented to the winners at the 2011 Storylines Margaret Mahy Day on 2 April.

Shortlist for 2011 Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon Award
* Sian Burling-Claridge, Wellington
* Vanessa Hatley-Owen, Auckland
* Juliet Jacka, Wellington
* Ragne Maxwel,l Paekakariki
* Kathy Taylor, Wellington
* Jean White, Auckland

Shortlist for 2011 Joy Cowley Award
* Renee Boyer-Willisson, Raglan
* Katherine Clark, Tauranga
* Marion Day, Picton
* Katie Furze, Auckland
* Jennifer Hill, Christchurch
* Sarah Johnson, Raglan
* Melanie Koster, Christchurch
* Juliette MacIver, Wellington
* Sabrina Malcolm, Wellington

Shortlist for 2011 Tessa Duder Award
* Hugh Brown, Paekakariki
* Matthew Cowens, Paraparaumu
* Shirley Eng, Christchurch
* Andrea Jutson, Auckland
* Desmond O’Leary, Auckland

Please note this is only a sample of events from the events page on our website:

A Night of Pleasure - Hastings Festival of Writers
2 April, 8.00pm
The Hastings Festival of Writers is proud to present a night of literature pleasure bringing together some of New Zealand's finest writers - Owen Marshall, Jenny Pattrick, poet laureates Cilla McQueen and Jenny Bornholdt. Joining them on the stage is world renowned Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx. Each writer will read from their own works which will be followed by a discussion led by chair and poet Marty Smith.
Venue: Hawke's Bay Opera House, 101 Hastings St South, Hastings

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